I tried it a couple of times too. First time I figured it was basically a slightly better stumbleupon. Next time I tried it was still the same thing and never went back.
No freaking kidding - only thing I saw the founder do was interview people on TC. Never heard anyone mention hunch outside of those interviews. What is ebay thinking?
Impressive back-end tech (the recommendation engine) that can now process millions and millions of items on eBay to help increase sales (something like a quarter of Amazon's sales come from recommendations).
As someone who builds recommender systems for a living, let me assure you that the output of the netflix prize was perhaps 10% of what you need to actually build a good recommendations product.
Sure, I wasn't implying eBay overpaid by 80x but 79 million dollars is a lot of product development once you've paid 1 million for a proven state of the art proof of concept.
Obviously eBay must see other reasons for the acquisition than just the tech itself.
Also, if it's also in large part a talent acquisition then they're going to paying more than 80 million since they're going to need to pay for some new pairs of golden handcuffs to keep the talent around.
Don't forget that Hunch's system is real-time (this is very hard), and is more than just scalable collaborative filtering for items of the same kind. They can ingest a Twitter or Facebook profile, infer your "taste profile", and start recommending things instantly; "things" meaning books, films, music, events, places etc etc.
I don't believe real time is very hard. Something that ebay can' already do. And if they can't already do it, how will hunch come in and solve it. It would probably require major changes to db's etc if that is why ebay can't already do it.
Apple bought the tech behind Siri for $200m in 2010.
MS bought Powerset (and their NLP-type search engine) for $100m in 2008. They also bought Farecast (travel pricing forecasting) for $75-115m in 2008.
Hunch for $80m is a steal, as far as talent acquisitions go.
EDIT: I'm not sure if they were product or talent acquisitions, but does it really matter? All companies listed above obtained state-of-the-art algorithms and the teams that developed them.
In all cases, those companies got the algorithms + the team that developed them. Are we really debating the difference? Or were you sitting in MS/Apple/eBay's boardroom?
I frequent HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. and have heard the name Hunch once or twice, but have no idea what they do and don't know anyone who uses it.
There's a different kind of bubble in the valley, it's a contained ecosystem that people get caught up in. Similar to the social bubble surrounding a college or church. People inside the bubble often cannot see the forest from the trees.
In the bubble it's easy to get to know all the trees, but from the outside it's just a forest and few trees are easily recognized or stand out from the others at all.
