Strands Blog

We got a couple of iPhones and we’ve been playing with them for a while. What do we like most? The easy sync with the mac. It’s amazing! I’ve got all my email, contacts, playlists in my iPhone… with zero effort. And of course…

MyStrands mobile website looks great!

You can get music recommendations (more than 6 million songs to be discovered); you can keep track of what music your friends are listening to in real time; you can check your friends’ profiles, posts, photos and music, and much more… just go to http://m.MyStrands.com.

Stay tuned for future developments for the iPhone…

Photos taken with a Nokia N95

Today KVAL the Eugene TV Station came into the MyStrands offices. Check Out partyTrevor and Dan’s Television Debut.

Nokia and S60 websites have chosen MyStrands Social Player as the Application of the Week. Zuper kool!

The MyStrands Social Player has greatly enhanced the concept of a mobile music player, turning it into a music discovery and social networking tool. Through it, you can not only play your favorite music but also discover and play new music that matches your tastes, meet new people with similar tastes, and find out how much your favorite music is played and by whom.

You can read the full story in the Nokia and S60 websites (btw, S60 newsletter ran another cool story about the MyStrands Social Player a while ago).

Corvallis is not only home of the Beavers, it is also a great place to study, party, live and work.

And we are hiring!

Let me tell you about Corvallis. Corvallis is located in the Willamette Valley in central western Oregon about 85 miles south of Portland, 45 miles east of the Pacific Coast beaches, and a bit more that an hours flight from San Francisco and Seattle. Population 49,322. Corvallis is home to Oregon State University (Go Beavs!) and is a “Safest Pac-10 Campus”. Corvallis has won many other awards as well, including “One of the 10 best cities in which to live”, Oregon’s most bicycle-friendly city, “Best Green Places”. For the family, Corvallis is simply unbeatable. There are many activities year-round and Corvallis School District was named one of the top public school systems in the country.

As far as we’re concerned Corvallis is also a great place to party. Come and check out partyStrands at Cantina, Sanchos, Tailgaters & Highland Bowl! It’s a rippin’ time.

Corvallis is also a great place to work: 15th most creative city in the nation (legions of inventive minds are at work in Corvallis); fourth in nation for the highest number of patents issued by city; 7th out of about 500 U.S. cities for best places to do business.

And we are hiring! Here at MyStrands we share an ambitious plan: develop technologies to better understand people’s tastes and help people discover things they like and didn’t know about already. We are always seeking enthusiastic, versatile and talented people to help us to write the “score” for this exciting tech venture:

MySQL DBA; Software Engineers, Data; Software Engineers; Designers; System Administrators; Financial Operations Manager… you can see the details here (we are also hiring in our Barcelona office).

If you are interested in joining the MyStrands team and working in an informal, rapidly changing environment, send us an email at Jobs@MyStrands.com.

We are happy to inform you all that Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google, has accepted our invitation to serve as Keynote Speaker for the ACM Recommender Systems 2007 Conference. Krishna is the creator of Google News, and also headed Google’s Bangalore R&D Center starting in 2004.

Please visit the RecSys07 website for further information.

Thanks to everyone! We are receiving great feedback after our recently announced round of financing, these are very exciting times for us! There has been a lot of coverage on the B round, this is some of it:

Peggy Anne Salz over at MSearchGroove asks Is Recommendation Ready For Primetime?

Spanish-American recommendation engine provider MyStrands announced a $25 million funding deal. But the news is not is not so much the money; it’s more the increasing realization that mobile search alone may not be enough. In their quest to match the right content to the right users mobile operators and media companies are looking to recommendation engines to deliver content suggestions with a personal touch.

In MyStrands gets funding boost, Jemima Kiss at The Guardian reports that American-Spanish social networking website MyStrands announced a $25m (£12.6m) funding deal today to develop its recommendation technologies. Science and telecoms specialists Debaeque Venture Capital and technology research firm Sequel R&D have invested in MyStrands, a four-year-old company currently focused on developing and researching recommendation tools around music.

Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb asks What Will MyStrands Do With $25M?

Right now MyStrands’ focus is music, but they’re also expanding into other media types – videos, films and websites, and more. With the $25M, they basically plan to utilize their “recommender engine” across all different forms of media. They already have that portability on delivery (mobile, PC, other Internet-connected devices), so now MyStrands is aiming to expand the media types.

Alexandra Berzon at Red Herring, in MyStrands Gets $25M, informs that MyStrands, the Corvallis, Oregon-based media recommendation service, on Monday said it had snagged $25 million from a group of Spanish investors, in a second round of funding. That comes less than a month after CBS bought music recommendation engine Last.fm for $280 million and eBay purchased socialized search recommendation service StumbleUpon for $75 million.

Thanks to everybody!

En español aquí.

We are very excited to announce that MyStrands has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The main investor is 25 year-old Spanish media mogul Antonio Asensio, owner and CEO of the third largest media group in Spain, Grupo Zeta, with existing investors Debaeque and Sequel R&D also backing this round. Total investment in MyStrands amounts to $31 million thus far.

MyStrands has made the decision to remain independent. Antonio shares our vision and ambition and he is the right person to help us realize it. We develop technologies to better understand people’s tastes and help people discover things they like and did not know about already.

Dr. Francisco J Martin

Antonio Asensio Mosbah

We feel strongly that the future of the web is about personalization. Personalized TV stations, personalized advertising, personalized news, personalized shopping, personalized music and entertainment experiences, wherever you happen to be, whether it’s at home, on the go, at your friend’s or at a bar… This is what our 50-person team has been focusing hard on and where we are headed with this funding.

During the last few years, we have built a powerful recommender engine that is able to provide real-time personalized recommendations of different products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices. Yes, we place a lot of emphasis on mobility, we believe personalization is key in a mobile world…

We have started to use this recommender engine to deliver personalized recommendations of videos (to be announced soon), films and websites, with other content applications following thereafter. And we are working to deliver personalized advertising based on people’s tastes, location and context. As you know, we have already applied the recommender engine to music, an area in which we will keep introducing numerous innovations.

If you still haven’t found what you are looking for, don’t worry. We are here to help. Stay tuned.

(Click here for the official press release).