Strands Blog

A few of us are in Minneapolis right now attending the Recommender Systems Conference. The conference is in its 2nd year and brings together academics and industry to discuss the future, challenges and opportunities for recommender systems. This year there are about 110 participants from 15 countries, including industry representation from Netflix, Amazon, AMG, Digg, AOL, eBay, Unilever, Aggregate Knowledge and MyStrands.

Yesterday featured a very interesting keynote speech from Khrishna Bharat, Principal Scientist from Google, about the history and future of news journalism and the social responsibility we all share in ensuring the continued freedom of speech. He also touched on the process by which Google crawls, clusters, ranks, classifies the most relevant stories in Google News. Followed by some insight into the increased user engagement they were able to realize with the introduction of their personalized news stories. The clickthrough of personalized news stories is indeed higher than on just a blind list of “top stories”.

The keynote was followed by a number of academic papers presentations – focused on the hot topics of privacy and trust in collaborative filtering engines. Indeed some very interesting research going on in these fields, and I look forward to seeing what the continued research here bears out in the coming months and years.

After lunch, I was honored to take part in a panel with the focus of “Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase the value of recommenders?”. This was the opportunity for the industry folks like ourselves to provide some insight to the academics about the “real world” issues that we are trying to solve or improve. It was a lively discussion that extended the dialog on recommenders beyond the science and into user experience, consumer value and business models built around them. The panel included:

• Joaquin Delgado, CTO, Lending Club Corp.
• Jason Herskowitz, VP of Consumer Products, MyStrands
• Kartik Hosanagar, Assistant Professor, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
• David Jennings, DJ Alchemi LLC
• Zac Johnson, Product Manager, All Media Guide, Inc.

The day closed out with Poster Sessions by the academic community and some very interesting demos, with the lively discussion moving on to dinner and drinks. Today’s session promises to bring more great discussion. Look for another post later….

We are pleased to announce that MyStrands is sponsoring She’s Geeky, a Women’s Tech (un)Conference, held in Mountain View, CA on the 22nd and 23rd of October.

The She’s Geeky (un)conference will provide an agenda-free and friendly environment for women who not only care about building technology that is useful for people, but who also want to encourage more women to get involved. It is designed to provide women who self-identify as geeky and who are engaged in various technology-focused disciplines with a gathering space in which they can exchange skills and discuss ideas and form community across and within disciplines.

And another cool thing: we are providing 3 travel/scholarship sponsorships for the event. More info here.

We hope to see you there, let us know if you are attending.

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be sponsoring the inaugural Ignite Portland event happening Wednesday October 25th, 2007 from 6pm – 9pm PST. This event is being hosted at the amazing offices of Wieden & Kennedy, Portland’s world-class advertising firm.The Ignite style of event is the brainchild of O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest and was started in Seattle earlier this year. The concept is simple: Bring a group of people together to hear speakers on varied topics. The twist is that each speaker only gets 5 minutes and 20 slides (15 seconds for each slide and it auto-advances). Once your 5 minutes is up, you’re done. No questions, no product pitches, just straight talk. Its a fast-paced, high-energy event that always leaves you wanting more.I’ll be speaking at the event (not sure exactly what time) on “Free beef and clean bathrooms: the irrelevance of Web 2.0″. Hope to see you there and don’t forget, MyStrands is hiring!Scott Kveton, VP Open Platforms

I was a panelist at the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco yesterday on the “Disruptive Innovations” panel moderated by Daniel Appelquist who has been organizing the event. The conference was sold out and the level of attendance was very impressive mixing industry experts and veterans from operators, technology leaders as well as some young blood from the start up world. The global emphasis was also encouraging given the U.S. and Silicon Valley centric viewpoints one can find at similar conferences around here. Actually, this to me is the biggest factor of differentiation at mobile events and especially those sponsored by a very grassroots Mobile Monday. Kudos to the organizing team for a job well done!

As for my panel we had a distinguished list that made it interesting despite being the closing panel:

• Daniel Appelquist, Vodafone (Moderator)
• Kaj “HeGe” Haggman, Nokia
• Peter Stark, Sony Ericsson
• Daniel Graf, Kyte.TV
• Atakan Cetinsoy, MyStrands

My main argument was that the tipping point for a true Mobile 2.0 experience will have to be driven by intense personalization. By that I mean the kind of personalization that will make data services indispensable part of the consumer’s lives instead of a nice to have, which is what it is to me in its current form – and a rather expensive one at that if I may say.

The personalized mobile computing devices of the future will be collecting many relevant, implicit user behavioral data and store a subset of it on the device itself but more importantly will update a richer profile on the network to maintain a memory of user history. This in turn can give way to a variety of “must have” personalization experiences going forward. This smart layer and the set of analytics tools that will manipulate it is almost completely missing at this time. While corporations all around the globe are spending billions on market research that gets old fast and billions on enterprise software projects with long implementation cycles and results that on average under deliver the promises made at inception, marketers and advertisers will be quick to realize the paradigm shift if an only if consumer behavior can be analyzed and presented near real time in a meaningful manner.

One of the audience members correctly mentioned how scary an idea this may be to the consumer if privacy issues are not properly addressed. I am a true believer in letting the user/consumer drive their permissions and privacy settings and with few exceptions I believe they should have fully transparent access to their profile info. I think this issue will be paramount in negotiating the new rules of customer contact in the world of Mobile Social Computing with no easy answers unfortunately. It is not too late at all though to set the ground rules and steal a page from the developments in the web world.

Next year try to make it to the City by the Bay for the 3rd annual Mobile 2.o and we’ll continue to slice and dice these hot topics armed with a year’s worth of stats, facts, rumors and flops!

Atakan Cetinsoy, VP Business Products, MyStrands

We are extremely pleased to announce that Oliver Bremer has joined MyStrands as VP of Product Management and Strategy.

Prior to joining MyStrands, Oliver served more than 6 years with Nokia, where he held several positions including leading the development of the OMA DRM 1.0 and 2.0 standards, technical product manager for mobile music application and manager of new business and licensing as a member of the team developing the Nokia Music Service.

Oliver studied at The University of Siegen, Germany and The University of Tulsa, OK, U.S., where he held a research assistantship with The Center for Information Security. He holds an M.S. degree in computer science and is the author and co-author of several conference publications. He is a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation.

It is a pleasure for us having Oliver on board. BTW, he will be based in Helsinki, drop him an email at bremer at mystrands dot com if you are around!

Next week we’ll be involved in several interesting events:

On Monday the 15th Atakan Cetinsoy participates in Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco, in the panel Disruptive or New Business Models. The Mobile 2.0 conference brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, mobile application developers, and web technologists.

That same day, while Noyda Matos and Albert De Reina attend the Widget Summitt, Scott Kveton will be at the API Conference.

On the other side of the Atlantic, our mobile guru Oliver Bremer will be at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, giving a keynote on Building content-focused social networks to attract and retain subscribers.

And finally, on October 19th and 20th, part of the team (Francisco, Jim, Jason and Justin) will attend the ACM Recommender Systems 2007 Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. This conference brings together research and practice to explore the latest innovations, discuss important challenges, and advance our understanding of recommender systems.

We are specially proud of this event, that builds on last year’s Recommenders06 organized by MyStrands. Francisco is chairing the Industry Committee and Jason will participate in the panel Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase value of recommenders?

We hope to see you at these events, let us know if you are attending any of them.

The old days when traditional gatekeepers programmed content for the mass-market are gone. Technology is shaking up the “chain of command” across popular culture. In the case of music, more and more consumers are looking at each other (friends, mavens, people they don’t even know…) to discover new songs and guide their tastes.

We have already talked about our approach for helping people discover things through other people’s tastes. Now we want to share further insight on how this process works.

Using OpenStrands (our public APIs), MyStrands’ researcher and PhD Candidate Justin Donaldson has developed a visualization technique (Artist Network Visualization) that shows in real-time how people correlate artists with other artists by listening to songs from their personal libraries. Strands of related artists will form from individual user’s listening histories. Eventually, these strands will connect, establishing the artist as a “hub” of shared musical information between the two users.

The visualization serves as a sort of primitive recommendation system as well. If you see an artist you recognize and enjoy, see who they’re connected to. You may just happen to see a new artist or track that you don’t recognize, and there’s a good chance that they’ll be worth a listen as well. MyStrands captures these opportunities in far more detail in our recommendation engine, enabling our community to explore artists, users, albums and many other items with equal ease. All these relationships form our “matrix of associations” which establishes a “ground truth” for how we at MyStrands understand the world of media content.

Try out Artist Network Visualization now!