Instant personalized TV entertainment developer, Gravity R&D, winner of the Strands $100k Call for Recommender Start-Ups
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
Commendo uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry
The seven members of the Jury were:
- Oliver Bremer -VP Mobile, Strands, Inc
- Andrei Z. Broder - Fellow & VP Computational Advertising, Yahoo! Research
- David García Fabre - Corporate Innovation and Strategy, BBVA
- Paul Marrow - Principal Multidisciplinary Researcher, British Telecom
- Bamshad Mobasher -Professor, School of Computing, DePaul University
- Peggy Salz - Chief Analyst and Producer, MSearch Groove
- MG Siegler - writer, VentureBeat and ParisLemon
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 24 » Silicon Florist said,
October 25, 2008 @ 12:02 am
[...] Instant personalized TV entertainment developer, Gravity R&D, winner of the Strands $100k Call … Via the Strands blog “Gravity R&D has 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.” [...]
Budapest New Tech Meetup Blog » Blog Archive » Gratulálunk a Team Gravity-nek! said,
October 29, 2008 @ 9:24 am
[...] Team Gravity a ReignSoft-tal karöltve megnyerte a $100.000-os befejtetésről szóló díjat a Strands versenyen – és ezúton gratulálunk nekik! Imperss nevű, IPTV felhasználóknak készült ajánló [...]
The Young and Restless » Blog Archive » Three startups from Turkey said,
October 30, 2008 @ 1:36 am
[...] rapidly emerging contents like news/rss feeds that utilizes social data. They became third on the Strands 100k call, so there must be some real story behind it. But I have to admit, that I did not understand what [...]
Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 24 : Oregon Startup Blog said,
November 3, 2008 @ 2:12 pm
[...] Instant personalized TV entertainment developer, Gravity R&D, winner of the Strands $100k Call f… Via the Strands blog “Gravity R&D has 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.” [...]
Collaborative Filtering and Social Capital | Scrump said,
November 25, 2008 @ 9:41 am
[...] such as ourselves. Strands, who offer their recommender system as a web service, even ran a $100k prize competition for recommender startups, won by Gravity R&D (although my vote would have gone to [...]