One year ago we announced that Nokia was featuring Strands in their “Phones should be open to anything” campaign.

Open to anything. We believe the smartest devices should keep getting smarter. That’s why we’ve left the Nokia Nseries open to enhancement, experimentation and evolution.

Mobile has always been a central component of what we do at Strands.

In the last year, we’ve been very active on mobile. The team has grown, and now 15 persons at Strands are exclusively dedicated to mobile. We also finally opened an office in Helsinki, home to the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile telephones, Nokia. We have built an amazing personal finance tool with tailored versions for Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia (S60) browsers, launched by BBVA, one of the largest banks in the world. We added Last.fm support to the Strands Social Player, presented Strands Widsets, organized parties and hosted mobile developers events.

All the team’s hard work was recognized by Nokia (winners of Nokia’s Mobile Rules 2008!), by BlackBerry (winners of the BlackBerry Developer Challenge) and last year by Orange (winners of the Orange Innovation Award in 2007).

This year in mobile has been an exciting one, but what the future will bring is even more exciting. In fact, the future is today: with so many possibilities open to developers to build cool services for iPhone, Nokia (S60), BlackBerry and soon Android, the future for mobile users looks great. And we will be making some great announcements soon.

Stay tuned!

Gravity R&D, developer of an Instant personalized entertainment solution for TV, has been selected by the jury as Winner of the first edition of the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-ups. Gravity R&D will be offered an investment of $100,000 from Strands, Inc.

In addition to the winner, the Jury selected two runners up: the location-based recommender developer Reccoon (2nd place), and Iletken (3rd place), a recommendation engine for rapidly emerging contents like news/rss feeds that utilizes social data.

Gravity R&D, Reccoon and Iletken participated in the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups together with a total of 68 scientists and entrepreneurs from 24 teams in 15 countries who presented 26 projects. Five finalists were selected to present their projects today at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems - RecSys08 in Lausanne. This is an impressive pool of talent and innovation, congratulations to all of them!

The Winner

Gravity R&D with its associate, Reignsoft, have created IMPRESS, a “magic button” that provides TV viewers with instant personalized entertainment at any given time with relevant program tips instantaneously on customer demand. It automatically schedules recordings with the highest probability based on user’s interest.

Gravity R&D is a four person team (Domonkos Tikk, István Pilászy, Gábor Takács and Bottyán Németh) from Budapest University of Technology in Hungary, and it was founded to exploit the experience learned at the Netflix Prize competition. It is specialized in algorithms, methods and practical application development for recommendation systems.

Reccoon helps people discover new places based on their input, current location and current time:

Iletken is a hybrid recommendation engine for services like news and RSS feeds:

The other two finalists were SentiMetrix and Commendo. See their presentations below:

SentiMetrix extracts and quantifies the huge and growing number of text-based opinions expressed through online media worldwide.

SentiMetrix @ Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups - RecSys08

The seven members of the Jury were:

Strands Social Player, powered by Strands Social Recommender, has won today the BlackBerry® Developer Challenge 2008 as the Best Multimedia Application!! The challenge is designed for BlackBerry developers from around the globe that have created their own BlackBerry applications (more here). This is great news!

Strands Social Player, powered by Strands Social Recommender, has previously won Nokia’s Mobile Rules 2008 Award and the Orange Innovation Contest 2007.

Strands Social Player for BlackBerry will soon be released. We have existing versions for Nokia S60 3rd edition and S40 devices which can be downloaded here.

As you know, Strands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music,connect with people, and share your tastes with friends.

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Thanks to everyone for your support!

Board a domestic flight and check the seat pocket in front of you, chances are you’ll find Strands’ latest client, SkyMall.

Launching in early November, Strands Social Recommender™ will be powering personalized product recommendations for SkyMall’s extensive online store of over 7,500 gifts, gadgets and home innovations—from the unusual to the practical—just in time for the holiday season.

Strands Social Recommender will provide an enhanced shopping experience to SkyMall customers, providing highly relevant recommendations to help them discover products based on their taste and intent.  Analyzing thousands of customer touchpoints, Strands Social Recommender “learns” what SkyMall shoppers are looking for, and then dynamically recommends tailored suggestions, while they browse.

We are thrilled to be working with SkyMall!

We are very excited to announce the five finalists for the first edition of the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups.

As you know, Strands seeks to identify the best early-stage project in the area of recommendation technologies. Finalists are invited to present their projects during the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys08) this October 23rd to 25th, 2008 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Winner will be offered an investment of $100,000 from Strands, Inc.

A total of 68 scientists and entrepreneurs from 24 teams in 15 countries presented 26 projects. Countries included Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Romania, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey and the USA. Areas where the recommendation technologies were applied are: pharmaceutical industry, cosmetics, video content, online media content, people and relations, TV content, search, events, social enterprise, advertising, location based services, travel and food.

And here is the list of the five finalists. Good luck to you all in Switzerland, this is very exiting for all of us!!

IMPRESS – Instant Entertainment, by Gravity R&D

IMPRESS “magic button” provides TV viewers instant personalized entertainment at any given time with relevant program tips instantaneously on customer demand. It automatically schedules recordings with the highest probability on user’s interest.

Gravity R&D was founded to exploit the experience learned at the Netflix Prize competition. It is specialized in algorithms, methods and practical application development for recommendation systems.

Team of 4: Domonkos Tikk, István Pilászy, Gábor Takács and Bottyán Németh. University: Budapest University of Technology. Hungary

SentiMetrix, Opinion-based Recommendations
SentiMetrix extracts and quantifies the huge and growing number of text-based opinions expressed through online media worldwide. SentiMetrix has automated sentiment extraction/analysis/scoring, the ability to find and quantify opinions in text.

SentiMetrix was founded in 2007 and it is based on the award-winning OASYS technology.

Team of 4: Patrick McBride, Vadim Kagan, V.S. Subrhamanian and Diego Reforgiato. University: University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Sciences, USA

iletken, Personally Relevant Content Based On Social Connections

Iletken, which means “Conductive” in Turkish, is a hybrid recommendation engine for services like news and RSS feeds. The core system of “Iletken” mimics the dynamics behind real life information dissemination to enable friends to share and conduct relevant information.

In contrast to traditional social networks, it maintains weighted graphs of social proximity among users for different categories of interest. Analyzing user behavior, Iletken dynamically updates its social graphs and uses this data to determine information conductivity among peer.

Team of 4: Murat Deniz Oktar, Baris Can Daylik, Firat Gelbal and Selcuk Atli. Universities: Koc University Istanbul, RPI New York and TU/e, Eindhoven.

Reccoon, location-based recommender

Taking advantage of the vast amount of GPS-enabled mobile devices, Reccoon helps people discover new places based on their input, current location and current time. It also adjusts recommendations to attention profile (e.g. Last.fm listening history). Reccoon responds to the simple question: what are my options for tonight?

Team of 2: Peter Tegelaar and Dominiek ter Heide. The Netherlands

Commendo - Drug Design Recommendation

Commendo uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry, including speeding up drug development and the minimization of adverse drug reactions.

Commendo was founded out of the project team “BigChaos”, which still participates very successfully in the Netflix Prize competition.

Team of 4: Andreas Töscher, Michael Jahrer, Georg Preßler and Michael Schrotter. Universities: Technical University Graz and University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, Austria