• San Jose Mercury News, Friday, October 9, 2009 10:40 AM

While buying Huggies for his newborn the other day and spying a coupon for infant formula on the back, columnist Scott Duke Harris stumbled upon the story of Causata, a startup with venture funding from Accel Partners that aims to "push customer-intelligence technology to an unprecedented level."

Causata is developing a "multichannel customer interaction platform" that can be deployed by big retailers and financial services firms. It constantly updates its profiles of customers -- "learning" from each purchase or query and adding the database.

Whatever you say about it, don't call it "artificial intelligence," as Harris did during a conversation with Accel partner Bruce Golden. Too many Silicon Valley startups have failed to deliver on the hype of AI, it appears. "This is more in the area of predictive analytics," Golden says. Sure sounds benign enough to me.

Read the whole story at San Jose Mercury News »