Blur Group gets recommending

When the cloud is mentioned the subject often comes round to how it can help smaller businesses compete with their larger, more established large enterprise brethren. One thing the cloud helps with, here, is the development new services that can help these SMEs in new and creative ways.

One such service is blurSense, produced by blur Group. This is a cloud-based intelligent decision and recommendation engine. The company claims that it is re-inventing commerce at its website, www.blurgroup.com, which is based around the model of an Exchange – which should not be confused with Microsoft’s Exchange email management system.

The new service is designed to automate the pitch selection stage of blur’s 4-step online Exchange process. It mines extensive expert and project information and combines this with intelligent learning algorithms to provide an automated way to rank and match pitches with projects.

Aimed primarily at the creative, IT, legal and accountancy fields, the intelligent application is seen by the company as an important lever in its drive to build acceptance of its Cloud platform. This is designed to architect and automate the entire business services process, from project submission to solution, using tools for service provider discovery and selection, procurement, project management, rating and payments.

The new service comes with a self-learning algorithm which automates recommendations based on experiential criteria, together with an algorithm which increases in accuracy as new data sets are introduced, an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) which creates an automated decision making model, and a Bayesian advanced engine to break down complex decisions into a hierarchy of more easily comprehended criteria. Together, the company claims they provide a higher standard of pitches for customers, as service providers understand the factors that affect their blurSense score.

The system not only provides accurate trust ratings within the Exchange, but because of the scale of projects, customers and experts running through the engine, it constantly improves its accuracy and relevance.

 “blurSense brings a new generation of intelligent apps to the Exchange platform,” said Philip Letts, blur Group’s CEO said. “ Introducing ratings and reviews to a b2b platform is a key component of social-commerce: now blurSense can be used to further automate pitch and project matching at scale. The self-learning algorithm is one of blur’s most innovative pieces of platform technology to date and will result in shorter pitch review timelines, as well as an even better experience for all Exchange users.”