We are glad to announce today the launch of the Strands Social Recommender™, a SaaS plug-and-play recommendation engine that can be easily and quickly installed by eCommerce and Media Web sites. We will be demonstrating the service at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago this week, let us know if you are going to be there.

The Strands Social Recommender has been proven to increase online sales by up to 35%, by offering site visitors personalized recommendations of new products and content that they might like, in real time.

The Strands Social Recommender can be easily installed through the Strands API or by adding personalization widgets to a retailer’s site, and can be up and running in as little as 30 minutes. More than 100 online businesses have piloted the Strands Social Recommender, with many customers seeing a significant increase in sales.

Key features of the Strands Social Recommender include:

• Cross-product flexibility: Recommendations can be generated across multiple product lines and data models, enabling sites to scale across diverse product, content and service categories.

• Personalized emails: Online businesses can opt-in to offer personalized product and content recommendations via multiple marketing channels, including email.

• Discovery widgets: Businesses can present content, merchandise, and services to users via fully customizable widgets

• Reporting: Business Intelligence reports and visualization tools complement standard Web site analytics to measure the performance of each recommendation. This includes conversion rates, click through rates, and session lift.

The Strands Social Recommender delivers relevant product suggestions to first-time users, as well as offering filtered, personalized results over time to returning customers. These personalized recommendations are based on an individual’s taste profile, but don’t involve asking the user to rate content or build a profile on each site. No personal data is ever exchanged and each user’s interaction remains anonymous and secure.

As we noted above, we will be demonstrating the Strands Social Recommender at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, today through June 12 at booth # 1216, let us know if you are going to be there.