Strands Blog

We are very pleased to announce ACM Recommender Systems 2007.

This Conference builds on a wonderful legacy of research workshops and the Recommenders06 Summer School on the Present and Future of Recommender Systems, organized by MyStrands last year in Bilbao.

The Conference will bring together the leaders of this field–from both research and practice–to explore the latest innovations, discuss important challenges, and advance our understanding of recommender systems.

RecSys07 is organized by Prof. Joseph A. Konstan (General Chair). Prof. John Riedl and Prof. Barry Smyth are the Research Program co-Chairs. As of today, the Practice/Industry Program Committee is compossed of:

• Dr. Francisco J Martin, MyStrands (Practice/Industry Program Chair);
• Todd Beaupre, Yahoo! Inc;
• Rafael Camargo, Motorola, Inc;
• Maikki Frisk, Nokia Corporation;
• Jason Herskowitz, AOL Inc;
• Kaushal Kurapati, Ask.com;
• Dominic Pride, France Telecom, SA.

Please visit the RecSys07 website for further information.

All you Mac lovers, the long awaited release of partystrands for Mac is here! Included as part of the MyStrands app, djs, bars, clubs and home users can now officially party it up with partystrands.

What are you waiting for, your ultimate party tool is only a download away!

If you are a Linux user, you can now discover new music using the MyStrands Amarok plug-in.

Capture your playcounts, build your music profile and share your tastes with others.

This will allow you to go to MyStrands and get instant song, album and artist recommendations, whenever you want. Also, you can have control over the music recommendations that you get by adjusting the popularity of the recommended songs, defining specific genres or decades, or even getting recommendations based on your listening habits over the course of the day, the week, the month or more.

If you don’t want to see a song, album or artist ever recommended again (because you don’t like it or you already know it) you can send it to the Exile list and it will vanish forever.

Now you have more control to discover more music. Welcome!

It’s been a while since we presented our music player for Windows Mobile devices (SmartPhones and Pocket PCs), but we did not have a video. Now, we do…

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MyStrands for Windows Mobile devices is a music player with three main characteristics: it helps you discover music, it is a strong community builder, and it helps you intelligently organize your music into playlists using songs recommendations or tags. You can also view and publish tags for any of your songs.Enjoy!

Thanks to all of you for the great feedback on the MyStrands Social Player (our initial post here). We are having a huge response with lots of calls and lots of reviews!

John Biggs at MobileCrunch broke the story early on Wednesday focusing on the community building aspects of the player. From MobileCrunch, John took the story to TechCrunch and CrunchGear. From the TechCrunch network, it went everywhere!

Zach Epstein over at mobile9.com was categoric: MyStrands Social Player is an app that has truly impressed me and beyond anything else, it is changing the way that I listen to music. He updated the review he did while the player was in our Labs.

Bena Roberts at BKI Media did a very interesting analysis about MyStrands Social Player and what they call “mefirst”. MyStrands is hot… because of its recommendation and “find similar” features… The “mefirst” early adopter market is the driver of mobile. Not only do they own and have the latest device they actively use it to “show-off” or carve their own personal niche via mobile. The fact that the community aspect is added and users can see and connect with people that purchased similar will surely have a viral effect.

Jonathan Greene over at Atmasphere starts his post with a Whoa – This looks super slick… Thanks Jonathan! Ricky Cadden at SymbianGuru reviewed MyStrands, pointing out one of our favourite features: helping those with massive libraries rediscover their own music.

According to Rudy at m-trends, MyStrands Social Player is probably the most advanced music and community mobile app around – I haven’t seen anything like it, a real social community and music discovery tool, you can even build playlists on the go and tag your music, dig?

Alessandro at Biskero focuses on OpenStrands: they have an open API for developers to create services around MyStrands. Something to look at. Paul over at Chilibean talks about how MyStrands Social Player includes some old favourites when it comes to the features, and the N95 Blog also covers some of the features of the player.

Kristen Nicole over at 606Tech also refers to OpenStrands and notes that the mobile app is fully integrated with the MyStrands API and truly brings social networking and entertainment to the cell phone.

Now in Spanish, Enrique Dans does a good review of the service, Sacha Fuentes at XatakaMovil writes a small piece, and JaviPas covers the application both at The Inquirer ES and PC Actual, focusing on the community aspects.

Thanks to you all for your support!

Interacting with partyStrands (download here) just got much easier!

Before you get to the party:

1. Link your phone number with your MyStrands account. To do so, go to Preferences in www.MyStrands.com, then “Change my cellphone information” and update your mobile phone number.

2. Then, send the following message to 81890 in the USA (or 5331 in Spain):

LINK YourMyStrandsAccount

3. You will get a return message. Reply with “Y” to opt-in to partyStrands, and you are ready to go.

You only need to do this once for each mobile phone.

When you arrive at a party:

1. Let us know where you are by sending a message with the venue or party name to 81890.

2. You then have several options:

• Send a text message: Type your message, send it to 81890, and it will appear on the partyStrands display screen.
• Add an artist: Type A name_of_the_artist
• Vote: Type V a , b, or c

Of course, you can always interact through the mobile web, free and easy.

Enjoy!

The MyStrands development team has some news for us today. Version 0.8.3.002 of MyStrands for Windows is here, and it includes new functionalities in partyStrands. Download it here.

What’s new?

• A partyStrands set-up wizard that allows party hosts to set default values for parties.
• A new tab on the host interface that allows party hosts to adjust the frequency of advertisements.
• A new protocol that downloads all advertisements from the MyStrands servers.
• Updated instruction screens on the party display.
• New SMS syntax…that is for another post.

Enjoy!