Recently, Franco Ponticelli and I announced a special summer project geared for student-based opensource development of the web programming language, haXe , and supported by Strands. The project is now underway with two student participants: Miguel Serrano Milano and Danny Wilson.

Miguel is working on a CLI target compiler for haXe, which means that haXe will be able to run on the popular .NET framework , which should provide another solid desktop environment for development. This project will add a valuable new facet to haXe, providing even more opportunities in addition to haXe’s current target options of Javascript, SWF, Neko, and PHP.

Miguel had this to say about himself:

I’m Miguel, a Spanish student from Valladolid, a middle-size city 180 Km in the north of Madrid. I’ve lived here during most of my life, but I was born and spent part of my childhood in Malaga, Andalusia. Although Castilian and Andalusian people are quite different I preserve cool things from both worlds. I’m calmed like "the old castilian man" (an spanish expression), but it’s easy to find a mediterranean into myself: I love the sea, eating fish and of course, flamenco!

I have a Bsc in Computer Science from the University of Valladolid. My Thesis was a tool to create diagram-based apps (with UML in my mind) using Adobe Flex 2 and Actionscript (http://asdia.googlecode.com ), thus I’m mainly interested in Rich Internet Applications’ world. Now I’m in the 5th course of a Msc in industrial organization engineering, mainly focused in production, logistics and financial markets. I’m specially interested in derivatives, I’m looking for an idea to combine RIAs , derivatives and conquer the earth, but inspiration hasn’t come yet.

Danny is working on wrapping and extending the popular extJS web gui component library in haXe. Essentially, this will involve granting haXe access to the existing Javascript extJS API, but will eventually also lead to a desktop option as well (perhaps through SWF).  He’s also very busy working to finish his Master’s Thesis this summer, and we wish him the best of luck.

Franco and I are pleased to be able to support these two students, as they have already been active participants, supporters, and contributors to the haXe community in their own right. We wish them the best of luck as they tackle their projects!

Franco and Justin

We are glad to announce today the launch of the Strands Social Recommender™, a SaaS plug-and-play recommendation engine that can be easily and quickly installed by eCommerce and Media Web sites. We will be demonstrating the service at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago this week, let us know if you are going to be there.

The Strands Social Recommender has been proven to increase online sales by up to 35%, by offering site visitors personalized recommendations of new products and content that they might like, in real time.

The Strands Social Recommender can be easily installed through the Strands API or by adding personalization widgets to a retailer’s site, and can be up and running in as little as 30 minutes. More than 100 online businesses have piloted the Strands Social Recommender, with many customers seeing a significant increase in sales.

Key features of the Strands Social Recommender include:

• Cross-product flexibility: Recommendations can be generated across multiple product lines and data models, enabling sites to scale across diverse product, content and service categories.

• Personalized emails: Online businesses can opt-in to offer personalized product and content recommendations via multiple marketing channels, including email.

• Discovery widgets: Businesses can present content, merchandise, and services to users via fully customizable widgets

• Reporting: Business Intelligence reports and visualization tools complement standard Web site analytics to measure the performance of each recommendation. This includes conversion rates, click through rates, and session lift.

The Strands Social Recommender delivers relevant product suggestions to first-time users, as well as offering filtered, personalized results over time to returning customers. These personalized recommendations are based on an individual’s taste profile, but don’t involve asking the user to rate content or build a profile on each site. No personal data is ever exchanged and each user’s interaction remains anonymous and secure.

As we noted above, we will be demonstrating the Strands Social Recommender at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, today through June 12 at booth # 1216, let us know if you are going to be there.

Today we are happy to announce the acquisition of NetworthIQ, a social personal finance Web site that lets people track, share, and compare their net worth. This news follows the acquisition of money management solution Expensr and the private beta launch of moneyStrands, Strands’ personal finance application.

NetworthIQ was founded by Ryan Williams and his partners in 2005 to enable anyone to easily track their financial progress from a high level, and anonymously share it with the world if they choose, in order to benefit from community’s financial insights and experiences.

NetworthIQ has been a pioneer in the personal finance space, allowing users to unlock the value of the community as a resource for information, inspiration, and advice. More than 15,000 users have already chosen to post, and in many instances share, their net worth with the community. Part of Strands’ vision is to use social recommendation to help people discover new content, services and products based on their tastes, and this acquisition will help us to do that in the personal finance space with moneyStrands.

Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is Strands’ social money management solution, which allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. With moneyStrands, users can anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits, such as demographics.

Today we are happy to announce the launch of moneyStrands, a personal money management solution, as well as the acquisition of Expensr, a leading online personal finance application.

This marks the first step towards Strands’ vision of applying its personalization technologies to new areas. Following with our mission of helping people discover new online content, services and products, we are now extending our social recommendation technology to help people find the best ways to save money and invest.

What is moneyStrands?
Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is an online money management solution that allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. With moneyStrands, users can anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits, such as demographics.

Key features of moneyStrands:

1.- Powered by Strands’ social recommendation technology, moneyStrands provides users with the best personalized recommendations possible, helping them find new ways to save money and invest.

2.- Tailored versions for Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia (S60) browsers, so that the service can be used on mobile devices just as easily as it can be used on computers.

3.- A powerful widget platform, enables maximum customization with minimum set-up time.

In order to ensure industry best practices are followed, moneyStrands benefits from Strands’ ties with BBVA, one of the world’s largest financial institutions. BBVA, a strategic investor in Strands ($24M invested in December 2007), is a financial services group with more than $783 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $85 billion.

Expensr acquisition
Founded in 2006 by Reman Child and Shawn Gupta, Expensr is a free online application that takes an innovative approach to personal finance, combining social networking with financial management.

In addition to giving users the ability to manage all of their accounts in one place, Expensr provides analysis tools that let users categorize their spending and track changes over time; as well as budgeting tools to help users plan for future expenses. Users can also compare their spending habits with relevant sub-groups (e.g. students) within the Expensr community to see how their expenses match with their peers.

In September 2007 Expensr was presented on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine’s “Top 10 Disruptors”.

Part of Strands’ vision is to help people to improve their online lives by discovering relevant new content, services and products based on their tastes and empowering them to manage all of this in one place. Strands is currently building technologies to make this vision a reality and will have additional announcements in the coming months.

You know us as MyStrands, OpenStrands, MusicStrands and several other “strands”. Today we are doing what we believe is the next logical step for our organization: Rebranding Strands.

The word “strands” has a particular meaning for us: it represents the sequences of digital events that connect our lives. Strands’ mission is to help people discover new things. We do this by analyzing and understanding people’s tastes based on strands of sequences (links between digital items such as the songs found in a playlist, events in an activity stream or transactional data such as monthly purchases).

As we launch new services and expand our current offering, understanding taste strands will help us achieve our mission. It’s what powers our organization and is why we will now be known as Strands.

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

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!