CEO Predicts Personalization Key to 80 Percent of Corporate Marketing Efforts

Within Two Years

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- At the first Personalization Summit in San Francisco today, Net Perceptions Inc. (Nasdaq: NETP) made a series of strategic announcements with a number of the world's leading e-commerce companies. Net Perceptions will work with the companies to deliver a host of enhanced customer relationship and marketing solutions based on its collaborative filtering technology. Together, these announcements underscore Net Perceptions' position as the leading supplier of realtime personalization solutions and reinforce the core importance of personalization technology for the next generation of Internet commerce.

Under the agreements announced today, Net Perceptions will work with IBM Corp., net.Genesis and DoubleClick Technologies Inc. to offer an adaptive Internet marketing solution to help customers make more informed decisions about online marketing campaigns, sales strategies and Web content. Additionally, BroadVision Inc. and Net Perceptions will collaborate to deliver integrated e-commerce personalization solutions for their shared customers; Carlson Companies Inc. is the first customer deployment.

Also today, Lycos and Net Perceptions launched the first online shopping cart to make cross-merchant product recommendations to online shoppers, thereby making it easier for the community of more than 30 million Lycos customers to find items they will value. Net Perceptions, together with leading vendors in e-business and e-customer applications, today announced the Customer Profile Exchange (CPEX), a standard for allowing e-businesses to have a unified view of their customers within multiple enterprise applications.

Speaking to a sold-out crowd at the Personalization Summit, Net Perceptions President and CEO Steven Snyder -- who last Friday was awarded the prestigious World Technology Award for Commerce, a global recognition for technology innovators -- had this to say, "In the age of the Internet, markets are conversations with and among individuals. Mass marketing is dead. New marketing is serving the needs of each customer as an individual. Personalization is about discovering individual preferences and then precisely delivering information that will be of value."

"Personalization will define the future of e-commerce. Customers will come to expect it. Within two years, personalization will play a vital role in 80 percent of corporate marketing efforts whether they are online or offline," said Snyder.

The Personalization Summit is a two-day event in San Francisco, attended by more than 600 people representing the leaders of the personalization industry as well as many of the world's top online and offline brands. As the pioneer of personalization technology, Net Perceptions has been able to leverage its position and its industry partnerships to facilitate a collaborative environment for the exchange of information and ideas related to the role personalization plays in marketing today. Attendees are immersed in discussions related to the technical, marketing and business aspects of how personalization enhances customer relationships and strengthens a company's bottom line.

Central to today's announcements is the fact that the integration of personalization technology is essential to the next generation of e-commerce solutions. Companies seeking to build and maintain customer loyalty through establishing a one-to-one relationship are specifying Net Perceptions as a requirement for their commerce platforms.

The following are highlights of announcements made at the Personalization Summit:

-- IBM, Net Perceptions and others announce adaptive marketing solution. Net Perceptions, IBM, net.Genesis and DoubleClick technologies will work together to create an adaptive marketing solution that will provide marketing executives with the ability to sense the needs of their online customers based upon their previous purchasing behavior, patterns of navigation through a site and affinity for certain related products or services. Components of this closed-loop solution include Net Perceptions for E-Commerce, IBM Net.Commerce, net.Analysis from net.Genesis and the DoubleClick AdServer.

-- Net Perceptions and BroadVision deliver integrated e-commerce solution. Net Perceptions' Realtime Recommendation Engine will be integrated with BroadVision's commerce platform to deliver a robust solution that meets customer demand for greater scalability, superior performance and enhanced functionality. Carlson Companies, parent company of Radisson Hotels, Carlson Wagonlit Travel and other hospitality, travel and marketing services, is the first customer to benefit from the enhanced partnership between these two companies. Going forward, this joint effort will make it make it easy for any company to take advantage of the integration of personalization in a leading e-commerce platform.

-- Net Perceptions and Lycos create personalized shopping experience. The Net Perceptions for E-Commerce personalization engine powers LYCOShop Recommends, a new service that makes Lycos the first to deliver an online shopping cart that makes cross-merchant product recommendations. LYCOShop Recommends correlates the items in shopper's cart with historical purchasing data from the entire community of LYCOShop users. It looks for popular combinations and suggests products that complement the items already in the shopper's cart. The anonymous profiling capabilities of the engine provide valuable recommendations without using cookies to track user activity. Customers will save both time and money by being presented with recommendations for items they most likely need and will value.

-- Net Perceptions and formation of Customer Profile Exchange. Net Perceptions joins Vignette, net.Genesis and other leading e-customer solution vendors as a member of the Customer Profile Exchange (CPEX) working group, whose mission is to offer a vendor-neutral, open standard for facilitating privacy-enabled exchange of customer information across disparate enterprise applications and systems. This XML-based standard will incorporate both online and offline data to allow for a singular, holistic view of supply and demand chains, thereby allowing all primary business functions to collectively, rather than independently, grasp a customer's identity, behavior and needs.

Also at the Personalization Summit, Net Perceptions for the first time showed the latest generation of its flagship product, Net Perceptions for E-commerce 5.0, which was announced last week. The new version consists of three new modules that target the specific needs of the shopper, the retailer and the marketer. Personal Shopper(TM) serves the shopper by understanding what an individual prefers and recommending items from their favorite department as well as offering daily specials tailored specifically to the shopper's tastes and needs. Smart Merchant(TM) allows retailers to implement specific sales strategies such as suggesting related items, incorporating new product promotions and making cross-department product recommendations. The third significant feature is a reporting and analysis capability based on the incorporation of MicroStrategy's Intelligent E-Business Platform as part of its Decision Support(TM) module. The Decision Support features provide marketers with insight into the products being recommended, bought and ignored, so more actionable merchandising decisions can be made.

For more details on Net Perceptions' announcements, see related press releases at http://www.personalization.com

About Net Perceptions

Net Perceptions is the leading supplier of realtime personalization solutions that enable businesses to market to customers on a true one-to-one basis across multiple customer touch points. Net Perceptions solutions increase new and repeat business by learning more about each customer's individual needs, tastes and preferences with every interaction, then making increasingly personalized product and service recommendations. Net Perceptions, based in Minneapolis, is a publicly held company, which operates additional offices in New York, San Francisco, and Reading, England, and a joint venture office in Japan. Customers include many of the world's best-known brands including Art.com, Bertelsmann, Billboard TalentNet, CDnow, E!Online, Micron, SkyMall, Tower Records and Ticketmaster Online. For more information about Net Perceptions products, visit http://www.netperceptions.com or call 800-466-0711.

Net Perceptions is a registered trademark of Net Perceptions Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements are the company's limited operating history, delays in product development, development of the Internet market, changes in product pricing policies, competitive pressures and the risk factors detailed from time to time in the company's periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SOURCE Net Perceptions, Inc.