his news story appeared in Yahoo News
NEW YORK: The O Alliance today announced the addition of Crayon Data to its network of world-class, transformational Affiliate members, with expertise in key areas designed to support retailers’ efforts to unlock value and achieve greater profitability. Expanding on The O Alliance’s existing best in class consultancy suite, Crayon Data is a Big Data firm with core proficiencies utilized in the financial and hospitality sectors, and is now bringing these methods to solve some of the retail industry’s biggest challenges. An ability to strategically organize data and personalize customer conversations in-store, as well as in traditional channels like email marketing empowers retailers to leverage critical information to drive business.
“The O Alliance welcomes Crayon to our growing network of innovative companies, providing unique solutions to meet today’s retail challenges,” said The O Alliance’s co-founder Andrea Weiss. “Crayon helps de-mystify Big Data and has built a powerful choice engine which will enable retailers to compete with more agile online competition.” She went on to explain that retail needs to look at more innovative tools to deliver results; and Data is the new currency for creating circular commerce. Being able to use Big Data in high impact ways will pave the future in retail.
Just over two-years old, Singapore-based Crayon offers retailers MAYA— a product built on SimplerChoices^TM, a platform that provides Amazon-like power to traditional retailers, banks and hotels by leveraging the power of data. SimplerChoices^TM hosts a massive, global consumer taste-graph derived from external data using 600M taste-points across 15M products and 30M customers. Crayon’s MAYA over-lays this external taste-graph on the internal data of retailers. This allows retailers to deliver sharp, ultra-personalized choices via store sales associates, as well as email marketing, mobile apps, and through on-line.
“We are delighted that Crayon’s proposition and products find strong resonance in every global market and vertical that we have addressed,” said Crayon’s co-founder Srikant Sastri. “We are really excited about our foray into the retail space and delighted to be chosen by The O Alliance. The fact that we have made headway in a large, mature market like the U.S. is particularly encouraging.”
Crayon is an award-winning technology firm, winner of the TiE Silicon Valley’s “2014 Global Hot Technology Start-up Watch List”, and was a finalist in IBM’s Watson Mobile Developer Challenge in 2014, as well as a finalist at CODE in 2014. Early clients have seen up to 1.5X increase in repeat visits and 18% more frequent visits using Crayon. Clients get started in 8-12 weeks, with zero upfront costs. Delivered off the cloud, the model is a simple monthly-subscription.
‘The power of data to drive every aspect of the retail experience, at every customer touch point, will be made easier with Crayon’s MAYA” Weiss said. “Our network of Affiliates represents best of class and emerging technologies and services which prepare a retailer for the move from channel-centric commerce to circular customer-centric commerce. We continue to seek solution providers that can collaborate to create this new era of commerce. We are thrilled to add Crayon to this family.”
The announcement comes on the heels of The O Alliances recent addition of Scoredata, the muscle behind the ScoreFast™ engine which is designed to use advanced mathematics and statistical techniques as a predictive tool for consumer behavior.

About The O Alliance

The O Alliance is a new consulting model that leverages a network of transformational practitioners with expertise in all of the critical areas that will unlock value and empower a retailer – digital/technology, operations, change management, marketing and talent. Designed to align a retailer’s organizational practices with today’s digitally savvy consumer, The O Alliance’s holistic approach delivers customer focused strategy and solution driven execution that creates a circular shopping ecosystem. For more information visit www.theoallianceconsulting.com.

About Crayon Data

Based in Singapore, Crayon Data is a big data start-up, with the ambitious vision of simplifying the world’s choices. Crayon’s SimplerChoicesTM collects and curates widely available information created by consumers and businesses, and combines them with proprietary enterprise data. This creates a unique taste fabric that delivers the best possible choices for customers and enterprises.

Contact:

Berns Communications Group
Stacy Berns/Michael McMullan
212-994-4660