Recommendation engine 'a la Amazon' made open-source

Seldon, a UK start-up, is bringing the machine learning used by Amazon to the masses - for free

Seldon is an open-source platform that generates user recommendations like the ones found on Amazon

A British entrepreneur is making the kind of machine learning used by Amazon to suggest products "you might like to buy" available to business of all sizes, creating an “app store for algorithms”.

Alex Housley, 31, is the founder of Seldon, an open-source platform that generates user recommendations for any kind of company or industry.

“We plug into a website and look at user behaviour, as well as contextual details like the time of day or what device they are using,” said Mr Housley. “Then we look at other third-party data to build a predictive model.”

The company’s platform will allow anyone to see how the technology works and users will be able to create their own recommendation engines to boost basket sizes and reduce customer churn.

Mr Housley said this was the first time companies and individuals have had free and easy access to such technology.

“Other companies only offer black box solutions,” he said. “They hide all the technology that’s happening underneath the surface so you’re forced to keep pushing your data into these systems.”

Seldon is building a “glass-walled platform” in order to accelerate the development of its system. Black box versions take much longer to build; with open-source, hundreds of developers help by creating “add-ons” – unique pieces of code that make the system relevant to their business.

Since September, more than 1,000 developers have signed up to the testing phase. Mr Housely believes many of Seldon’s fans will become customers.

“The technology is not free like free beer,” said Mr Housley. “It’s free like a free puppy. You’ll have to pay for maintenance to keep it alive.” The “out of the box” plumbing is free, he says, but companies pay to bolt on their own business logic.

Industry insiders suggest that Seldon's name is based on Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon, the social scientist from science fiction work The Foundation Trilogy. Mr Housley would neither confirm nor deny the rumour

Seldon also operates a revenue-generating cloud platform, which processes 250m unique sessions. Later this year, the company will offer a version of the technology for big companies, which will have technical support thrown in, and will generate licence fees.

Seldon turned over £200,000 last year and expects to hit £500,000 next year. The company is working with publishers such as Trinity Mirror in the UK, Italy’s RCS Group and Publimetro in Latin America.

Seldon was born out of location-based service Rummble Labs. The company adapted its model in 2011 after admitting defeat to US competitor Foursquare, pivoting to become a business-to-business service. It is fundraising for a seed round worth £500,000.