Strands Blog

We are happy to announce that Scott Kveton has joined MyStrands as the Open Technology Lead.

Scott Kveton is a digital identity promoter and open source advocate. Scott has worked at Amazon, RuleSpace.com and JanRain as well as founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. Working closely with projects like Mozilla, Linux, Drupal and Apache led Scott down the identity path and to JanRain in mid-2006. Scott was named to Red Herring’s list of ‘25 Titans in waiting’ in early 2007 and ‘InformationWeek’s Change Agents’ in December 2005.

We have some exciting plans linking social recommendation technologies with the open web, and Scotts visionary and leadership abilities will be key in helping us define and execute our objective: to help people discover things they like and didn’t know about already.

It is a pleasure for us having Scottt on board. He has some great skills which he already showed during the interviewing process.

We’ve got a new t-shirt, this is a limited edition that we really like, it features Muzika (that little guy you sometimes see at MyStrands) with two pirate swords. Each member of the team has got one, and we’ve thought we’d love to share some with you. Like it?

Just drop us an email with your preferred size and where we should send it, and we will send it to you (first 100 emails get a free t-shirt).

The technical program for ACM Recommender Systems 2007 is now posted on the conference website. Highlights include:

* A Keynote address by Krishna Bharat, principal scientist at Google and creator of Google News.

* 16 full-length technical papers, plus an exciting poster and demo program

* Still to be finalized — two industry-driven panel sessions on topics of current importance in the field.

Don’t miss the conference. RecSys 2007 will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota October 19-20, 2007. Registration and hotel bookings are now open at the conference website http://recsys.acm.org. See you there!