Strands Blog

Will our online activities affect our real life social interactions? asks Corvida.

Well, we certainly think so. And this is precisely the topic of our next event Proactive Displays: Bridging the Gaps between Online Social Networks and Shared Physical Spaces, to be held at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona, next Friday June 27th.

The Strands innovation team in Seattle, lead by our Principal Instigator Joe McCarthy, works on developing technologies that bridge the gaps between the digital and physical world.

The focus is on creating large displays applications that can sense the people and activities taking place nearby and show content relating to those people, activities and place. Proactive displays enable people to share the richness of their online lives with others in physical contexts in which they feel – or want to feel – a sense of community and connection, bringing the benefits of virtual communities into the real world.

Some of the possibilities envisioned by science fiction movies are a bit disturbing (see this provocative picture from the film Minority Report). However, we believe that if users have total control to opt in – and out – from being exposed to things that might be relevant to them, these technologies can be friendly and useful.

We’ll leave for another post a description of some of the applications of these technologies, its evolution and challenges.

Good news for the mobile enthusiasts out there: MyStrands is now available on Nokia’s WidSets platform, bringing a new way to discover music and see what your friends are listening to, right on your cellphone.

In the two weeks MyStrands WidSet has been available, more than 65,000 users have downloaded it!

WidSets is Nokia’s mobile widget platform, and is completely manufacturer and browser independent. Probably the biggest mobile widgeting platform in the world, it reaches more than 300 handset models and has over 6,000,000 users. As Nikolaj Nyholm wrote a while back, “WidSets is for the mobile what Netvibes is for the browser”.

How does this fit with the rest of our music services? MyStrands music experience is present in the complete triangle of Internet experiences:

1. Online service at http://mystrands.com and http://mystrands.TV.
2. Mobile with the MyStrands Social Player for Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile devices; MyStrands mobile website; and now also the MyStrands Widset
3. PC/Mac desktop applications with the Strands Tracker that works with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Songbird, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and Amarok.

All are integrated through our public APIs (OpenStrands), and your one MyStrands account is good for all these services. OpenStrands demonstrates the power and universal applicability of the Strands Recommender to the entire ecosystem.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to send us your feedback!

Recently, Franco Ponticelli and I announced a special summer project geared for student-based opensource development of the web programming language, haXe , and supported by Strands. The project is now underway with two student participants: Miguel Serrano Milano and Danny Wilson.

Miguel is working on a CLI target compiler for haXe, which means that haXe will be able to run on the popular .NET framework , which should provide another solid desktop environment for development. This project will add a valuable new facet to haXe, providing even more opportunities in addition to haXe’s current target options of Javascript, SWF, Neko, and PHP.

Miguel had this to say about himself:

I’m Miguel, a Spanish student from Valladolid, a middle-size city 180 Km in the north of Madrid. I’ve lived here during most of my life, but I was born and spent part of my childhood in Malaga, Andalusia. Although Castilian and Andalusian people are quite different I preserve cool things from both worlds. I’m calmed like "the old castilian man" (an spanish expression), but it’s easy to find a mediterranean into myself: I love the sea, eating fish and of course, flamenco!

I have a Bsc in Computer Science from the University of Valladolid. My Thesis was a tool to create diagram-based apps (with UML in my mind) using Adobe Flex 2 and Actionscript (http://asdia.googlecode.com ), thus I’m mainly interested in Rich Internet Applications’ world. Now I’m in the 5th course of a Msc in industrial organization engineering, mainly focused in production, logistics and financial markets. I’m specially interested in derivatives, I’m looking for an idea to combine RIAs , derivatives and conquer the earth, but inspiration hasn’t come yet.

Danny is working on wrapping and extending the popular extJS web gui component library in haXe. Essentially, this will involve granting haXe access to the existing Javascript extJS API, but will eventually also lead to a desktop option as well (perhaps through SWF).  He’s also very busy working to finish his Master’s Thesis this summer, and we wish him the best of luck.

Franco and I are pleased to be able to support these two students, as they have already been active participants, supporters, and contributors to the haXe community in their own right. We wish them the best of luck as they tackle their projects!

Franco and Justin

We are glad to announce today the launch of the Strands Social Recommender™, a SaaS plug-and-play recommendation engine that can be easily and quickly installed by eCommerce and Media Web sites. We will be demonstrating the service at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago this week, let us know if you are going to be there.

The Strands Social Recommender has been proven to increase online sales by up to 35%, by offering site visitors personalized recommendations of new products and content that they might like, in real time.

The Strands Social Recommender can be easily installed through the Strands API or by adding personalization widgets to a retailer’s site, and can be up and running in as little as 30 minutes. More than 100 online businesses have piloted the Strands Social Recommender, with many customers seeing a significant increase in sales.

Key features of the Strands Social Recommender include:

• Cross-product flexibility: Recommendations can be generated across multiple product lines and data models, enabling sites to scale across diverse product, content and service categories.

• Personalized emails: Online businesses can opt-in to offer personalized product and content recommendations via multiple marketing channels, including email.

• Discovery widgets: Businesses can present content, merchandise, and services to users via fully customizable widgets

• Reporting: Business Intelligence reports and visualization tools complement standard Web site analytics to measure the performance of each recommendation. This includes conversion rates, click through rates, and session lift.

The Strands Social Recommender delivers relevant product suggestions to first-time users, as well as offering filtered, personalized results over time to returning customers. These personalized recommendations are based on an individual’s taste profile, but don’t involve asking the user to rate content or build a profile on each site. No personal data is ever exchanged and each user’s interaction remains anonymous and secure.

As we noted above, we will be demonstrating the Strands Social Recommender at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, today through June 12 at booth # 1216, let us know if you are going to be there.

Last week we launched in private beta our new baby, an early version of the discovery site / life streaming service Strands.com.

As with any new beta site we needed your feedback, and yes we got it! And we thank you for that. Now it is our turn not only to improve in those areas where you all told us to do a better job, but also to work hard to bring new features to the service.

Rick Turoczy of SiliconFlorist wrote an excellent treatise on life-streaming and said I’m going to use it [Strands] because it gives my lifestream value—and it gives me more valuable resources through participation.

Portland-based Marshall Kirkpatrick also wrote a thoughtful post on ReadWriteWeb with very good feedback. What we probably most enjoyed was the reference to the hot posts: hotness is hotness – right now you can view what the hottest items are in your whole circle of friends, in a particular group of friends or in the lifestream of one particular friend.

Jason Harris, the Salem-based blogger who writes for GigaOm, also took the time to review Strands.com. He let readers in on how we will be adding the ability to build a “taste profile” based on your social media usage patterns.

Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian also covered the launch. He explained how the company’s technology will direct people to new things that fit their tastes, and take their taste profiles to other sites.

There is no doubt that the best part of our launch week was the meet-up we held with the Portland tech community. We had the opportunity to meet many interesting people, and the chance to hear their thoughts on Strands.com We thank everyone who attended the meet-up and has contributed their feedback: brampitoyo, TheInfovore, ahockley, turoczy, ThisKat, gwalter, xolotl, thattalldude and many, many others.

We are very excited to continue to hear all of your feedback on Strands. Keep the suggestions coming!