Back in March we announced the “Strands $100,000 Call for Recommender Start-Ups“, the Fastest Path to Fund your Project. Now that we are getting closer to the end of the submission period, next September 15th, we’d love to receive your proposal!

As you know, the Call is open to individuals or sole proprietors and privately held businesses throughout the world, and 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. The Winner will receive a commemorative plaque and an offer of a $100,000 investment in the form of a convertible loan.

For 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:
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.Strands.com
http://recsys.acm.org

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 are very pleased to announce ACM Recommender Systems 2008 (RecSys08), the annual event on research and applications of recommender technologies, where the recommendation industry and academia come together. MyStrands’ CEO, Francisco Martin, will repeat as Industry co-chair this year, along with Unilever’s Shail Patel.

This conference builds on the success of Recommenders06 Summer School organized by MyStrands in Bilbao in 2006, and the 1st International Conference in Minneapolis last year. In these events many members of the practitioner and research communities valued the rich exchange of ideas made possible by the shared plenary sessions.

Why should this matter to you? As our Chief Scientist Rick Hangartner recently wrote:

Search engines as we know them will never disappear. In the near term, search engines will increasingly incorporate simple recommender technologies to handle approximate queries … But in the long term, the recommender industry will be larger, and recommender technologies will be more pervasive than the search industry and search technology as we know it.

If this were not enough, this year’s event will take place in beautiful Lausanne, Switzerland.

ACM Recommender Systems 2008 is chaired by Pearl Pu, General Chair, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Please visit the RecSys08 website for further information regarding topics of interest, important dates and more.

I had the pleasure of attending the ACM Recommender Systems Conference, as part of the research division of MyStrands (as well as a participant in the associated doctoral consortium). I was also offered the opportunity to discuss a few of the papers and “themes” of the conference in more detail here as a guest blogger.

There were too many ideas and themes that interested me this year, but in particular, I was very interested to hear Khrishna Bharat, principle scientist at Google, give the keynote. Greg Linden from Findory gives a good overview, which I won’t repeat. Dr. Bharat’s talk was a very detailed argument of journalism as a necessary cultural function, and not just a reflection (or exaggeration) of online novelty and whim.

His main argument was of journalism and free press being a necessary agent (and product of) democracy. While Google News has come under fire for potentially undermining the economic viability of online journalism, Krishna argues that Google News actually increases traffic to such sites.

However, much of his emphasis (and closing remarks), came in his discussion of the journalists who risk their lives to cover developments in hostile international countries and situations. Many people may have better tools and options for the exploration and discovery of relevant news items, especially in the realm of technical or entertainment journalism. However, the biggest threat to journalism as an agent of democracy may be the increasing number of reporters killed pursuing their trade.

Any sort of news is a function of three populations: Those who collect and distill the event into words, those who editorialize and sort these events into meaningful chunks of information, and finally those of us who consume this information. All of the technology in the world cannot replace a single journalist, and Bharat believes that this is actually one of the most important issues for journalism in general, both online or print.

Justin Donaldson, Researcher, MyStrands

A few of us are in Minneapolis right now attending the Recommender Systems Conference. The conference is in its 2nd year and brings together academics and industry to discuss the future, challenges and opportunities for recommender systems. This year there are about 110 participants from 15 countries, including industry representation from Netflix, Amazon, AMG, Digg, AOL, eBay, Unilever, Aggregate Knowledge and MyStrands.

Yesterday featured a very interesting keynote speech from Khrishna Bharat, Principal Scientist from Google, about the history and future of news journalism and the social responsibility we all share in ensuring the continued freedom of speech. He also touched on the process by which Google crawls, clusters, ranks, classifies the most relevant stories in Google News. Followed by some insight into the increased user engagement they were able to realize with the introduction of their personalized news stories. The clickthrough of personalized news stories is indeed higher than on just a blind list of “top stories”.

The keynote was followed by a number of academic papers presentations - focused on the hot topics of privacy and trust in collaborative filtering engines. Indeed some very interesting research going on in these fields, and I look forward to seeing what the continued research here bears out in the coming months and years.

After lunch, I was honored to take part in a panel with the focus of “Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase the value of recommenders?”. This was the opportunity for the industry folks like ourselves to provide some insight to the academics about the “real world” issues that we are trying to solve or improve. It was a lively discussion that extended the dialog on recommenders beyond the science and into user experience, consumer value and business models built around them. The panel included:

• Joaquin Delgado, CTO, Lending Club Corp.
• Jason Herskowitz, VP of Consumer Products, MyStrands
• Kartik Hosanagar, Assistant Professor, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
• David Jennings, DJ Alchemi LLC
• Zac Johnson, Product Manager, All Media Guide, Inc.

The day closed out with Poster Sessions by the academic community and some very interesting demos, with the lively discussion moving on to dinner and drinks. Today’s session promises to bring more great discussion. Look for another post later….

The Industry Committee of the ACM Recommender Systems 2007 has assembled two exciting industry panels for the Conference:

Friday October 19th: Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase value of recommenders?

• Moderator: Todd Beaupre, Yahoo, Inc.
• Joaquin Delgado, CTO, Lending Club Corp.
• Jason Herskowitz, VP of Consumer Products, MyStrands
• Kartik Hosanagar, Assistant Professor, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
• David Jennings, DJ Alchemi LLC
• Zac Johnson, Product Manager, All Media Guide, Inc.

Saturday October 20th: Appraisal of Recommender Systems

• Moderator: Kaushal Kurapati, Ask.com
• Delip Andra, CEO, Minekey, Inc.
• Jennifer Consalvo, Director of Personalization, AOL
• Greg Linden, CEO, Findory, Inc.
• Shail Patel, Platform Leader, Unilever Corporate Research
• Neel Sundaresan, Director, eBay Research Labs
• Tim Vogel, Chief Scientist, Aggregate Knowledge, Inc

As previously announced, Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google, will serve as Keynote Speaker for the Conference. For additional content and information, please visit the Conference Program. For last year’s Recommenders06 panels and speakers, please visit Recommenders06.com.

The technical program for ACM Recommender Systems 2007 is now posted on the conference website. Highlights include:

* A Keynote address by Krishna Bharat, principal scientist at Google and creator of Google News.

* 16 full-length technical papers, plus an exciting poster and demo program

* Still to be finalized — two industry-driven panel sessions on topics of current importance in the field.

Don’t miss the conference. RecSys 2007 will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota October 19-20, 2007. Registration and hotel bookings are now open at the conference website http://recsys.acm.org. See you there!