Our story
CoolProducts & Gift Professor matching – the world’s best gift giving help
In the movie The Social Network, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg took a seemingly impossible problem (he sucked at getting girls) and invented a social site using technology.It’s amazing!On Facebook, even a guy like me can almost instantly become social.
But I’m at a different stage in life than Mark.I have a big extended family, a wife, four kids and I suck at shopping and gift giving.Like Mark, this problem was eating at me, so I set out to enlist technology to help me solve it.In the back of mind I thought maybe I would help some friends too.This was the spark that began the Gift Professor & CoolProducts.com.
It’s a common problem.Shopping is overwhelming at times.Sometimes a little help would be nice.In fact, shopping is pretty hard. I love it when I discover the perfect gift for someone important to me. It’s like making a 90 yard touchdown.But I personally hate certain aspects of the process; the parking lots, the lines, trying to think about all aspects of the person I’m shopping for and product sell outs. What I hate most is when the reaction I get to my gift is essentially. What were you thinking?
Our system addresses these things in a fun easy way.The biggest problem I have with shopping is that many times I just don’t have the time.Even blindly browsing online when I don’t know what I’m looking for can suck up a huge amount of time.
I asked; why can’t a combination of the Internet’s abundance and artificial intelligence help? After some innovative research we determined – it can.When we started CoolProducts our dream was to find a way to uncover the coolest stuff for a specific person in a fast easy way.Our team consists of PhD social psychologists, computer scientists, industrial design, statisticians, and passionate commerce savvy editors (boomer women). The most important innovation is the Gift Professor survey. This is a shopping system that assigns attributes to products, like the brain does so it can perform matching – person to product. As a first step the team created a web based catalog to combine as many online merchants and their best items as we possibly can into one catalog (We have 700+ merchants and 18,000 products to date). We wanted to somehow create a democratic method so anyone can suggest products and have their ideas featured high on the list if the item warrants it, based on popularity.
The important thing is to help shoppers to arrive at a solution, without requiring them to browse online for hours or devote days to shopping the mall and the big box stores. We want people to say, “I will find ideas here that I wouldn’t have thought of.”
The team has moved mountains. They have created a product suggestion engine deluxe and a fun customized store creation tool. To zero in on your needs, all you have to do is fill out our short survey about your recipient. I would like to invite you to try our gift matching engine; Gift Professor. Contact me at tschmidt@coolproducts.com. I’m anxious to enlist testers who are passionate shoppers. I will provide you with a user name and password. I would be more than grateful for your insights, criticisms and suggestions and I think you will be delighted.
Tony – the Founder
