Update (04/28/08): MyStrands Social Player now with Last.fm scrobbling for Nokia S60 and S40 devices!

MyStrands Social Player (download here) has won the Mobile Rules! Award 2008 as the Best Multimedia Application!! Mobile Rules! competition is the world’s leading awards for innovative mobile business plans and cuttin-edge applications services and technologies from developers and entrepreneurs from around the globe (more here). This is great news!

MyStrands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices (Symbian Series 60, 3rd edition. Also available for Java) with two main characteristics: it lets you discover new music and has a built-in social network. You can meet people who like the same songs you play, send messages, see others’ listening histories, and much more… It has received great reviews so far and the best is yet to come.

Watch the video then try it yourself.

Stay tuned for our next release at the beginning of April at CTIA in Las Vegas with some pretty exciting features.

If you are there, make sure to come by and visit us at CTIA for a demo / conversation about what MyStrands Recommender Technology and the Social Player can do for your business. Booth #4855 in Hall N4, within the Enterprise Mobility Pavilion, Las Vegas Convention Center.

We are looking for distribution and music / ring tone service partners to integrate with for wireless music purchasing and to distribute the Social Player. Get in touch with us!

MyStrands is announcing today the “Strands $100,000 Call for Recommender Start-ups“.

We seek to identify the best early-stage project in the area of recommendation technologies, considering the technology, business opportunity and team behind the project (without limitations as to which field the technology is applied).

The Winner will be offered an investment of $100,000 from Strands, Inc. the parent company of MyStrands.

Candidates should submit a one-slide presentation in quad-chart format (example, more examples) by September 15th, 2008 to recommender-startups@strands.com, together with the team bios (in addition to this, an optional 2-minute video uploaded to YouTube describing the start-up enterprise would be highly appreciated).

Eligibility: The Call is open to individuals or sole proprietors and privately held businesses throughout the world.

Five Finalists will be invited to present their projects during the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys08) next October 23rd to 25th, 2008 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Finalists will be announced on October 6th. All Proposals will be judged using the following judging criteria: (a) implementation and integration of recommendation technologies, (b) originality and creativity, (c) likelihood of long-term success and scalability, (d) effectiveness in addressing a need in the marketplace, and (e) team bios.

Five grants. Each Finalist will obtain a $1,500 travel grant to attend RecSys08; Strands, Inc. will also cover the registration fees for the Conference, for one person per Finalist.

The final selection process will include on-site presentations of each project during RecSys08. Finalists will make three presentations of 5 minutes each (focused on technology, business and the team respectively) in front of the Jury and the attendees of the Conference.

The Jury will be composed of renowned experts in the academic, industry and venture capital communities.

The Winner will be announced on October 25th, 2008 during the Gala Dinner at RecSys08. The Winner will receive a commemorative plaque and an offer of a $100,000 investment in the form of a convertible loan.

Proposal submission period begins on March 12th and ends on September 15th, 2008.

Further information: Please visit http://recommender-startups.strands.com or contact the Strands $100,000 Call for Recommender Start-ups organizers at recommender-startups@strands.com.

Important dates:
March 12th: Proposal submission period begins
September 15th: Proposal submission period ends
October 6th: Five Finalists are announced
October 23rd-25th: Presentations of Finalists at RecSys08
October 25th: Winner Announced

Contact and updates:
Email proposal to: recommender-startups@strands.com
http://recommender-startups.strands.com
http://blog.MyStrands.com
http://recsys.acm.org

We just learned that MyStrands Social Player for Symbian S60 devices (download here) has been chosen as a finalist for the Mobile Rules! 2008 Award. Mobile Rules! is the leading annual competition in the mobile world.

We will be accompanied by Arvato, Call Enhancer, Hyper Player, JuiceUp, MobSensor, MosKillTo, NovixLife, PhuneTV and Vagalume. Good luck to all of you! The winner will be announced in San Jose next March 19th- let us know if you’ll be there.

On March 23, 2005, MyStrands was awarded a grant for $30,000 by the Benton, Linn, Lincoln, and Lane Regional Investment Board (BL3RIB). The funding was provided to assist MyStrands (a very young start-up) in filling ten new positions in its Corvallis office.

At the time the grant was awarded, MyStrands had only nine full-time employees in its downtown Corvallis headquarters, and the support was very much needed.

Today, with nearly 50 employees in Corvallis and over 100 employees worldwide, it is time again to thank BL3RIB for their support!

We are excited to announce that Claudio Baccigalupo (PhD student at IIIA-CSIC) and his thesis supervisor Prof. Enric Plaza (IIIA-CSIC) have been awarded the “Best Case-based Reasoning Application Paper” by the 7th International Conference on Case-based Reasoning (ICCBR’07) for their paper “A Case-Based Song Scheduler for Group Customised Radio“.

MyStrands is sponsoring Baccigalupo and Plaza’s research, focused on recommender systems within a musical context.

Their current project is about a novel Web radio architecture called Poolcasting in which they are implementing and combining several different techniques (CBR, Pattern Mining, Group Satisfaction).

Congratulations to Claudio and Enric, and also to the IIIA-Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, this is the 3rd time IIIA has received Best Paper in CBR in the last 5 years.

Nokia and S60 websites have chosen MyStrands Social Player as the Application of the Week. Zuper kool!

The MyStrands Social Player has greatly enhanced the concept of a mobile music player, turning it into a music discovery and social networking tool. Through it, you can not only play your favorite music but also discover and play new music that matches your tastes, meet new people with similar tastes, and find out how much your favorite music is played and by whom.

You can read the full story in the Nokia and S60 websites (btw, S60 newsletter ran another cool story about the MyStrands Social Player a while ago).

MyStrands Social Player has been nominated for the Webware 100 Awards in the mobile category.

We are proud to be in company with some other cool services such as 4Info, ShoZu, Google Maps Mobile, Google Gmail Mobile, GoWare DoMo, WinkSite and others. You can vote here.

The Webware 100 has been organized by Webware together with CNET.