Dive Brief:
- Former Amazon employees have launched a personal shopper app, Mona, to public beta testing on the iPhone.
- Mona offers a feature called “Missions” that searches e-commerce sites for products that match user criteria such as style, price, and other factors.
- The app also links to users’ e-mail addresses to mine historical order information and improve search results.
Dive Insight:
Mona goes beyond shopping recommendations to find suggestions based on user-defined criteria and historical shopping information mined from e-mail. In addition to discovering and suggesting trending items and deals, Mona’s “Missions” feature will track items based on style, price, and other factors.
Orkun Atik, a veteran developer of Amazon’s personalization technologies, launched the startup with fellow Amazon alum Nurettin Dag and another partner. In public beta, Mona is tracking 100 of the top 300 retailers in United States.