Find out who is who here.

The MyStrands Team in Corvallis recently decided to shoot the Deschutes River for some class 3 and 4 rapids. Bring on the white water!

See all the photos here.

We’ve got a new t-shirt, this is a limited edition that we really like, it features Muzika (that little guy you sometimes see at MyStrands) with two pirate swords. Each member of the team has got one, and we’ve thought we’d love to share some with you. Like it?

Just drop us an email with your preferred size and where we should send it, and we will send it to you (first 100 emails get a free t-shirt).

Corvallis is not only home of the Beavers, it is also a great place to study, party, live and work.

And we are hiring!

Let me tell you about Corvallis. Corvallis is located in the Willamette Valley in central western Oregon about 85 miles south of Portland, 45 miles east of the Pacific Coast beaches, and a bit more that an hours flight from San Francisco and Seattle. Population 49,322. Corvallis is home to Oregon State University (Go Beavs!) and is a “Safest Pac-10 Campus”. Corvallis has won many other awards as well, including “One of the 10 best cities in which to live”, Oregon’s most bicycle-friendly city, “Best Green Places”. For the family, Corvallis is simply unbeatable. There are many activities year-round and Corvallis School District was named one of the top public school systems in the country.

As far as we’re concerned Corvallis is also a great place to party. Come and check out partyStrands at Cantina, Sanchos, Tailgaters & Highland Bowl! It’s a rippin’ time.

Corvallis is also a great place to work: 15th most creative city in the nation (legions of inventive minds are at work in Corvallis); fourth in nation for the highest number of patents issued by city; 7th out of about 500 U.S. cities for best places to do business.

And we are hiring! Here at MyStrands we share an ambitious plan: develop technologies to better understand people’s tastes and help people discover things they like and didn’t know about already. We are always seeking enthusiastic, versatile and talented people to help us to write the “score” for this exciting tech venture:

MySQL DBA; Software Engineers, Data; Software Engineers; Designers; System Administrators; Financial Operations Manager… you can see the details here (we are also hiring in our Barcelona office).

If you are interested in joining the MyStrands team and working in an informal, rapidly changing environment, send us an email at Jobs@MyStrands.com.

This past weekend, the MyStrands sponsored “Team PartyStrands” took part in the great adventure that is the 197-mile Hood to Coast relay race. The 12 runners, each running an average of more than 16 miles, covered the distance from Oregon’s Mt. Hood to the coastal town of Seaside in just over 26 1/2 hours. As fun as it was challenging, the accomplishment called for equal measures of energy and enthusiasm combined with grace under pressure and a never-say-die attitude. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so different than a typical day at MyStrands where we give our all to unleashing the coolest products with the most innovative technology. Well, except that you don’t get as sore from developing software as from running over the coastal range.

So congrats to all of the PartyStrands runners with special thanks to our friends and teammates recruited from Amazon and fellow Corvallis software companies Cleverset and Alsea Geospatial!

Team partyStrands, with CEO Francisco J Martin far left, is nothing but confident before leaving from MyStrands’ Corvallis offices

Gerardo, MyStrands software engineer and runner extraordinnaire, taking time out for a pose in front of Mt. Hood at the start of the 2006 Hood to Coast relay.

(More pics here).

Not too long ago, several of us were betting how unlikely it was that someone would compose some of the playlists submitted to the site. There is a virtually unlimited number of songs out there, millions and millions of songs and growing everyday. So, with such great diversity and taking into account that we could chose any of the existing songs to include a playlist, we were wondering what the odds are of someone composing a given playlist. We quickly realized that the odds were too small to distinguish from nil if we considered playlists over all of the millions of possible songs, and thinking about how to factor in the relative popularity of songs made our heads hurt.

So we finally agreed to just restrict the problem to deciding the odds that the songs on a particular playlist would occur in a set of random sequences of the songs actually played by our members. Then we started debating whether we should assume a single sequence of songs (what we call a playstream) could only include a single play of each song, or if we could allow playstreams that included repeated plays of songs. Not long after that we decided this problem was really not that interesting, and decided to go to the Cantina instead. Before we left, we asked our Chief Scientist what he thought the odds were, so we could decide who lost the bet and would have to buy the drinks.

He started mumbling to himself about urn problems, multivariate hypergeomtric distributions, reduction to the binomial, and Stirling’s Approximation, and we saw he was going to turn this into a major project, so we decided to leave for the Cantina. When we got back he announced he could give us an approximation to the answer for the first case in which playstreams couldn’t include repeats, but that he still had some “calculator work” to do for the case in which playstreams with could include repeats. We of course had long forgotten the question, but thought we should humor him and pretend to still be interested. He started to explain the mathematics of the problem to us: “Assume we have a population of L songs, and that we select a set of K playstreams from our members of some average length M, what is the odds that at least one playstream includes a particular playlist of N≤M songs. We also assume …”. We decided to just post the analysis for you to read instead. (The short answer for the case without repeated songs: About 10^15-to-1, or a million-billion to one, against someone composing a particular playlist from the songs our members actually play, without considering the relative popularity of songs. No one would have won the bet, so we decided we had done the right thing by going to the Cantina when we did.)

What we hope this illustrates is how we understand and appreciate the uniqueness of each playlist you share with the community. When you compose songs into a playlist, you are capturing a feeling or making a statement that you want to share with the world. We recognize how fortunate we all are that you have chosen to share that feeling or message. We will continue to work to provide you with creative and enjoyable ways to express yourself with and about music; we hope you’ll continue to share your taste in music.

We interrupt our regulary scheduled programming to bring you this important announcement from our Human Resources Department!

We seek a Senior Search Engineer (Ph.D. in Information Retrieval or
equivalent with strong software development abilities).

Does Levenshtein Distance sound familiar to you? Have you read
Managing Gigabytes and know all the pros and cons of mg? Do you
understand how Page Rank works? Do you love programming and seeing
your work used by millions of people? Interested in helping people
find the music they like and helping musicians find new fans? Would
you like to enjoy the beauty of Bilbao, Spain and the unique ambience of
the MusicStrands workplace? If so, please send an email with your resume to Jobs@MusicStrands.com.