At Filament, we love that we get to work with really, really smart people. The guys from Cognito are case in point. We met them at their earlier startup, SiteAdvisor, where they had figured out a way to create an automated system that tested every page on the worldwide web — tracking spam, hoaxes, malicious downloads, and the like, and gathering all the data into comprehensive reports to inform web surfers about the real potential risks of their online decisions.
Users answer a set of questions and are given recommendations.
Having made the web safe for all of us, they turned their minds to a new challenge: creating an automated system that lets the wisdom of crowds create self-learning expert recommendation systems. Cognito, when initially seeded with a set of questions about a subject, looks at the answers users provide, effectively learns from the patterns of responses, and then turns around and advises people about options and choices on that subject based on that input.
While the engine running in the background is parallel processing a million miles a minute, the question-answer part needs to feel friendly, fun and informative. And on the developer side, it needs to be super-easy to implement.
Examples of several sites developed to run off of the same underlying HTML code
That's where we came in. We developed a set of core templates for each page type — question, answers list, recommendation, and "add a question" form — with a structured markup and naming convention that would work for any content or subject area. We then overlaid branding, color and texture to deliver a richer experience relevant to the subject matter through customized CSS and images.
The resulting sites quiz and advise about subjects as diverse as picking the camera that has the features you want, choosing the right college, or finding a TV show you'll love, to matching yourself to the best presidential candidate. They look unique, and get smarter all the time, all with the same simple template structure.