**this current blog will remain as Strands corporate news blog.

The Vancouver USA Marathon race mobile application is a simplified version of the Strands Fitness mobile app, a GPS tracker combined with social networking integration.  With the race app, participants and spectators can receive updates from the race director, view photos uploaded by the community, and live athlete tracking on the race day.

Benefits for the event organizers:

• Keep race participants updated with news and race information
• Provide training tips and sponsor messages
• Distribute detailed course maps with elevation profile, aid stations and entertainment on the course

Benefits for event participants and spectators:

• Receive event news directly to your phone
• Track runners in real-time on race day
• Find exclusive deals and promotion from the event sponsors
• Share and view photos by the community

Download the Vancouver USA Marathon app here.

For more information, please contact Wookie@strands.com

New and Improved Features

Goals

We’ve revamped our goals! All goals will be displayed in the the progress bar and will be automatically updated with every activity you add to your training log. To share a goal, click on the yellow ‘More’ button. Choose goal options including Simple, Weight and Activity and define how you want to track.

Progress Summary

View your activity summary for the current week! The progress tab displays active goals, recent workouts and friends’ activity. From the report tab, you’ll get your weekly summary charts, recent activity from your contacts and current active goals. From the complete summary page, you can then navigate to the pages and posts you wish to find.

• Facebook Login
• Layout theme
• Faster!
• Easier user navigation

Using Strands Fitness Beta

Remember, any posts created in the Strands Fitness Beta application will only be saved and available in Beta. When the Beta application replaces current site at fitness.strands.com, all your saved activity history from Beta will then be transferred. We suggest you try out Beta, but choose one application to add your activity. Facebook login users will not be able to access fitness.strands.com until the Beta application replaces the current site at fitness.strands.com

If you have any questions, comments and concerns, please visit our Beta FAQ or contact us at feedback@strands.com.

Thank you for your support as we create a stronger application to help achieve your fitness goals!
Strands Fitness

At the conference, Strands Personal Finance gave a preview of their new Business Intelligence (BI) application, which plugs directly into the Strands PFM platform. The BI app gathers user data and analytics from Strands PFM solution, allowing banks to visualize key metrics, personalize and customize their PFM solution and see key performance indicators.

The application was designed to help financial institutions improve adoption, ROI and profits from their PFM solution. It will be available later this year. If you are interested in more information about Strands Business Intelligence, contact our SPF team.

2010 has been both incredibly busy and great year for us here at Strands Labs. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve grown and thank you everyone for showing Strands love. We look for even greater accomplishments in 2011!

We are currently working to bring more focus towards goals. I think the new tools will aid to stay motivated and logging your workouts. Suggestions and feedbacks are always welcome- Strands.com is for YOU!

We can’t say it enough – thanks to all the fans of Strands.com!

With love, Strands.com Team

Team Strands.com/Mizuno athlete Meghan Armstrong racing Chiba tomorrow

Corvallis, OR, November 22, 2010–Team Strands.com/Mizuno athlete Meghan Armstrong returns to International Chiba Ekiden with Team USA to race the marathon relay tomorrow. The 22nd edition of the event will feature teams from Japan, Romania, Russia, China and Canada in addition to a strong USA squad.

Armstrong and fellow Chiba veteran Ed Moran (Williamsburg, Va.) will lead teammates Bobby Curtis (Ardmore, Pa.), Aaron Braun (Flagstaff, Ariz.), Kim Conley (West Sacramento, Calif.) and Stephanie Pezzullo (Charlotte, N.C.)

Team USA will look to improve on an fifth-place finish from last year, where they covered the marathon distance in a combined time of 2 hours, 9 minutes and 42 seconds.

Find Meghan’s training and wish her good luck on her Strands.com online training log.

Gear tab on Strands is now available! You can view description, ratings and overall reviews from the Strands community.

To rate a gear, click on ‘Edit Review’ button. From the modal window, you’ll be able to rate the gear and provide text description. You can add the gear to your profile simply by clicking on the ‘I own it’ button at the top of the page. You can always purchase ‘must have’ gear through ‘Buy Here’.

Drop Down Menu

The Drop Down Menu makes it easier and faster to share a post.Hover over the ‘Share Something’ menu bar’s icon and the drop down menu will appear, allowing you to go directly to the specific modal window. This functionality is also available for your inbox notifications.

At Strands, we are always looking for ways to improve. If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us feedback@strands.com

Enjoy!

Blog widgets with dynamic displays of your Strands activity are now available on the Goodies page on Strands. You can choose from three different widgets, including a stats overview, your last workout, or recent workouts.

To add a blog widget to your blog or website, visit the Goodies page and copy the code of the badge you would like to use. If you use Blogger, you can add a blog widget with two mouse-clicks. Just click the ‘Add to Blogger’ button on the Goodies page, and ‘Add Widget’ from your Blogger account.

Questions or problems? Email feedback@strands.com.

Happy Training!

Strands Team

As we strive to make Strands.com the most comprehensive online training log, the product development team continues to add new activity types for you to track online.

The latest additions include the sport families Mountain Sports, Nautical Sports and Roller Sports. Within these sport families, Strands users can now track their activity for, climbing, canoeing, kayaking, rowing, inline skating, roller hockey, and skateboarding.

You can find the new additions in the sports drop menus in the basic tab of your workout modal window.

Can’t find your sport or activity on Strands.com? Let us know what you would like added at feedback@strands.com.

What’s New in Version 3.3?
-New six icon menu screen for easy navigation
-All app settings now accessible from within app, allowing for quick configuration
-Direct access to your messages and inbox from main menu screen
-Enhanced routes function helps you find new places to train
-New interactive News/Questions/Tips section
-Re-configured Chrono with added menu for pre-workout settings
-Ability to share and exchange goals with other Strands users

Have feedback? Send an email to iphone@strands.com.

About Meggie

Meggie (Strands User: mdials) is a runner and blogger from Indianapolis. She works in digital marketing, is married (to a runner), and has two dogs. She started running 5 years ago, and has has run four marathons–finishing her fourth in a near personal best 4:41 earlier this month at the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco. Meggie runs to “feel empowered, alleviate stress, and eat dessert”. You can follow Meggie on her Strands profile as she prepares to run the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon this month in a goal time of 4 hours, 31 minutes.

I’m not sure what’s growing at a faster pace: social media or the amount of distance runners in the United States. We all know that Twitter and Facebook are nearing world domination, but given the fact that the Boston Marathon sold out in 8 hours and 3 minutes (compared to 2 months in 2009 and 6 months in 2008), I’d say it’s a close race.

Both running and social media are interests of mine. I’m not an expert in either, but I love to practice both. Therefore, it seems fitting that I stumbled upon Strands. This site serves as a user community for the active person. Runners. Hikers. Walkers. Bikers. Swimmers. Strands is perfect for people who enjoy tracking training programs, monitoring upcoming races, setting goals and talking about running with other people who are equally passionate about the sport.

So, without further ado … a review.

When you log in to Strands, you see a horizontal tab bar [share bar] that lists the site’s different features.

Home: It’s easy to compare this tab to a Twitter stream. Essentially, it pulls up the people that you follow and their latest activity (whether that’s entering a new event, a route, a comment, etc.). Home provides  a quick dashboard to check up on your network. There is also a page for questions that allows the user community to interact on hot topics, provide feedback and provide tips.

Profile: When you first click on Profile, you pull up a stream of your latest activity. Again, similar to Twitter, but you also can access other areas including Info, Calendar and Stats. Like other social tools, Strands forces you to build out your bio, which you can view and edit under Info. You include a picture, bio information, some comments about who you are and why you run. You can also share goals, images, and videos for others to peruse. When you enter a workout – including details such as mileage and pace – you can earn trophies for things like stamina and endurance. (There is also an option to link your GPS device to automatically download your workouts directly into Strands. I have yet to try it out, but sounds like a cool integration.)

The gear section under Profile is awesome. After adding personal gear to your bio, you can select it when entering your workouts (for example, the pair of shoes you wore). Experts advise you to purchase new running shoes every 500 miles, and Strands gives an easy way to track the age and wear on your shoes! Plus, as you start to link up with others on the site, you can check out what gear they prefer and get some personal recommendations for your next purchase.

When you move over to the calendar, you see a simple view of your upcoming events as well as all your training activities. Before Strands, I went old school by writing my mileage on my desk calendar at work and crossing off the runs on my marathon training Excel spreadsheet. Now, I can keep track of everything online and access it anywhere!
The stats page breaks down the activity information you have provided into a bar graph to show things like average distance and pace. You enter the details and it does the rest of the work for you.

People: Not surprisingly, this is the area where you can search for people to follow and bring into your network. Currently, the page sorts people based on those that have the most followers, new users or name. I can see how elite athletes may find it valuable to build a network of people nationally who have similar goals and race times. I also like that I can find runners who are geographically close to me. In addition, People has a cool “stats” section that rates people who have logged the most miles. One guy [Nick Arciniaga] has 4,136 miles entered. Impressive!

Groups: Here you can create groups or join them based on interest, geography, activity or event.

Events: Events shows just that – events that you can search for, create, register for, comment on, “like” or “dislike.” I made sure to RSVP for the races I am signed up for as well as create some that weren’t already in the application. I love this idea. Imagine getting geared up for a big race and being able to log in, see who else is running, look at  their goals and read their feedback about the race. Maybe you could even find some people who will hold your pace, allowing you to meet new running partners.

Unfortunately, it seems that most of the people around these parts have yet to discover Strands. I had to create most of the Midwest races I participate in, and as a result they have a following of one (me). I look forward to this application expanding as the organization grows.

Routes: In Routes, users can upload various routes that are stored and available for others to try out. For those who don’t have a GPS watch, or for those who are sick of running the same tired paths, you can spice things up by trying out a new route!

Here’s the thing: This site rocks. It combines the best of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MapMyRun and then flavors it for athletes. My favorite aspect is the tracking area for workouts, gear and events. I am disappointed that there aren’t more people from the Midwest who are signed up with Strands; I’d love to see hundreds of people signed up for the same races so we can start building relationships based on our love for running and social media. Hopefully, as the exposure for Strands grows in the Midwest, so will its membership. Until then, I’ll happily continue to use it to store my workouts and goals.

Strands Team

We’ve added new badges to our goodies section!

You can easily place the badges on your blogs, websites, and other online profiles to share your Strands training log. To add, go to the Goodies and copy the code of the badge you would like to use.

Questions or problems, please feel free to email us at feedback@strands.com or just send a tweet to @Strands.

Happy training!

To commemorate the opening day of BAA Boston Marathon registration, the Strands team has put together 5 tips to help you prepare for Boston using your Strands training log.

1) RSVP on the Boston Marathon event page on Strands and find others who will be racing Boston. You can also share images and videos with other users on the event page.

2) Now that you’ve qualified and registered, it’s time to set a goal. To set a race goal, click on the goal button on your Strands share bar.You can set a general goal, or set a specific time or place goal. The Strands Race Predictor software will allow you to track your progress towards your goal.

3) Watch the Strands 3D Route Replay of the Boston Marathon course.

4) Ask the community a question. The Strands community includes everyone from the first-time 5k runner to the Olympian. Learn from their experience and ask a question. Just click on the ‘Share a Question’ button at from the questions tab.

5) Read training tips! Members of the community (including the Team Strands.com/Mizuno athletes) also post regular training tips. Search for tips by keyword or click ‘More Options’ to filter tips by by activity, location, and more.

Happy training! Good luck to you all as you start preparation for Boston!

Strands Team

By Melissa Field

Lately I’ve been experiencing Facebook fatigue. What began as a great way to stay in touch now suddenly feels like a mundane waste of time. The status updates have become borderline irritating and my own updates pose no exception. I recently ran a program that spit out the words I use most frequently in my updates. The results:

1.Run

2.Running

3.Marathon

4.Ran

5.Colorado

I’m from Colorado, which explains the last part. But the other 4 words made me think, “Wow, I talk this much about running? How annoying! It’s a wonder I haven’t been defriended by everyone I know.” My friends don’t have to say anything. I know they find my endless updates about running tiresome, and who wouldn’t?

Other runners. That’s who. Runners love talking about negative splits, wave starts, tempo workouts, GU shots, and Garmin watches. Most runners could talk about these things all day. So when a fellow running friend suggested Strands, I decided to give it a try.

Strands was developed by computer scientist and accomplished runner, Francisco Martin. Strands is a two-fold venture. The website, www.strands.com, is a free online training log and social networking site. Like Facebook, each user has a profile. Users can log workouts, meals, routes, and gear. They can also talk to other each other, offer tips and encouragement, and share images and videos. The second part of the venture is Team Strands.com/Mizuno, an elite-level team comprised of runners from across the United States. Unlike teams centered in one specific location, such as the Mammoth Track Club, Team Strands runners live across the country and are paid to travel and place well in races. It’s easy for them to stay in touch because, well, they have their own website.

Nearly everyday on Strands, an elite runner, often a member of Team Strands, is offering advice or support to a slower runner. The training log feature makes it easy for runners to see what others are doing. If you’ve just struggled though a long run, another runner, or even a coach, might look at your training log and offer feedback on how to improve based on your previous workouts. If the road you’re running lacks a water fountain, another runner in your area might suggest a better path.

Elite runners differ from pro athletes in other sports. They are approachable and, for the most part, shockingly humble. We, the running masses, love this about them, and yet, do very little to support them. We pay to run a marathon, not to watch the best run. But if we love this sport, we should support our elites. They are the ones who will take us to new heights; they are the ones who will accomplish the dreams we have yet to envision.

In the movie Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson, a baseball player robbed of the ability to play the game he loves, delivers a poignant line. Stepping out onto a baseball field, he stares into the night sky and declares, “I would have played for food money. It was the game; the sounds, the smells.” In the end, Shoeless Joe tells us he would have played for nothing. Playing for nothing—a heartbreaking concept that, in reality, keeps the best runners from doing all they can to compete. The businesses that keep our elites running—and connected to the larger running community—are the businesses worth supporting.

So instead of wasting my time reading about what a high school friend did this weekend on Facebook, I have decided to invest my time on a site devoted to keeping me fit, well-informed, and well-connected to the sport I adore. At its best, a social networking site links us to the things we love. It’s even better if supporting that site helps to build a stronger running community—a community centered on encouraging the novice and sustaining the pro.

Melissa is a freelance writer and a runner living in Boulder, Colorado. She runs “to see the world, to stay healthy, and to feel free and at peace”. You can follow Melissa’s training as she pursues her goal of goal of qualifying for the BAA Boston Marathon by her 35th birthday at her Strands.com profile, www.strands.com/coloradomel.

You can follow the Team Strands.com/Mizuno athletes on Strands, read news and events on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

Copyright August 2010
]]> http://blog.strands.com/2010/09/26/move-over-facebook-why-runners-prefer-strands/feed/ 0 http://blog.strands.com/2010/09/24/introducing-strands-3d-route-replay/ http://blog.strands.com/2010/09/24/introducing-strands-3d-route-replay/#comments Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:25:34 +0000 reneau http://blog.strands.com/?p=2952 Introducing Strands 3D Route Replay!

Strands 3D Route Replay offers the athlete another tool to analyze training and share their experience in an unparalleled 3D format.

“In an effort to provide a better sense of a given workout or route, we have developed route visualization tools that work with sophisticated Google Earth technologies,” explains developer Justin Donaldson.

“Using these tools, Strands users are no longer restricted to just pace information, distances, and a crude map. They are sharing the actual experience of what it is like to run the route–including terrain, elevation changes, buildings and other landmarks.”

This new visualization technology works with all existing Strands compatible data formats, and will run on any OSX or Windows based browser using a small plugin.

The plugin is free, and you can install it from here: http://www.google.com/earth/explore/products/plugin.html

After you have installed the plugin, you can check out some sample routes from our users.

Coming to an event near you!

In addition to Strands users workouts, the route replay 3D system enables basic route information to be rendered as well. This gives race organizers the ability to create a course map offering race participants a ground level re-creation of the entire race, from start to finish–including critical course information such as first aid stations, water stops, terrain changes and landmarks on the course. For example, below is a 3D course representation of the famous Citgo sign marking 1 mile to go in the BAA Boston Marathon.

If you are interested in working with a Strands rep to develop a 3D Course Map for your event, please contact feedback@strands.com.

Happy Training!

Strands Team

The enhanced route search function on Strands.com, allows you to search the database of routes uploaded by the Strands community. Using both a grid or map view, you can search for routes by location, route type, distance, proximity and popularity.

To get started, simply click on the Routes tab. Here you will find a grid view of routes in your area. If you would like to search for routes in a new location, type a city or zip code in the text field, or click “More Options” to search using the advanced search functions.

Another method to search for routes is with the map view. Select the map view tab and a map will display running hot-spots listed by the number of routes posted in the area. Double-click or use your mouse’s scroll wheel to zoom in on the map for a display of each routes starting point. If you mouse over the starting point, it will display a snapshot of the route on the map.

If you have any questions about searching for running routes, please contact feedback@strands.com, or visit our FAQ at www.strands.com/FAQ.

Happy training!

Strands Team

Calendar View

The calendar view in your strands profile is the best place to add, browse and edit all of your activity on Strands.com.

Add New Activity
Adding new activity to your calendar is easy. Click on the day and a pop-up window will appear where you can share a note or a workout post using the parser language. You can also share activity with details by clicking on one of the activity buttons.

Browse Calendar
Activity is color coded for easy browsing. You can also scroll over the activity for a post preview, or if you would like to filter the activity in your calendar, select the activity or date in the drop-down menu. Remember, the calendar is interactive. When you have located a post, simply click on it once to link to the original post.

Edit Calendar
To edit old activity, simply double-click the post. If you have added it to the wrong date, you can drag and drop to the correct date.

To make the calendar view your default profile view, visit your account preferences, select the “View” tab, and mark the Calendar checkbox.

If you have any questions about the Calendar View on Strands, please visit our FAQ or send an email to feedback@strands.com.

Listed are some key features we’ve improved or added. We’ll provide an in-depth blog to introduce each new and improved sections later, but until then here is a sneak peak of what to expect!

Key New Features

• Custom workout title – name your workouts!
• Strands Parser – convert text to workout post!
• Social – share who you trained with!
• Race Prediction – compare your Race Prediction with others!
• Supplements – how do you recover?
• Trophy Case – earn your medals through your training miles and days!
• Goals – Faster time? Weight goal?
• Calendar – new design, easy view of all workouts
• New stats - new charts and graphs for easy viewing
• Questions – Training Questions? Shoe Review?
• Smart Routes – Search routes by distance and location. Compete and challenge against others!
• Tips – Injury prevention, best gear, supplement, routes, stores, sales…

Improvements

• Expanded layouts for better visualization
• Design overhaul throughout the site for better navigation
• Better filtering – filter your life stream
• More activity – just about any activity you can think of!
• Race Prediction – apply day off into the training calculation
• Improved view navigation – easily access your stats
• iPhone 3.1
• Improved Strands Tracker with bug fixes

Every few days, we’ll introduce each new feature in-depth so that you won’t miss a thing.

Stay tuned – it’s worth it!

We are recruiting 20 enthusiastic individuals to spread the word about Strands.com in their community. We are looking for individuals of all ages and abilities. If you have been an active user of Strands.com for at least 30 days and you think you would make a good candidate, send an email to Mike Reneau. Please include your name, home location, Strands.com user name and a paragraph why you would like to be a brand advocate.

Strands.com Brand Advocates will receive a Team Strands.com singlet, technical running T, water bottle, and the opportunity to earn more Team Strands.com gear. They will be featured on the website on both the landing page and as recommended users for new registrants to follow. Brand advocates will have the opportunity to beta test new Strands.com software and iPhone apps if they choose. They will be provided with cool promotional material for community events, group runs and Strands.com user “Meet-Ups”.

Guidelines
Your participation in the Strands Brand Ambassador program is subject to the Strands.com Terms of Use and the following additional guidelines.

You must comply with the FTC guidelines relating to compensated endorsements of goods or services, 16 CFR Section 255.5. When you post or blog encouraging people to use Strands.com, you must disclose that you have received something of value from Strands. You should do this by including a link to this page (page that explains the Strands Brand Ambassador Program). You are encouraged to post positive comments about Strands.com, but you should NOT post negative comments about other sites that may compete in the same space. Posting anything that is false or misleading, about Strands.com or a competitor, is not permitted and is grounds for immediate termination from the Strands Brand Ambassador Program. Anything you write, post or tell people relating to Strands.com is user-generated Content as defined in the Terms of Use so please ensure that the Content is not illegal or offensive to the recipient.

Your relationship with Strands will be that of an independent contractor. You are not authorized to make any contracts or commitments on behalf of Strands. You are solely responsible for all tax returns and payments required to be filed with or made to any federal, state or local tax authority with respect to your compensation for participation, and Strands will not withhold or make payments for social security, unemployment insurance, disability insurance or worker’s compensation insurance on your behalf.

Full Length Guidelines

The Strands.com Hi-Lite Meet will draw many of the nation’s best mid-distance and distance runners for the first high performance track meet hosted in Corvallis since the Oregon State University men’s and women’s track programs were cut in 1988. The Hi-Lite meet originated on May 30, 1974 under the direction of Oregon State Head Coach Berny Wagner. During its 14-year history, the meet was host to some titans in the history of USA Track & Field, including Steve Prefontaine and Mary Decker, among others. The meet will take place at Corvallis High School, where Prefontaine set the National High School 2-mile record 41 years ago.

“Corvallis has a tradition of great track and field and a vibrant running community,” said Strands.com Marketing Director, Matt Downin. “We thought it would be fun to host a track meet that brings together the community and some of the nations best track talent.”

Community events are slated to begin at 6:30 PM. Runners of all ages and abilities are invited to participate in an Open Mile, Boys Middle School Mile, Girls Middle School Mile, Pre-teen 400 Meter Dash, Kids 50 Meter Dash, and Corporate Relay (4 x 400). To register for the community events, visit the Official Strands.com Hi-Lite Meet web site and follow the registration link.

The elite meet will feature a men’s and women’s 800 meters, 1500, 5000, and a men’s 10,000 meters. Coaches and athletes interested in attending the meet need to contact Seamus Nally to register at nally@strands.com.

Successfully invite 15 of your friends, training partners, or teammates to join the Strands.com community between March 2nd and April 17th and we’ll send you a free technical running shirt.

An invitation is considered “successful” when the individual was invited through Strands profile and signs up using the link provided in the email invitation.

Get Started:

1.  Visit www.strands.com, click ‘Register Now” and set up your free profile.

2. From your Strands profile click on the official contest banner or click here.

3.  From the “Invite Overview” you can start Inviting people two different ways:

• “Invite Contacts by email” (up to 5 emails at a time)
• “Invite Address Book Contacts” (your entire address book from Gmail)

Check the status of your invitations in the “Invite Overview”. When youj’ve successfully invited 15 friends, we’ll send you an email request your t-shirt size and mailing address.

Terms and Conditions

Below you’ll find a selection of different badges, which you can easily place on your blogs, websites, or other online profiles to show that you, your races/events, or your groups are on Strands.

Just use the source code to easily integrate them. The only thing you need to do – depending on the badge – is to:

• replace YOUR_USERNAME with your own username on Strands, then the badges will directly link to your Strands.com profile, or
• replace YOUR_RACE with your race name on Strands, then the badges will directly link to your Strands.com race, or
• replace YOUR_EVENT with your event name on Strands, then the badges will directly link to your Strands.com event, or
• replace YOUR_GROUP with your group name on Strands, then the badges will directly link to your Strands.com group.

Remember, only one of the above steps needs to be taken per badge!

In case of any questions or problems, please feel free to email us at feedback@strands.com, send a Strands message to @Strands, or just send a tweet to @Strands.

Select a badge	And just copy and paste the code Don’t forget to change YOUR_USERNAME, or YOUR_RACE, or YOUR_EVENT, or YOUR_GROUP depending on where it should link to on Strands.com!
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/YOUR_USERNAME" target="_blank" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_01.png" alt="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" border="0" /></a>
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/YOUR_USERNAME" target="_blank" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_02.png" alt="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" border="0" /></a>
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/YOUR_USERNAME" target="_blank" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_03.png" alt="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" border="0" /></a>
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/YOUR_USERNAME" target="_blank" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_04.png" alt="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" title="I am on Strands.com – Follow my training" border="0" /></a>
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/events/YOUR_RACE" target="_blank" title="Find this race on Strands.com"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_05.png" alt="Find this race on Strands.com" title="Find this race on Strands.com" border="0" /></a>
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/events/YOUR_EVENT" target="_blank" title="Find this event on Strands.com"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_06.png" alt="Find this event on Strands.com" title="Find this event on Strands.com" border="0" /></a>
	<a href="http://www.strands.com/groups/YOUR_GROUP" target="_blank" title="Find this group on Strands.com"><img src="http://www.strands.com/images/badges/us_strands_badge_07.png" alt="Find this group on Strands.com" title="Find this group on Strands.com" border="0" /></a>

Strands.com will host the inaugural edition of the Strands 5k in Corvallis on October 24th. The race will feature a community 5k, a children’s race, post-race party and a prize purse totaling $13,000. Supporting sponsors of the race include Emery & Sons Construction, Eufora, and Marrakesh Salon.

All race proceeds benefit Childhelp, an organization dedicated to helping victims of child abuse and neglect. Childhelp’s mission is to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of abused, neglected and at-risk children through advocacy, prevention, treatment, and community outreach. Find more ways to get involved or information on how to donate directly through the Childhelp.org website.

Prize money is only available to U.S. Citizens and will be distributed as follows for the men’s and women’s open field:

• 1st place–$3,000
• 2nd place–$1,500
• 3rd place–$750
• 4th place–$600
• 5th place–$400
• 6th place–$250

The 5k race will begin at 9:00 a.m. PST on October 24. The children’s race will begin at 10:00 a.m., followed by an awards ceremony and post-race party outside Strands headquarters at Central Park in Corvallis.

Online registration is $15.00 and race day registration is $20.00. For more information and a race registration link, visit the race website at Strands5k.com, call the race hotline at (541) 740-5306, or email us at strands5k@strands.com.

Version 2.6 is the first ever full-featured training log for iPhone! It allows runners, cyclists, and active people to add to their training log from categories like exercise, nutrition, injuries, therapy, gear, and more.  And, using the built-in GPS, athletes can use their iPhone 3G or 3GS to map routes and record workouts… but that’s not all!

In the latest version we have added some extra goodies that many people have been asking for…

Route Replay lets users pause their current workout to play a satellite video reply of their progress, or wait until they are finished and view video of their final route.  Along with the video replay, Strands for iPhone will simultaneously display the overall distance and current progress along the route.

iPod and playlist integration so athletes can listen to tunes while working out!  Before or during a workout, tap the playlist button from Strands Chrono to access iPod controls and add tracks to a playlist.  Add tracks by artist, song or album, or add a playlist you’ve created with iTunes on your computer.

Voice Feedback by distance and/or time so that users of the app can hear how fast and how far they have gone without even looking at the iPhone.

Automatic calorie calculation for both calories burned during each workout, and for calories consumed when adding nutritional information to the training log.

Sharing to Facebook & Twitter allows users to optionally share to Facebook and Twitter for their friends on those networks to see.

In the latest version we also introduces 2 modes: Strands Chrono, and Strands Social.  Within Strands Chrono an athlete can add to their training log, view their workout history, and find short-term weather forecasts for their area.  Strands Social allows users of the app to follow how their friends are training, leave comments, and interact with people and groups among other community-based features.

If you haven’t already, download Strands for iPhone from the App Store today and tell us what you think.  We’re always listening and would love to hear about your favorite features and suggestions!

At Strands.com/LaVuelta, users can follow each stage’s GPS route LIVE, receive minute-by-minute situation updates, and listen to an exclusive broadcast of Radio Vuelta, the internal radio of the competition.  Additionally, all cyclists competing in the tour have personal profiles on Strands, where fans can chat and comment on each stage’s performance.

Through our partnership with La Vuelta, we will also be hosting several contests on Strands.com.  A total of 21 Golden Jerseys signed by the final winner of La Vuelta, and one official bicycle of Team Euskaltel will be given away!

For full contest details and information about the event visit Strands.com/LaVuelta.

Based on your current training and previous performances, we are able to predict your next race performance.  The more detailed workouts you add to your training log, the more accurate the predictions will be.  In addition to current training and previous performance, determining factors include weight and age.

To show off your your race predictions to your followers, simply visit your profile on Strands and personalize your sidebar to display the widget.

Set a time goal for an upcoming race and track your progress with the Strands Race Predictor. To set a goal, click on the goal button on your Strands share bar.

Happy Training!

Strands Team

Awards were given to the Best Overall Male and Female Athletes of the Championships, and were received by Reyes Estévez and Mayte Martínez respectively.

Estévez is a 1,500M runner who won the 1998 European Championships in Budapest, bronze medals at the 1997 and 1999 World Championships, and silver medals at the 2001 IAAF World Indoor Championships and 2002 European Championships.  Martínez is an achieved 800M runner, winning silver medals in the 2002 and 2005 European Indoor and Outdoor Championships; and bronze medals in the 2003 and 2007 World Indoor and Outdoor Championships.

Also, awards for the Top Male and Female Athletes Participating in the Championships with the most followers on Strands were received by Carles Castillejo and Marta Esteban.   Castillejo and Esteban both competed in the 5,000M this weekend, finishing 3rd and 13th respectively.

Awards were presented by World and European Marathon Champions Abel Antón and Martin Fiz, along with European and Olympic 1,500M Champion Fermín Cacho.

Today we are excited to announce our partnership with the Spanish National Track & Field Federation for the celebration of the 2009 Track & Field Championships, which will be held during the 1st and 2nd of August in the Olympic Stadium of Barcelona.

Through the partnership Strands will be present during the event with banners, booths for both athletes and attendees, and spots on both the JumboTron and the National DTT Sports TV Network: Teledeporte. 

Additionally, Strands will be hosting the Official Post-Championship Party, which will include awards for the Best Athlete of the Championships and the Most Popular Athlete on Strands.com; as well as the announcement and introduction of Team Strands Spain – a team of post-collegiate, professional middle and distance runners.

To follow all the events throughout the Track & Field Championships, log into your Strands account and check out the event profile at Strands.com/Barcelona09 to see pictures, videos, and meet the athletes.

Javier is now competing in the United States under the sponsorship of Suunto, Louis Garneau, Oakley, Nike, and Cervélo among others.  You can follow his training at Strands.com/javiergomeznoya.

Returning to one of the most hallowed sites in the sport, the 2009 USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships will take place at Hayward Field, site of the ’72, ’76, ’80, and the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.  Eugene has long been dubbed “Track Town, USA” for its rich track and field history and the community’s overwhelming appreciation of the sport, and Strands has 20 tickets to give away.

The top winner will receive 1 pair (2 passes) of All-Session passes, good for all days and all events of the 2009 USATF Track & Field Championships.  Four runners-up will each win 3 Individual Session passes, good for all events for 1 day each (date of passes TBD).

To enter to win, simply leave a comment on this post and include your Strands.com Username.  For extra style points, add your favorite running quote or include a link to your favorite running video on the internet.  Winners will be chosen at random from the comments below, and all winners will be announced by June 24th.

For more information about the event, please see the USATF event website.

Click to comment

We dug through our photos and grabbed some reminders from the past — check out the slide show of some Strands employees, projects, adventures, and fun.

On August 28th over 12,000 runners will embark on the largest relay race in the World — 197 miles from majestic Mt. Hood to the beautiful Pacific Ocean in Seaside, the Nike Hood To Coast Relay is truly “the mother of all relays”.

Strands is sponsoring two teams of up to 12 runners each to participate in the 28th Annual Hood To Coast Relay, and we are inviting specialty running stores and individuals from across the nation to compete for 12 all-expense paid trips to Oregon to participate in this incredible adventure!

Stores can win by creating an account on Strands.com and inviting their customers and friends to join them, and individuals can win by creating a video about “Why I Run” and posting it on Strands.

Full contest details can be found at http://contest.strands.com.

He will be working along side Spanish friends, rivals, and teammates Abel Antón and Fabian Roncero – together these three men lead Spain to be the largest world power in long-distance running in the 1990′s.

Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images, 1995

You can follow Martín’s run @ http://www.strands.com/martinfiz

The 2009 USATF National Club Track & Field Championships will be held at New York City’s Icahn Stadium on July 10-11.  This marks the third time the championships have been held in New York since 2005.  The meet will be hosted by the Central Park Track Club, who captured the 2009 combined team title.

“We are extremely pleased that the Club Championships are returning to one of America’s premier track & field venues, in an area that is a hotbed for our sport and the USATF club program,” said USATF Director of Grass Roots Programs, Andy Martin. “The 2005 and 2007 Club Championships held at Icahn Stadium were both big successes, and the meet continues to grow. We hope to continue that growth in 2009.”

The schedule of events, entry information, and housing information for the 2009 National Club Track & Field Championships, and meet headquarters hotel information, is available at the USATF website.

“After a rigorous selection process by the 25-member panel of angel investors, CenterSpace was chosen to receive an $125,000 angel award investment,” said Trevor Misfeldt, CEO.  “We’re proud to have been chosen from over 40 excellent start-up companies to receive this award.  The investors recognized the excellent traction CenterSpace has already achieved in the .NET numerical component market, and the exciting growth opportunities for leveraging CenterSpace technology into new markets, such as cloud-hosted numerical web services and numerical applications.”

The first annual Willamette Angel Conference was held May 14, 2009 in Corvallis at the CH2M Hill Alumni Center on the Oregon State University campus, and is a new investors conference aimed to connect early stage and seed businesses with angel and venture investors in the Willamette Valley.

The 2010 Willamette Angel Conference will be held in May in Eugene, Oregon. For more information about the conference see www.willametteconference.com.

“So, what’s the big deal?”

Strands has been able to support AA Sports’ races by sponsoring disposable ChampionChip timing chips, allowing users of Strands Online Training Logs to receive LIVE race results as soon as they cross a timing mat!

Within 5 seconds of crossing a timing mat, results are saved directly to Strands.com for fans and family to view from the web and the Strands iPhone App.

So far we’ve been able to provide live results for the Salt Lake City Marathon, Eugene Marathon, and Lake Run 12k; and are excited to offer live race timing for the upcoming Coeur d’Alene Marathon, 10Cane 10k, and Pacific Crest Sports Festival, with many more to come.

If you are a Race Organizer or Coordinator and would like to bring Strands LIVE timing to your race, be sure to let us know!

There are already Elite Athletes and ‘Average Joes’ from numerous countries using Strands to train smarter, but we want to help athletes from every country around the World!

The contest is based on the number of friends and training partners you share Strands.com with, and the biggest fans will receive Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watches w/HR monitors. Other prizes range from Strands technical shirts, to Puma jackets and running shoes.

The contest is open to the World, and there is no limit to the number of prizes to be awarded.

Not a member of Strands yet? Click here to get started.

Already a member? Log in to get the full scoop on the contest and see when you’ll get the next prize.

Best Training!

The latest release of Strands.com allows athletes to log workouts and routes manually through the web, or automatically from Garmin, Nike Plus, and the Strands iPhone App. In addition, users are able to see their statistics graphically, comparing themselves with the rest of the community (or just the people they follow).

(click for detailed preview)

Besides the common features of a daily training log, Strands.com allows its users to add other online services using the idea of “life-streaming.” This enables users to add videos or pictures from services like YouTube and Flickr, and share their training log through Twitter or Facebook. In total there are more than 25 services currently supported.

Although just recently launched with this renewed vision, Strands.com has already proven to be a powerful tool for anyone wanting to train smarter by logging their miles, routes, gear, and nutrition; as well as an effective tool for communicating with training partners and teammates.

This is just the beginning of a feature-packed road map for Strands.com, and we’ll be excited to make more announcements as we continue to grow. And as always we love to hear from you, so feel free to send us your feedback.

His presence on the Strands Team has been generating some buzz, and you can see him interviewing alongside fellow runner and Strands Team member Fabián Roncero for a Spanish TV station while greeting fans at the Madrid Half Marathon.

If you’ve already received your invitation, you can follow his run at strands.com/abelanton. Not a member yet? Request an invite!

Photo: George Herringshaw, 28th August 1999

tunesBag uses Strandsâ„¢ flexible algorithm configuration to influence how the recommendations are calculated. Based on the current track that the user has selected, other tracks with the same tags and artists are given high priority resulting in similar music recommendations. Through Strandsâ„¢, users can also discover new artists that share similar styles with the tunes in their music libraries. While users can get recommendations from day one, the quality of recommendations improves with continued use as the user behavior starts to influence the results. Strands Social Recommenderâ„¢ builds on listening histories and evolves with the current behavior ensuring that recommendations are relevant and offer consistent content discovery. Unlike recommendation features in other music clients, Strands Social Recommenderâ„¢ is able to truly personalize recommendations by filtering out tracks that are no longer relevant, ie, user gave track low ratings, already owns track or added track to favorites.

If you are in Europe and you are interested in recommendation technologies, Recked is for you.

Recked is an informal event for 100 engineers interested in recommender systems, organized by Wakoopa, the software and games discovery start-up, and Strands.

Held on January 26th in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Recked will focus on how to implement collaborative filtering for your product in a manageable and practical way. Three experienced speakers will give you all the real-world use cases and solutions you’ll need to start building your own recommendation platform.

The speakers at the event will be Dominiek ter Heide, founder of Reccoon, the location based services start-up (and finalist in the Strands Call for Recommender Systems); Coen Stevens, Lead Recommendations Engineer at Wakoopa; and Jim Shur, Strands Chief Software Architect.

For more information and to sign up, please visit to the Recked website. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Read more about it on our community blog.

You can:
- View recent activity from your friends
- Check and reply to your inbox messages
- Like and dislike things in peoples Strands
- Comment
- View images and click on links to blog posts and bookmarks
- Check out recommended posts
- Save things for later viewing once you get to your computer

It’s pretty addictive.

You can read more about it here on our Community Blog!

Open to anything. We believe the smartest devices should keep getting smarter. That’s why we’ve left the Nokia Nseries open to enhancement, experimentation and evolution.

Mobile has always been a central component of what we do at Strands.

In the last year, we’ve been very active on mobile. The team has grown, and now 15 persons at Strands are exclusively dedicated to mobile. We also finally opened an office in Helsinki, home to the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile telephones, Nokia. We have built an amazing personal finance tool with tailored versions for Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia (S60) browsers, launched by BBVA, one of the largest banks in the world. We added Last.fm support to the Strands Social Player, presented Strands Widsets, organized parties and hosted mobile developers events.

All the team’s hard work was recognized by Nokia (winners of Nokia’s Mobile Rules 2008!), by BlackBerry (winners of the BlackBerry Developer Challenge) and last year by Orange (winners of the Orange Innovation Award in 2007).

This year in mobile has been an exciting one, but what the future will bring is even more exciting. In fact, the future is today: with so many possibilities open to developers to build cool services for iPhone, Nokia (S60), BlackBerry and soon Android, the future for mobile users looks great. And we will be making some great announcements soon.

Stay tuned!

]]> http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/29/one-year-later-the-future-of-mobile-looks-even-better/feed/ 2 http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/24/gravity-winner-strands-100k-call/ http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/24/gravity-winner-strands-100k-call/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:29:17 +0000 Strands http://blog.strands.com/?p=948 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

The seven members of the Jury were:

Strands Social Player, powered by Strands Social Recommender, has previously won Nokia’s Mobile Rules 2008 Award and the Orange Innovation Contest 2007.

Strands Social Player for BlackBerry will soon be released. We have existing versions for Nokia S60 3rd edition and S40 devices which can be downloaded here.

As you know, Strands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music,connect with people, and share your tastes with friends.

.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

]]> http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/21/blackberry-winner/feed/ 4 http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/16/100k-finalists-recsys/ http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/16/100k-finalists-recsys/#comments Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:06:53 +0000 Strands http://blog.strands.com/?p=920 We are very excited to announce the five finalists for the first edition of the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups.

As you know, Strands seeks to identify the best early-stage project in the area of recommendation technologies. Finalists are invited to present their projects during the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys08) this October 23rd to 25th, 2008 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Winner will be offered an investment of $100,000 from Strands, Inc.

A total of 68 scientists and entrepreneurs from 24 teams in 15 countries presented 26 projects. Countries included Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Romania, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey and the USA. Areas where the recommendation technologies were applied are: pharmaceutical industry, cosmetics, video content, online media content, people and relations, TV content, search, events, social enterprise, advertising, location based services, travel and food.

And here is the list of the five finalists. Good luck to you all in Switzerland, this is very exiting for all of us!!

IMPRESS – Instant Entertainment, by Gravity R&D

IMPRESS “magic button” provides TV viewers instant personalized entertainment at any given time with relevant program tips instantaneously on customer demand. It automatically schedules recordings with the highest probability on user’s interest.

Gravity R&D 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.

Team of 4: Domonkos Tikk, István Pilászy, Gábor Takács and Bottyán Németh. University: Budapest University of Technology. Hungary

SentiMetrix, Opinion-based Recommendations
SentiMetrix extracts and quantifies the huge and growing number of text-based opinions expressed through online media worldwide. SentiMetrix has automated sentiment extraction/analysis/scoring, the ability to find and quantify opinions in text.

SentiMetrix was founded in 2007 and it is based on the award-winning OASYS technology.

Team of 4: Patrick McBride, Vadim Kagan, V.S. Subrhamanian and Diego Reforgiato. University: University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Sciences, USA

iletken, Personally Relevant Content Based On Social Connections

Iletken, which means “Conductive” in Turkish, is a hybrid recommendation engine for services like news and RSS feeds. The core system of “Iletken” mimics the dynamics behind real life information dissemination to enable friends to share and conduct relevant information.

In contrast to traditional social networks, it maintains weighted graphs of social proximity among users for different categories of interest. Analyzing user behavior, Iletken dynamically updates its social graphs and uses this data to determine information conductivity among peer.

Team of 4: Murat Deniz Oktar, Baris Can Daylik, Firat Gelbal and Selcuk Atli. Universities: Koc University Istanbul, RPI New York and TU/e, Eindhoven.

Reccoon, location-based recommender

Taking advantage of the vast amount of GPS-enabled mobile devices, Reccoon helps people discover new places based on their input, current location and current time. It also adjusts recommendations to attention profile (e.g. Last.fm listening history). Reccoon responds to the simple question: what are my options for tonight?

Team of 2: Peter Tegelaar and Dominiek ter Heide. The Netherlands

Commendo – Drug Design Recommendation

Commendo uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry, including speeding up drug development and the minimization of adverse drug reactions.

Commendo was founded out of the project team “BigChaos”, which still participates very successfully in the Netflix Prize competition.

Team of 4: Andreas Töscher, Michael Jahrer, Georg Preßler and Michael Schrotter. Universities: Technical University Graz and University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, Austria

As you might remember, Strands has organized the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project (also see the announcement post), an opportunity for students to receive funding for open source development focused on the web based programming language “haXe“. Today, the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project has officially come to a close

Miguel Serrano Milano stepped up and became our first student project developer.  The main contribution for his project has been the development of a CLI .NET target for haXe.  Yes, that means that haXe can now target .NET platforms.  While the project is still missing some language features, and is in need of some optimization, Franco and I commend Miguel for his hard work and efforts towards implementing the base functionality.  Miguel has provided an overview of his work as a tutorial over at the haXe wiki.  Check it out if you’re interested in how haXe works to target other languages such as PHP, Actionscript, or CLI bytecode.

P.S. Danny Wilson (the other student participant) dropped out early because of a hectic summer work schedule, we still wish him the best of luck!

Get your iPhone and start playing here now!

We just started a community blog, community.strands.com, where we’ll talk about what’s new on Strands, the things we’re doing in our communities, and most importantly… you!

YourStrands is our new community show all about you, the cool stuff you share, the things you do in your communities, and what’s hot on Strands. We’ll also be having guest appearances, so give it a look!

Lastly, we’re hosting a series of informal townhall style events called Strandups. Take a minute, talk about what makes you you, and why your fans follow you online. Kind of like “speed friending”, but more friendly The first Strandup is tonight at Gnomedex ’08, and we hope to see you there.

Why?

Because Finland = Mobile. Around 92% of Finland’s population has a mobile phone, and it is home to the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile telephones, Nokia. We have a lot to do in Finland!

Drop us a line if you are visiting and want to meet, and check out our job openings in Helsinki:

• Senior Business Development Manager
• (Senior) Mobile User Experience / Interaction Designer

Drew is joining Strands as Community Manager / Evangelist, his job is to increase the number of Strands enthusiasts and to spread Strands awesomeness. Easy

For the entire Strands team and for me personally, this is very exciting. I’ve known Drew for almost a year since Marshall (thanks!) connected both of us, and I am convinced we will have a lot of fun while doing a great job. Very interesting times ahead for all of us… welcome to the team Drew!

What is new in the new Strands Social Player 3.2?:

• UI improvements
• Bug fixes
• Reduced application size
• Improved playlist management
• Support for English, Spanish and Finnish
• Auto check for future updates
• Help file
• Rebranding to Strands Social Player (from MyStrands Social Player)

As you know, the Strands Social Player, Nokia’s Mobile Rules! 2008 winning application, is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. Version 3.2 works with Nokia S60 3rd edition or S40 devices (optimized for most recent Nokia S40 devices), which brings the Strands Social Player not only to 10s of millions of smart phones but to the true mass market of 100s of millions of Java devices.

Powered by Strands Social Recommender, Strands Social Player provides artist and song recommendations from over 6 million songs, automatically shows cover art and fully integrates with a social network of music enthusiasts.

The “Who’s Listening” feature lets you discover like-minded people who are listening to the same songs you are playing. You can send messages, see the listening histories of your friends, and keep an ear on what’s hot.

Strands Social Player allows you to scrobble tracks to Last.fm as you play music on your Symbian S60 3rd Edition and J2ME (optimized for Nokia S40) devices. Recently listened tracks on your mobile device will now be available on your Last.fm profile.

Earlier versions of the Strands Social Player have won Nokia’s Mobile Rules 2008! Award as the Best Multimedia Application and have received great reviews by many users.

If you are a music / ring tone service provider and looking for a new distribution channel, Strands Social Player might be your new web & mobile community business generator. Get in touch with us!

We’d love to hear your feedback!

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

Well, we certainly think so. And this is precisely the topic of our next event Proactive Displays: Bridging the Gaps between Online Social Networks and Shared Physical Spaces, to be held at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona, next Friday June 27th.

The Strands innovation team in Seattle, lead by our Principal Instigator Joe McCarthy, works on developing technologies that bridge the gaps between the digital and physical world.

The focus is on creating large displays applications that can sense the people and activities taking place nearby and show content relating to those people, activities and place. Proactive displays enable people to share the richness of their online lives with others in physical contexts in which they feel – or want to feel – a sense of community and connection, bringing the benefits of virtual communities into the real world.

Some of the possibilities envisioned by science fiction movies are a bit disturbing (see this provocative picture from the film Minority Report). However, we believe that if users have total control to opt in – and out – from being exposed to things that might be relevant to them, these technologies can be friendly and useful.

We’ll leave for another post a description of some of the applications of these technologies, its evolution and challenges.

In the two weeks MyStrands WidSet has been available, more than 65,000 users have downloaded it!

WidSets is Nokia’s mobile widget platform, and is completely manufacturer and browser independent. Probably the biggest mobile widgeting platform in the world, it reaches more than 300 handset models and has over 6,000,000 users. As Nikolaj Nyholm wrote a while back, “WidSets is for the mobile what Netvibes is for the browser”.

How does this fit with the rest of our music services? MyStrands music experience is present in the complete triangle of Internet experiences:

1. Online service at http://mystrands.com and http://mystrands.TV.
2. Mobile with the MyStrands Social Player for Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile devices; MyStrands mobile website; and now also the MyStrands Widset
3. PC/Mac desktop applications with the Strands Tracker that works with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Songbird, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and Amarok.

All are integrated through our public APIs (OpenStrands), and your one MyStrands account is good for all these services. OpenStrands demonstrates the power and universal applicability of the Strands Recommender to the entire ecosystem.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to send us your feedback!

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

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.

As with any new beta site we needed your feedback, and yes we got it! And we thank you for that. Now it is our turn not only to improve in those areas where you all told us to do a better job, but also to work hard to bring new features to the service.

Rick Turoczy of SiliconFlorist wrote an excellent treatise on life-streaming and said I’m going to use it [Strands] because it gives my lifestream value—and it gives me more valuable resources through participation.

Portland-based Marshall Kirkpatrick also wrote a thoughtful post on ReadWriteWeb with very good feedback. What we probably most enjoyed was the reference to the hot posts: hotness is hotness – right now you can view what the hottest items are in your whole circle of friends, in a particular group of friends or in the lifestream of one particular friend.

Jason Harris, the Salem-based blogger who writes for GigaOm, also took the time to review Strands.com. He let readers in on how we will be adding the ability to build a “taste profile” based on your social media usage patterns.

Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian also covered the launch. He explained how the company’s technology will direct people to new things that fit their tastes, and take their taste profiles to other sites.

There is no doubt that the best part of our launch week was the meet-up we held with the Portland tech community. We had the opportunity to meet many interesting people, and the chance to hear their thoughts on Strands.com We thank everyone who attended the meet-up and has contributed their feedback: brampitoyo, TheInfovore, ahockley, turoczy, ThisKat, gwalter, xolotl, thattalldude and many, many others.

We are very excited to continue to hear all of your feedback on Strands. Keep the suggestions coming!

1.- Applying our social recommendation technologies on top of the lifestreams of users and their communities, to provide them with personalized recommendations of media content they might like, based on their behavior.

2.- Allowing data portability for taste information, enabling users to take their taste profiles with them to other sites.

When we are online, we generate at least two types of data. Digital assets such as list of friends, pictures, etc, that are normally the focus of the data portability community. And taste-related data, data which describes our preferences, our tastes. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like digital assets, and is the area where Strands is focused.

Without inventing new or proprietary technologies, we will identify and encapsulate taste-related data and enable the users who own it to take it with them. We will leverage into existing efforts including OpenID, OAuth, and APML-style representations for our relative preferences of all types and not just our attention preferences. Users will be able to take their taste profiles with them to other websites that are prepared to be taste profile consumers.

Strands.com will lead the way by aggregating users taste data from the sites and services they choose, and creating a portable taste profile out of it that users control and own.

We expect to roll out these two innovations in the near future, and really look forward to working with all of you to enable open taste sharing across the web. If you’re a website developer and you want to be part of the open taste sharing experience, please let us know.

As a first step towards this goal, we are opening up the Strands.com private today which currently includes:

1.- Filters and Hot Posts – Strands.com helps people cut through the noise of lifestream posts by providing filters, including date, content type, and groups created by the user. For example, you can find what videos your coworkers have favorited this week, or see only what music your partner has listened to today.

Personalized ‘Hot Posts’ highlight what’s popular with your friends, to help you discover new things that your friends have enjoyed.

2.- Granularity and Privacy Options – Strands.com allows you to control what you share with whom. For example, you can post a photo you liked, allowing only your closest friends to see it, while sharing your taste in music with all of your coworkers.

You also have granular control over what you follow from whom. For example, you can follow your friend but filter out his tweets.

3.- Strands Friend Tracker – this desktop application shows you real-time updates on the activities of your friends right on your desktop. It also records your activities – such as listening to songs in iTunes – and posts them to your lifestream.

We will be adding improvements and new features to Strands.com quickly as we move toward our vision of implementing personalized recommendations and open taste sharing.

“We argue that it’s in everyone’s best interest that the data be freed. Vendors have far more to gain by working to add value to freely flowing data than they do from trying to horde as much data as they can”.

We at Strands have already explained our vision of why we think not only users but also vendors will benefit from data portability, and why it is important for web personalization.

When we are online, we generate at least two types of data. Digital assets such as list of friends, pictures, etc, that are normally the focus of the data portability community. And taste-related data, data which describes our preferences, our tastes. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like digital assets, and is the area where Strands is focused.

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.

Strands is pleased to sponsor the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project, an opportunity for students to receive funding for open source development focused on the web based programming language “haXe “. More details are available on the labs announcement page . This project is supported by Strands, as well as members of the haXe community.

The project is led by Justin Donaldson and Franco Ponticelli. Justin is a PhD candidate at Indiana University in the School of Informatics. He focuses on Music Recommendation and Human Computer Interaction, and has been a research intern at Strands for the past few years. Franco Ponticelli is the author of the book “Professional haXe and Neko” and an active member of the haXe community. He is a free-lance programmer with a passion for Web Applications and in his free time he is currently developing haXe/PHP, a method of targeting PHP using the haXe language.

Why haXe?

The World Wide Web has evolved into a complex assortment of platforms and languages. These languages often are considered as implementing different “layers” of an interactive web experience: From the client side layer languages of javascript and actionscript, to the server side layer languages of php. The variety of languages and protocols has made it difficult to create “cohesive” web applications that share information seamlessly across all of the layers. As a developer of rich internet applications, Strands is interested in streamlining the development of its growing number of products and services. HaXe presents a very promising approach towards unifying web development in an efficient and open manner.

HaXe has grown at a steady pace since 2005 when it was first released. Since then, 20 official releases have been made (latest is 1.19) each bringing new features, fixes, and new possibilities. The developer community has an active mailing list (http://lists.motion-twin.com/mailman/listinfo/haxe ) and also uses the #haxe IRC channel. HaXe has an integrated repository of community sponsored packages called “haxelib” (http://lib.haxe.org/ ), which contains dozens of useful projects and extensions (DBI’s, GUI toolkits, etc.).

Why participate?

By participating in the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project, students will have the opportunity to discover a powerful development environment and to increase their experience working on projects that serve the greater community of open-source developers. With the continued support and interest of Strands and the haXe community, we are helping to make haXe an enterprise-ready, game-changing language for advanced interactive web development.

If you’re interested in learning more about haXe, you can find more information on its web page.

Or… if you’re a student and are interested in participating in our project, please check out the labs announcement page . Accepted student participants will be announced in the coming weeks.

Thanks,
Justin and Franco

The Boy Genius Report , The Symbian Core, Symbian Freak, Symbian in Motion, All About Symbian, Mashable, MoneyMaking expirience, Hinkmond Wong´s Weblog, ZDNet, Nokiaapps.org, Profy, Imserba.com, Enrique Dans, Gizmóvil, Celularis, El Winux

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.

We have just released version 3.1  Strands Social Player (powered by Strands Social Recommender) which allows you to scrobble tracks to Last.fm as you play music on your Symbian S60 3rd Edition and J2ME (optimized for Nokia S40) devices (download for S60 devices here and for S40 devices here). Recently listened tracks on your mobile device will now be available on your Last.fm profile.

The Strands Social Player, Nokia’s Mobile Rules! 2008 winning application, is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. Version 3.1 works with Nokia S60 3rd edition or S40 devices (optimized for most recent Nokia S40 devices), which brings the Strands Social Player not only to 10s of millions of smart phones but to the true mass market of 100s of millions of Java devices.

Powered by Strands’ Recommender, Strands Social Player provides artist and song recommendations from over 6 million songs, automatically shows cover art and fully integrates with a social network of music enthusiasts.

The “Who’s Listening” feature lets you discover like-minded people who are listening to the same songs you are playing. You can send messages, see the listening histories of your friends, and keep an ear on what’s hot.

Also, the new version comes with a completely overhauled UI.

Earlier versions of the MyStrands Social Player have won Nokia’s Mobile Rules 2008! Award as the Best Multimedia Application and have received great reviews by many users.

If you are a music / ring tone service provider and looking for a new distribution channel, Social Player might be your new web & mobile community business generator. Get in touch with us!

We’d love to hear your feedback!

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.

Fifteen years or so into the evolution of the web, we already have many of the key ideas and technologies in place to start describing and sharing personal preference information — or what we might colloquially call “taste” — in order to personalize web experiences.

So, why haven’t we seen widespread adoption of web personalization? Much of the answer seems to lie in the fact that user expectations and online business models haven’t yet evolved to the point that user-controlled, ‘open taste’ sharing is a viable option.

However, the dataportability.org initiative suggests we may have reached a turning point. The DataPortability project taps into the strong conviction engendered by the do-it-yourself nature of the web 2.0 movement that individuals should “have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it”. This extends to an inherent belief that that it has not been a lack of effective technology that has held back this new culture of open data sharing, but rather, business models that have been over-reliant on laying a proprietary claim to some portion of that data.

Taste sharing is a DataPortability use case
We express our online tastes anytime we make a choice between the various alternatives available to us. Some of our choices may be characterized by the number of times we select each option, for example the number of songs of each genre we play when we select music, when repeatedly confronted with the same choice. Other choices may be expressed subjectively, such as by assigning one to five stars to movies we watch when we are asked to rate our preferences for the different alternatives. In yet other cases, we may in effect be giving estimates for the number of times we would expect to select each alternative, such as when we are asked if we are likely to buy a product or vote for something. Virtually any online experience we have includes one or more instances in which we make conscious choices reflecting our preferences.

For the more theoretically inclined amongst us, we can view a choice as somewhat analogous to a random experiment and our relative preferences as measures of the different possible outcomes of the experiment. The collection of such experiments that we participate in as a matter of course in our web experiences paints a vivid picture of our taste. For the more pragmatic, each time we make choices, we generate data which empirically describes our preferences. This is data that can be encapsulated and shared just like any other picture, blog post, video, or other piece of online content that we create, and which the DataPortability is focused on.

Just a few ideas for open taste sharing
As a DataPortability use case, open taste sharing embodies and embraces the culture shift that the Web 2.0 movement represents. With regard to data ownership, the DataPortability concept has even more succinct expression: our tastes should be ours to share – or not. This puts the user in control of their online experience, so they can set the boundaries of how much they want to share, and with whom. Similarly, there is no need to invent new or proprietary technologies to simply identify, encapsulate, and share taste-related data. A little thought by websites about how to identify and summarize our relative preferences on their site, along with OpenID, OAuth, and a little task-specific XML for markup is enough to do the job. Clearly this kind of data sharing also raises new privacy concerns that will be part of the work-in-progress for the entire DataPortability project.

Perhaps the most interesting challenge lies in educating businesses to thoroughly and thoughtfully examine their current ideas about user data, so they can better understand and enthusiastically embrace The Web 2.0 Golden Rule: “Do for other web experiences providers as they would do for you — under our control as the owners of our taste data — and the blessings of networks effects for taste data shall be yours.

The round was led by venture capital firm, Asset Management Company, and two strategic investors: Peacock Equity, the joint venture between GE and NBC Universal, and Telefónica Capital S.A.U.

Other players in the same market include Aggregate Knowledge ($25M raised), ChoiceStream ($13.1M in Series B), Criteo (€10M), recently acquired CleverSet (sold for $10M) and of course Strands ($55M raised).

We will write about it more over the next few days but we wanted to share the slides with you first.

| View | Upload your own

Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist, MyStrands

Click here to view the embedded video.

See Mobile Rules! Award 2008 press release here.

Strands Social Player (download here) 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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

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

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 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.

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!

…it easily had the highest concentration of mobile startup representatives per square meter in the world…

Nice!

Thanks to Jane and Rudy for the photos.

The announcement took place both in Barcelona and Madrid. On the morning of the 9th, we held a press conference at the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid.

During the afternoon, at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) in Barcelona, there was a public presentation of the project and a round table. With Maite as master of ceremony, the speakers at the event were Alvy, Francesc Godia y Francesc Esteva, Javier, Luis Calvo, Ramón, Revolver, Thomas and of course Francisco.

During the evening and very late into the night we went to celebrate at Café Belgrado with friends and family, along with two amazing bands: Second and Lluis‘ band Distant Voices.

Three years already and strongly committed to the same mission: help people discover new things.

Thanks to Alvy, Cristi, etc for letting us borrow their photos .

Sramana Mitra has also covered the topic several times, and she recently described Web 3.0 as a summation of context, community, commerce, content, vertical search and personalization. In the end, new brands able to build deep, rich, highly personalized Web 3.0 user experiences would become Google’s real competition.

Here at MyStrands we obviously believe that the future of the web is personalization. And there is more… this is a slide where we’ve talked about some “Web 3.0″ trends as we see them.

There are already approximately 250 people subscribed to the wiki. To confirm your attendance, simply add your name to the Who? list here. We hope to see you there!!

And don’t forget to check out the Mobile Jam Session on Tuesday and the MyStrands GoMo News Blender on Wednesday, also during the week of the Mobile World Congress .

As computing technologies move beyond the desktop and into the other spaces that we inhabit, new possibilities are emerging for tools that can help us connect with the kindred spirits around us, says Joe. He thinks we all could take advantage of more opportunities to share valuable insights and experiences with others. He looks for innovative ways for technology to develop and improve interpersonal relationships.

Joe received a a doctorate in computer science from the University of Massachusetts and a master’s degree in computer science from Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has held the position of research project leader with frontrunners in technology, including Intel Research and Accenture Technology Labs.

Joe’s most recent instigation at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto was the design, development and deployment of a new generation of proactive displays – large computer displays that can sense people in their physical proximity (via their Bluetooth phones) and respond by showing digital content relating to those people (e.g., photos from their Flickr accounts, if they’ve chosen to share them). He currently enjoys additional roles as husband, father, wine aficionado and blogger.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Exactly!

Scott joins MyStrands as VP, Enterprise Sales. He is a veteran executive with early stage companies with deep enterprise sales, business development and channel sales experience.

Other players in the same market include Aggregate Knowledge ($25M raised), ChoiceStream ($13.1M in Series B), recently funded Criteo (€10M) and of course MyStrands ($55M raised).

We wish CleverSet’s founder Bruce D’Ambrosio and the entire team the best for the future, and look forward to creative collaborations again this summer.

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.

On February 12th, Mobile Jam Session will connect mobile developers to industry leaders with an open agenda that will inspire exciting new ideas and innovate solutions within the mobile ecosystem.

Hosted by MyStrands in our Barcelona office and coinciding with Mobile World Congress (fka 3GSM) Mobile Jam Session has been organized by Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) and Rudy De Waele of dotopen / mTrends.

We will kick off by opening up the mobile ecosystem and connect experienced and talented developers with industry experts and decision makers. It’s no secret that the industry needs the emerging companies to lead with innovation, to leverage resources and to help change the game.

Most importantly this event is driven by developers – what you want to hear, who you want to talk to, what you want to say… But of course, we want to hear from the big companies and experts too – so what’s the hot topic for you?

See you there!

Work hard, play hard, be a part of it all… Join the team!

Not only do they have the visual beauty of Barcelona but Freddie Mercury even wrote an album entitled “Barcelona” in honor of the 1992 Summer Olympics. Recorded by Mercury and operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé, some opera fans thought the music was too pop influenced; similarly, some rock fans found it to be far too operatic. In any case, it is a great song.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Fantastic re-cap at OpenID.net
• Flickr photos
• OpenIDDevCamp Sessions re-cap
• OpenID Mobile Experience
• Twitter chatter about OpenIDDevCamp

MyStrands and GoMo News would be delighted to welcome you to a blender at Mobile World Congress (fka 3GSM).

The event targets GoMo readers and anyone interested in recommendation, personalisation…

It will be held on Wednesday 13th February from 6pm (to about 10pm) at BelChica (Villarroel 60) Metro L1 (between Gran Via and Diputacio. It’s only a ten minute walk from the Congress. BelChica is a funky Spanish bar that serves top quality Belgian Beer, and the drinks are being sponsored by MyStrands.

We hope to see you there – to guarantee entry please sign-up on Facebook, comment or email.

Watch a video of that night:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A total of 470 people joined partyStrands to interact and sent 2,450 messages during the two hours partyStrands was running (in intervals of 30 minutes). Over 1,000 of the interactions were text messages displayed on the screen, that could also be seen in real-time at MyStrands website or mobile website.

The rest of the interactions were responses to polls or people selecting music videos. We also had to activate the system to filter out messages that included swears (yes, creating that list was fun ) and messages which included first+last names.

One of the polls asked people to “Go Green in 2008!” and we were happy to learn that recycling was their choice.

“Go Green in 2008! How will you?”
a) recycle
b) drive a hybrid car
c) use biodegradable cleaners
d) eat organic food

The session ended with partygoers choosing Paramore’s crushcrushcrush music video over Lupe Fiasco’s Superstar and Fergie’s Clumsy.

All in all, it was a great event for partyStrands, MTV and everyone in Times Square. This event and others clearly demonstrate that interactivity is becoming part of everyday life in this connected society. Yes, event promoters and nightclubs out there, people are now connected even when they are not in front of their laptop. Why should we expect this connected generation to party the same way their parents did 15 years ago?

Check out some more photos in our Flickr page.

Brought to you by Marc and Rich.

People in Times Square will be able to use their cell phones to send messages, vote to choose music videos and answer trivia questions on MTV’s 44 ½ giant HD screen in front of the MTV Studios.

People who aren’t able to make the New Year’s bash, can follow the party from home and even interact with the people in Time’s Square by logging onto www.mystrands.com/mtv.

Join us and bring in the New Year with partyStrands and MTV.

Ho, ho, ho!

The MyStrands team

1. Explain briefly the outline of your service and what it hopes to achieve.
The Artistnet Interactive Visualization (see video) generates a network model from our user’s play activity. This is a very similar process to what we do “behind the scenes” with our recommender engine, although on a much, much smaller scale. However, even in this limited version you can often see how individuals relate to each other through their shared music tastes. The network visualization makes this apparent when two people’s “strands” of artists become connected. Most likely, those two people have something in common with their musical tastes, and may find something new and interesting in each other’s recent music listening history.

2. What do you think music visualization services bring to the table over other recommendation services?
Music visualization services represent recommendation information in a much higher level of detail. They expose recommendation as a “field of possibilities” instead of a simple ordinal list of results. Other MyStrands visualizations (such as recommendation mapping) seek to do just this. Exposing the relationships between the artists, songs, or albums in this fashion can help an individual come to a better understanding of how the artists, songs, and albums relate to one another in a broader cultural sense.

3. How are they of benefit to consumers and music users?
They benefit consumers and music users in the sense that they offer a richer portrait of the music possibilities available at any given time. People that are passionate about music are then able to explore their options in a more involved way.

4. How important are visuals to users experience of music in an age where cover art has been cast aside in the digital realm?
Cover art is not “completely” dead. It is experiencing a rebirth of sorts in the form of small thumbnail images (such as the “coverflow” visualization in iTunes). There is no doubt in my mind that the resolution and multimedia aspects of “album art” will continue to increase well beyond its current primitive state, and will once again become a significant component to a musical offering. With high definition televisions and sound systems at reasonable prices, the time is ripe for a multimedia “convergence” of sorts which will most likely kick off with music. In a sense, this is already happening with music videos. In fact, the most popular videos right now on youtube are often music videos, and MyStrands has just started providing recommendation for these videos with MyStrands.TV.

5. Where do you see these kind of services going in the future?
I think we as consumers will have a heightened awareness of our digital entertainment options. Eventually, recommendation service users will split into two camps: Those who want “push” recommendation, similar to conventional advertising where options are provided to them in a straightforward manner; and those who want “pull” recommendations, where an individual can explore the world of media possibilities relevant to them, and eventually play an active role in spreading new media that they enjoy. This sort of behavior already exists through informal social interaction (“Hey, did you hear about this new band?”…etc). However, recommendation systems will seek to automate and optimize it for everyone: listeners, artists, labels, studios, and venues. It’s gonna rock.

No, the headline on this entry is not a careless grammatical error. Nor is the question really “What is the recommender market?” That implies that “recommenders” are mature, well-defined technologies that deliver specific features and value to the online world. Emerging recommendation technologies are currently setting the standards for discovery and personalization in today’s social networking-dominated web 2.0 environment, and the future of online social networking is all about discovery and personalization. While search engines help you find things you know you are looking for, discovery helps you find the rest.

If we accept that every business must make its case in 10 to 20 seconds on its Web site, then we are all but forced to admit that recommenders, more than anything else, represent the conceptual answer to the question: “How can I get that visitor/user/customer to realize that I offer something of value to him or her?”

Although venture capitalists and Web 2.0 users may find that claim to be just the tiresome excuse they need for hitting the “Back” button, the point is that a good argument can be made that unlike search engines, the idea of recommenders is a formal concept that has as many different concrete examples as there are separate market applications. The recommender industry really is the business of pulling three components together into a system that helps a user-driven business convince their potential customers that they should stay for a while. These three elements include:

1) An effective model that relates the needs visitors have to what the business offers.

2) Quality data to build a model instance that relates specific needs to specific offerings.

3) Unobtrusive means for easily and quickly determining an individual user’s needs.

Note that these three components are not quite as simple as “good (statistical) algorithms,” “a lot of data,” or “simple user interfaces.” In the coming years, defining an effective model will increasingly involve a scientific approach to understanding user needs and the market strategy of the business. Gathering quality data will require more sophisticated understanding of which data is actually relevant to the model. Devising means for characterizing an individual user’s needs will depend on a refined understanding of how people implicitly and explicitly signal needs that they themselves may not even fully understand.

In short, the recommender industry is the evolving business of building and deploying systems that reify some of the psychology of human economic transactions. What this means for the marketplace seems relatively clear: 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 (e.g. “You asked for this, and based on similar queries/behavior by others, you might be looking for this.”). 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.

Beyond that, some general themes about the future of the recommender industry that seem to be worth watching for include:

Multiple revenue models: Unlike search engines, which primarily are monetized through contextual ads of some form, recommender systems will be monetized in multiple ways. Recommender technology suppliers will continue to partner with customer businesses to derive revenue as a share of explicit sales increases directly accredited to the recommender system. In the longer term, recommender technology will increasingly enable business models, including advertising schemes, which could not exist without it. An implicit valuation for a specific application of a recommender system will be derived from the enabled economic activity.

Increasing focus on how users require change over time: In that recommender systems reify aspects of the psychology of economic transactions, there is an increasing appreciation for the probable value of responding to how economic behavior changes over time. This includes how an individual’s needs change over time and how the needs of the community evolve. The former can, in part, be accommodated by simply taking care to build a recommender system instance using data that is an adequate sampling of individuals whose needs are changing. Adapting to the latter may also require recommender system models that explicitly incorporate features of how community needs to evolve.

New concepts of personalization: One of the recent trends in personalization is using information about an individual’s social network to better characterize that individual’s needs and interests. This may be just one aspect of a new concept of personalization that puts the focus not on delivering an isolating, customized experience to a person, but rather on connecting an individual with affinity communities who can provide information of value to that individual. Few people really want to be out there all alone. And for those explorers who do, they might, in reality, be hoping to build a community of like-minded souls or be waiting for others to catch up with them.

More than anything, the future of the recommender industry is a business that will continue to grow and become more sophisticated as the science of recommenders greatly develops and to increasingly encompasses computer science, psychology, economics and cognitive science.

New York Times, ReadWriteWeb, Digital Music News, Red Herring, Business Journal, Enrique Dans, Primate Blog

En Español aquí

We are very excited to announce that MyStrands has secured $24 million in its Series B2 round of funding. Spanish bank BBVA led the funding along with existing investor Debaeque. As you know, the last round of funding closed in June at $25 million, bringing the total capital raised to date to $55 million.

What is the value of MyStrands?

In the past four years, MyStrands has developed a scalable Personalized Discovery Platform and a Social Recommender Engine. The Social Recommender Engine provides real-time personalized recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-connected devices; and takes into account that taste is context-sensitive and evolves over time.

These developments have already resulted in sales of $12 million during 2007.

Why more money?

The future of the Web is personalization and we are committed to leading it. These new funds will allow us to go one step further, enabling us to grow to the next level of product development, always respecting our core proposition: help people discover new things.

Why BBVA?

They endorse our vision and realize that summarizing and understanding people’s preferences will allow us to deliver relevant content to people, wherever they are.

What is BBVA?

BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion.

The BBVA Group maintains a leadership position in Spain, Mexico, and Latin America, and has started a growth and diversification strategy in Asia and the United States, where it recently bought Compass for approximately $9.6 billion.

We are Growing, Hiring!

This is the perfect moment to repeat it: we are hiring! We are bringing the best developers all over the world to come and join our team of 90 people. We are headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon, but you can join our teams in other cities. In the US: San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and Seattle (upcoming). International: Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza in Spain; Helsinki in Finland or Sao Paulo in Brazil.

For English click here.

Nos alegra anunciar que MyStrands ha atraído 24 millones de dólares en financiación. El BBVA es el inversor de referencia en esta ronda y el actual inversor Debaeque también ha participado. Como sabéis, MyStrands cerró una ronda de financiación con Antonio Asensio hace 5 meses, y la inversión total en MyStrands hasta ahora asciende a los 55 millones de dólares.

¿Cuál es el valor de MyStrands?
Durante los últimos cuatro años hemos desarrollado una plataforma de descubrimiento personalizado y un motor de recomendación social, capaz de ofrecer en tiempo real recomendaciones personalizadas de diferentes productos y servicios a través del ordenador, el teléfono móvil y otros dispositivos conectados a Internet. El recomendador entiende que el gusto de las personas evoluciona a lo largo del tiempo y puede depender del contexto.

Estos desarrollos se han concretado en unas ventas de 12 millones de dólares durante 2007.

¿Por qué más dinero?
El futuro de la Web es la personalización y estamos comprometidos a liderarlo. Esta nueva financiación nos permite pasar al siguiente nivel en el desarrollo de productos, respetando siempre nuestra misión: ayudar a la gente a descubrir nuevas cosas.

¿Por qué BBVA?
El BBVA respalda nuestra visión, y entiende que compilar y comprender los gustos de la gente nos permite ofrecerles contenido que les pueda gustar.

¿Qué es el BBVA?
El BBVA es un grupo de servicios financieros con más de 782 billones de dólares en activos, 42 millones de clientes en 40 países y una capitalización de mercado de aproximadamente 94 billones de dólares.

El Grupo BBVA mantiene la posición de liderazgo en España, México y América Latina y ha iniciado una estrategia de expansión y diversificación en Asia y en los EE.UU., donde ha comprado recientemente Compass por aproximadamente 9,6 billones de dólares.

¡Estamos creciendo!
Este es el momento perfecto para repetir que estamos creciendo! Estamos atrayendo a los mejores desarrolladores del mundo para que se unan a nuestro equipo de 90 personas. Nuestra sede está en Corvallis, Oregon, pero también estamos ampliando los equipos en otras ciudades (San Francisco, Nueva York, Washington DC y -pronto- Seattle, en EE.UU.; Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia y Zaragoza en España; Helsinki en Finlandia y Sao Paulo en Brasil).

Peyman has been a MyStrands strategic advisor for the last four years, and will now be joining the Innovation team as Principal Scientist, developing the Economic Analysis and Strategic Architectures. He will support technology and business teams with strategic innovation decisions and applications. Peyman joins the city that never sleeps (NYC), where he will also not likely get much sleep either.

Dr. Peyman Faratin has been an active researcher in Computer Science and Business Schools for the past twenty years, with specialization in technologies and architectures, economics and regulation of converged IP (layer 3) and Internet application (layer 7) networks and services. Prior to joining MyStrands, he worked for eight years as a research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab (at the Advanced Network Architectures group), developing intelligent AI and market mechanisms for management and provisioning of IP and 802.11 networks, as well as building economic models of Internet’s IP and (P2P-propriety) overlay infrastructures.

Dr. Faratin has over fifty publications in international peer reviewed journals, conferences and workshops and has regularly served on governmental and academic panels and committees on technology and economics and holds a number of patents. He is currently an affiliate of MIT’s Advanced Network Architectures group at CSAIL, Internet and Telecommunication Convergence (ITC) and Communication Futures Program (CFP) consortia at MIT. Dr. Faratin is a member of ACM SIGCOMM and SIGART. He holds a Ph.D. in EECS from London University.

Welcome to the team Peyman!

Nice job Jane!

Jadam has most recently been running RocketSurgeon - an experience design firm with a focus on digital media – where his clients included Universal Music, Apple Computer, Hitmaker, Steveland Films, Sikora Films, and many others. He also is a thought-leader in the “music 2.0″ space where he analyzes products and trends in the Rocketsurgeon Music 2.0 Blog and Directory.

Prior to running his own firm, Jadam worked as the Manager of User Experience for Music Now which was eventually purchased by AOL. While there he participated in building what was often reviewed as the leading-edge subscription service in terms of user experience and community features as well as doing some work on the Winamp media player.

Jadam studied neurobiology at Cornell University, and received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he concentrated on visual communication and art and technology.

We are very excited to have Jadam on the team – even if he is all the way out there in Chicago.

MobileMonday is a community of mobile professionals. The open community promotes the mobile industry and fosters cooperation and networking among industry people and their companies by providing opportunities for personal and virtual contacts.

Next November 12th event will cover experiences from the UK Mobile Market. The UK has one of the most active emerging markets in next generation mobile data services, together with France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

So, what would 10k Brazilians do with their phones at a party? They would party. They will party.

Yes, this Saturday 10,000 people are expected at Planeta Terra Festival 07 (Plannet Earth) in Sao Paulo, an explosive festival combining local and international bands and DJs, attractions, contests and more.

If you are lucky enough to attend, the organizers are asking that you take your mobile phone with you. Why is that? partyStrands will be there!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yesterday, Nokia hosted its annual Mobile Mash-Up event here in Palo Alto. Nokia’s CTO Tero Ojanperä kicked off the event with his fireside chat session, where he emphasized Nokia’s full commitment to creating a vibrant ecosystem of application and service providers on its platforms and devices. The rest of the event was testament to that indeed with a lineup of 13 startups (including MyStrands) all doing groundbreaking work in mobile applications arena. The applications presented covered an impressive range from stress management games that react to signals coming from a physical sensor that the user applies his/her thumb on to avatars that mimic the user’s facial impressions.

On behalf of MyStrands, I showcased our award-winning MyStrands Social Player, which combines media management functionality with community oriented taste sharing use cases such as “What music are my friends listening to?”. In alignment with the growing consensus that successful Mobile 2.0 applications should create synergies with web and desktop use cases MyStrands Social Player’s integrated capabilities that leverage its users’ online profiles and music listening habits on their PCs was very well received.

IMO Nokia has come a long way in walking the talk when it comes to having a more user centric model instead of an operator centric one. Given the fact that millions of Nokia devices are sold worldwide untethered to any given operator there is good reason to believe user adoption of 3rd party applications can accelerate as more advanced and viral functionality are introduced with the handsets. The N series and especially N95 has packed together a powerful set of those capabilities already but the price points are still out of reach for a larger portion of the demographics. At this stage I expect the early adopters to take the lead and be the ultimate judge as to what applications add value to their life and which ones are really worth raving to those friends that are left in the 20th century when it comes to mobile entertainment and productivity savvy. Without a doubt, the race has just begun!

Atakan Cetinsoy, VP Business Products, MyStrands

We’ll move into our permanent office space in the same building early next year but till then the team welcomes you to MyStrands NYC on 350 Broadway.

With this offering, Motorola wants to demonstrate how easy it is for consumers to enhance their wireless experience with the addition of advanced applications that match their personality and lifestyle.

Find the MyStrands Social Player as part of My Q Packs in the Fun Seeker bundle and enjoy! More information here.

Nice job Bryan!

Phones should be open to anything… is the new marketing campaign Nokia is running that features some cool applications, such as MyStrands Social Player, YouTube, the GPS… Click here to see the demo (and click on MyStrands within the demo to see entire campaign).

Women came from as far as New York City. Attendees ran a full spectrum of ages and interests which made the “Un” in the conference so amazing. There were so many topics to choose from such as video blogging and live stream, public speaking, or just how to say NO.

I had such a great time meeting these amazing women. The power in numbers was felt there. You can see for yourself in the She’s Geeky video…

Click here to view the embedded video.

And some cool photos here.

Stephanie X, VideoGeek

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

Just click the link to open a new tab/window and enjoy the show. For artists, we will launch you into a virtually endless stream of their music videos, interviews and coverage from their live shows. For users, we create the channel based on content they listen to, like, and have not yet discovered yet but we think they will be into. Listen to yours, or listen to someone else’s! Want to know what I’m into, just check it out:

http://www.mystrands.com/musick_in_the_head

Now so simple even my mother could do it!

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 She’s Geeky (un)conference will provide an agenda-free and friendly environment for women who not only care about building technology that is useful for people, but who also want to encourage more women to get involved. It is designed to provide women who self-identify as geeky and who are engaged in various technology-focused disciplines with a gathering space in which they can exchange skills and discuss ideas and form community across and within disciplines.

And another cool thing: we are providing 3 travel/scholarship sponsorships for the event. More info here.

We hope to see you there, let us know if you are attending.

As for my panel we had a distinguished list that made it interesting despite being the closing panel:

• Daniel Appelquist, Vodafone (Moderator)
• Kaj “HeGe” Haggman, Nokia
• Peter Stark, Sony Ericsson
• Daniel Graf, Kyte.TV
• Atakan Cetinsoy, MyStrands

My main argument was that the tipping point for a true Mobile 2.0 experience will have to be driven by intense personalization. By that I mean the kind of personalization that will make data services indispensable part of the consumer’s lives instead of a nice to have, which is what it is to me in its current form – and a rather expensive one at that if I may say.

The personalized mobile computing devices of the future will be collecting many relevant, implicit user behavioral data and store a subset of it on the device itself but more importantly will update a richer profile on the network to maintain a memory of user history. This in turn can give way to a variety of “must have” personalization experiences going forward. This smart layer and the set of analytics tools that will manipulate it is almost completely missing at this time. While corporations all around the globe are spending billions on market research that gets old fast and billions on enterprise software projects with long implementation cycles and results that on average under deliver the promises made at inception, marketers and advertisers will be quick to realize the paradigm shift if an only if consumer behavior can be analyzed and presented near real time in a meaningful manner.

One of the audience members correctly mentioned how scary an idea this may be to the consumer if privacy issues are not properly addressed. I am a true believer in letting the user/consumer drive their permissions and privacy settings and with few exceptions I believe they should have fully transparent access to their profile info. I think this issue will be paramount in negotiating the new rules of customer contact in the world of Mobile Social Computing with no easy answers unfortunately. It is not too late at all though to set the ground rules and steal a page from the developments in the web world.

Next year try to make it to the City by the Bay for the 3rd annual Mobile 2.o and we’ll continue to slice and dice these hot topics armed with a year’s worth of stats, facts, rumors and flops!

Atakan Cetinsoy, VP Business Products, MyStrands

Prior to joining MyStrands, Oliver served more than 6 years with Nokia, where he held several positions including leading the development of the OMA DRM 1.0 and 2.0 standards, technical product manager for mobile music application and manager of new business and licensing as a member of the team developing the Nokia Music Service.

Oliver studied at The University of Siegen, Germany and The University of Tulsa, OK, U.S., where he held a research assistantship with The Center for Information Security. He holds an M.S. degree in computer science and is the author and co-author of several conference publications. He is a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation.

It is a pleasure for us having Oliver on board. BTW, he will be based in Helsinki, drop him an email at bremer at mystrands dot com if you are around!

On Monday the 15th Atakan Cetinsoy participates in Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco, in the panel Disruptive or New Business Models. The Mobile 2.0 conference brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, mobile application developers, and web technologists.

That same day, while Noyda Matos and Albert De Reina attend the Widget Summitt, Scott Kveton will be at the API Conference.

On the other side of the Atlantic, our mobile guru Oliver Bremer will be at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, giving a keynote on Building content-focused social networks to attract and retain subscribers.

And finally, on October 19th and 20th, part of the team (Francisco, Jim, Jason and Justin) will attend the ACM Recommender Systems 2007 Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. This conference brings together research and practice to explore the latest innovations, discuss important challenges, and advance our understanding of recommender systems.

We are specially proud of this event, that builds on last year’s Recommenders06 organized by MyStrands. Francisco is chairing the Industry Committee and Jason will participate in the panel Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase value of recommenders?

We hope to see you at these events, let us know if you are attending any of them.

The old days when traditional gatekeepers programmed content for the mass-market are gone. Technology is shaking up the “chain of command” across popular culture. In the case of music, more and more consumers are looking at each other (friends, mavens, people they don’t even know…) to discover new songs and guide their tastes.

We have already talked about our approach for helping people discover things through other people’s tastes. Now we want to share further insight on how this process works.

Using OpenStrands (our public APIs), MyStrands’ researcher and PhD Candidate Justin Donaldson has developed a visualization technique (Artist Network Visualization) that shows in real-time how people correlate artists with other artists by listening to songs from their personal libraries. Strands of related artists will form from individual user’s listening histories. Eventually, these strands will connect, establishing the artist as a “hub” of shared musical information between the two users.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The visualization serves as a sort of primitive recommendation system as well. If you see an artist you recognize and enjoy, see who they’re connected to. You may just happen to see a new artist or track that you don’t recognize, and there’s a good chance that they’ll be worth a listen as well. MyStrands captures these opportunities in far more detail in our recommendation engine, enabling our community to explore artists, users, albums and many other items with equal ease. All these relationships form our “matrix of associations” which establishes a “ground truth” for how we at MyStrands understand the world of media content.

Try out Artist Network Visualization now!

partyStrands is heating up in the nightclub and bar scene, so stay tuned for more parties, events and more from the p-Strands crew.

This week MyStrands was very pleased to provide a video presentation to be used for a keynote address opening the SIRTEL 2007 (Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning) workshop. This workshop was held In conjuction with the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL’07) in Crete, Greece.

While MyStrands’ presenters Jim Shur and Rick Hangartner sat a stone’s throw from the foothills of Oregon’s coastal range, the workshop attendees were 10,448 kilometers away watching and discussing with them the video and its implications over Internet Chat. Thanks to Riina Vuorikari and all the SIRTEL organizers and participants for inviting us!

Click here to view the embedded video.

(We have uploaded the video to YouTube in four pieces (one, two, three, four), as we cannot upload the entire file at once. The entire video can be downloaded from here).

Abstract
Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) represents an interesting new application domain for Social Recommender Technology (SRT). Many, and perhaps most, successful applications of SRT to date have involved recommending media items and consumer goods. For these domains, the knowledge base for the recommender embodies relatively superficial preference semantics, derived as relatively simple statistics from implicit or explicit preference data. It seems the recommendation tasks in many TEL applications will benefit from, if not require, knowledge bases that embody deeper semantics than just statistically evaluated preferences. This talk explores this issue of the role of semantics in SRT recommenders for TEL applications. We propose that the science of how people learn can guide us in building knowledges bases for SRTs applied to TEL, and for that reason TEL applications might be viewed as an evolutionary step for SRTs that places a new emphasis on the science of making useful recommendations.

This image is a way of visualizing a subset of UMA, our Ultimate Matrix of Associations.

Get ready to spend hours and hours in front of your computer. At MyStrands.TV you can watch an endless number of personalized videos with the simple click of a button – and easily share them with your friends. You can also watch Artist Channels, Genre Channels, and even User Channels. Yes, that’s right… you can watch channels that have been personalized for – and by – your friends, family, influencers and anyone else you come across.

Whether you have been lucky enough to attend concerts by artists like The Allman Brothers Band or you are among the millions of Avril Lavigne music video fans, or anything in between… MyStrands.TV has them and many other artists as well.

You can create an “Avril Lavigne-only channel” or you can build a channel of music videos and concerts of artists similar to Avril Lavigne. Or you can just ask MyStrands.TV to give you videos based on what you listen to. It’s up to you.

Features:

If you already have a MyStrands account then you just log into MyStrands.TV and start enjoying a music channel of music videos and concerts that are personalized specifically for you. Want to veer off course a little? Great, under the video player there is a selection that will help you select the next song in the playlist to be either: 1) From a Similar Artist, 2) From the Same Artist, or 3) From a Different (non-similar) Artist that we think you may also like. Away you go.

While you’re listening, bookmark your favorite videos or check out other people that have recently listened to the artist. Jump over to another recommended artist or recommended channel. It’s up to you… use it as an interactive video channel or just let it run in the background like radio.

If you don’t have a MyStrands account, and want to just try out MyStrands.TV before deciding whether to sign up, just type in the name of an artist and we’ll build a custom music video channel for you.

MyStrands.TV is powered by OpenStrands, MyStrands Public APIs and YouTube.

Enjoy!

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.

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.

Jason has spent the past 15 years engaged in virtually all links of the digital media value chain – from consumer services to consumer hardware to development tools to semiconductors.

His background includes extensive experience in product management, product marketing, brand marketing, strategy and market development. Most recently Jason served as the Director of Music Products at AOL – which included the AOL Music, AOL Radio, Music Now, Winamp and SHOUTcast properties.

It is a pleasure for us having Jason on board.

The 2nd Edition of the New Faces of partyStrands contest will take place tomorrow Friday August 10th at Rock ‘N’ Rodeo in Eugene. Stay tuned for the winners!

Thanks to our great partners Taboo and Rock ‘N’ Rodeo, Sunsational Tanning Salon and 104.7 KDUK. More to come soon!

Gary Geller joins as the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, while Scott Lehr joins as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. This duo, which has been working together for the last decade, has a sales and development history that is not only remarkable but an incredible asset for MyStrands to acquire.

Gary Geller

Scott Lehr

Gary joined Muze Inc., the leading provider of Media Information and Digital Services, as one of its first employees in 1992. Gary facilitated an increase in the company’s revenue base from the low-six figures to 10s of Millions in revenue. He was responsible for securing, developing and managing Muze’s major accounts including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, Best Buy, Trans World Entertainment, Yahoo!, Wal-Mart, Netflix and many others. As a Senior Vice President, Geller was instrumental in the development and expansion of the company from a simple data provider to a technology and service partner.

Scott spent the last 11 years with Muze Inc. In his most recent position as Vice President of Corporate Development, he created critical strategic relationships with Fox Interactive Media and Nielsen Business Media’s properties including Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter. He also played a key role in developing strategies for expanding the company’s business in Europe and Asia. As Vice President of Sales & Business Development at Muze, Scott helped develop business models and go-to-market strategies for the company’s media information licensing business and negotiated deals with global brands such as Apple, Microsoft, eBay, AOL, and Yahoo!

We have already seen that Gary and Scott bring a great deal of energy, drive and excitement along with them. We are very excited to welcome them to the MyStrands team and are looking forward to the growth and development they will inspire. It’s going to be a fun ride!

See all the photos here.

The first event in the series takes off this Friday at The Greek Cusina in Portland, Oregon. Don’t miss out on sick beats, great visuals and partyStrands.

Scott Kveton is a digital identity promoter and open source advocate. Scott has worked at Amazon, RuleSpace.com and JanRain as well as founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. Working closely with projects like Mozilla, Linux, Drupal and Apache led Scott down the identity path and to JanRain in mid-2006. Scott was named to Red Herring’s list of ‘25 Titans in waiting’ in early 2007 and ‘InformationWeek’s Change Agents’ in December 2005.

We have some exciting plans linking social recommendation technologies with the open web, and Scotts visionary and leadership abilities will be key in helping us define and execute our objective: to help people discover things they like and didn’t know about already.

It is a pleasure for us having Scottt on board. He has some great skills which he already showed during the interviewing process.

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).

* 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!

MyStrands mobile website looks great!

You can get music recommendations (more than 6 million songs to be discovered); you can keep track of what music your friends are listening to in real time; you can check your friends’ profiles, posts, photos and music, and much more… just go to http://m.MyStrands.com.

Stay tuned for future developments for the iPhone…

Photos taken with a Nokia N95