http://blog.strands.com Strands Weblog Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:30:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Test your music knowledge with the latest release from the Mobile team at Strands. Featured by Apple today,  Strands Music Quiz is an addictive game for the iPhone that challenges you with questions relating to your own musical taste. Compete with your friends and see who is the real music ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/09/03/think-you-know-something-about-your-listening-habits-take-strands-music-quiz/ Some new great things for the Strands community. An awesome new community blog, the YourStrands show, and Strandups! 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/08/21/strands-community-blog-yourstrands-strand-ups/ After almost a year of permanent presence in Finland thanks to our VP of Mobile Oliver Bremer, and several years of many many trips across the Atlantic, Strands has finally opened an office in Helsinki! Why? Because Finland = Mobile. Around 92% of Finland's population has a mobile phone, and it is ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/08/20/strands-finland/ Yes, everybody knows it by now. Drew is a Strander. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/07/28/drew/ We have just released an improved version of Nokia’s Mobile Rules! 2008 winning application, Strands Social Player 3.2, for Symbian S60 3rd Edition and J2ME (optimized for Nokia S40) devices (download for S60 devices here and for S40 devices here). What is new in the new Strands Social Player 3.2?: UI improvements Bug ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/07/24/strands-social-player-32-just-released/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/07/22/call-for-recommender-start-ups-the-fastest-path-to-fund-your-project/ We are happy to announce today that Strands will be powering the online personal finance tool that BBVA, one of the world’s largest retail banks, will be offering its customers (see BBVA press release here). Developed by BBVA and Strands, BBVA Tú cuentas (You count, in Spanish) is an innovative personal ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/07/16/bbva-strands-personal-finance/ Will our online activities affect our real life social interactions? asks Corvida. 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, ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/06/25/personalizing-physical-spaces/ Good news for the mobile enthusiasts out there: MyStrands is now available on Nokia's WidSets platform, bringing a new way to discover music and see what your friends are listening to, right on your cellphone. In the two weeks MyStrands WidSet has been available, more than 65,000 users have downloaded it! WidSets ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/06/19/mystrands-widsets/ Recently, Franco Ponticelli and I announced a special summer project geared for student-based opensource development of the web programming language, haXe , and supported by Strands. The project is now underway with two student participants: Miguel Serrano Milano and Danny Wilson. Miguel is working on a CLI target compiler ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/06/17/strands-haxe-summer-project-is-rolling/ We are glad to announce today the launch of the Strands Social Recommender™, a SaaS plug-and-play recommendation engine that can be easily and quickly installed by eCommerce and Media Web sites. We will be demonstrating the service at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago this week, let ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/06/10/strands-launches-plug-and-play-recommendation-engine-for-ecommerce-and-media/ Last week we launched in private beta our new baby, an early version of the discovery site / life streaming service Strands.com. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/06/04/thanks-love-oregon/ We are happy to announce our latest launch here at Strands. We are opening the private beta for Strands.com, a very early version of a destination site that aims at helping people discover new stuff. Our vision for Strands.com includes two innovations towards which we have been working on for ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/05/28/announcing-strandscom/ There is an excellent post by Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW, discussing the economics of data portability. "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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/05/22/economics-data-portability/ Today we are happy to announce the acquisition of NetworthIQ, a social personal finance Web site that lets people track, share, and compare their net worth. This news follows the acquisition of money management solution Expensr and the private beta launch of moneyStrands, Strands’ personal finance application. NetworthIQ was founded by ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/05/15/networthiq/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/05/07/strands-summer-2008-haxe-project-announcement/ Thanks to all of you for the great feedback on the new version of MyStrands Social Player (our initial post here). Tweets and posts, all are welcome. The Boy Genius Report , The Symbian Core, Symbian Freak, Symbian in Motion, All About Symbian, Mashable, MoneyMaking expirience, Hinkmond Wong´s Weblog, ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/05/05/feedback-socialplayer/ Today we are happy to announce the launch of moneyStrands, a personal money management solution, as well as the acquisition of Expensr, a leading online personal finance application. This marks the first step towards Strands’ vision of applying its personalization technologies to new areas. Following with our mission of helping people ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/29/moneystrands-expensr/ For those of you who are mobile enthusiasts and also Last.fm users, we have good news! We have just released version 3.1 of Nokia’s Mobile Rules! 2008 winning application, MyStrands Social Player, which allows you to scrobble tracks to Last.fm as you play music on your Symbian S60 3rd Edition and ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/28/mystrands-31-lastfm/ You know us as MyStrands, OpenStrands, MusicStrands and several other “strands”. Today we are doing what we believe is the next logical step for our organization: Rebranding Strands. The word “strands” has a particular meaning for us: it represents the sequences of digital events that connect our lives. Strands' mission is ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/23/mystrands-rebrands/ (By Dr. Rick Hangartner, MyStrands Chief Scientist. Guest column published in ReadWriteWeb) 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" --- ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/14/data-portability-web-personalization/ Centernetworks reports that San Francisco-based Loomia has closed a $5M Series A round of funding today to accelerate Loomia's rapid growth, including continuing the build-out of its world-class recommendations platform and expanding its sales and marketing efforts in the U.S. and internationally. Read Loomia's press release here. The round was led by ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/02/loomia-raises-5/ Two of the key trends for 2008, Open Data and Personalization, are rarely considered together, but we have always thought they were strongly related. So when we were asked to talk at Startupalooza (a really cool Portland tech event, put together by Todd Kenefsky and the Legion of Tech) we ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/01/taste-sharing-for-web-personalization/ Update (04/28/08): MyStrands Social Player now with Last.fm scrobbling for Nokia S60 and S40 devices! MyStrands Social Player (download here) has won the Mobile Rules! Award 2008 as the Best Multimedia Application!! Mobile Rules! competition is the world's leading awards for innovative mobile business plans and cuttin-edge applications services and technologies ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/03/19/mobile-rules-winner/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/03/12/recommender-start-ups/ We just learned that MyStrands Social Player for Symbian S60 devices (download here) has been chosen as a finalist for the Mobile Rules! 2008 Award. Mobile Rules! is the leading annual competition in the mobile world. We will be accompanied by Arvato, Call Enhancer, Hyper Player, JuiceUp, MobSensor, MosKillTo, NovixLife, ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/02/19/mobilerules-finalist/ On March 23, 2005, MyStrands was awarded a grant for $30,000 by the Benton, Linn, Lincoln, and Lane Regional Investment Board (BL3RIB). The funding was provided to assist MyStrands (a very young start-up) in filling ten new positions in its Corvallis office. At the time the grant was awarded, MyStrands ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/02/18/thanks-bl3rib/ MobileSundayBarcelona was a total success. The Sunday event prior to the Mobile World Congress, organized by Rudy and MyStrands, was packed and according to Martin Sauter: ...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. http://blog.strands.com/2008/02/12/mobile-startups/ Yes, that is correct, already 3 years. MyStrands was introduced to the public on February 9th, 2005, 15 months after the project was started. 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) ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/02/07/3-years/ If web 2.0 could be summarised as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalisation writes Jemima Kiss in a very interesting article on The Guardian. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/02/06/web30/ Mobile Sunday Barcelona is turning out to be a great meet up for mobile lovers. Organized by Rudy with MyStrands support, it is an unofficial, informal and generally cool and funky gathering of mobile bloggers and their chums. It takes place on Sunday, February 10th, just the day before the ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/02/06/mobilesundaybarcelona/ We are extremely pleased to announce that Dr. Joseph McCarthy, former Principal Scientist at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, has joined MyStrands as Principal Instigator. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/30/joseph_mccarthy/ Watch this cool interview with Trevor Legwinski aka "partyTrevor", speaking about MyStrands and partyStrands, featured today on ABC News. [youtube]Vx-0zfHAy9Y[/youtube] Exactly! http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/23/mystrands-abcnews/ Yes, MyStrands is expanding by leaps and bounds. Our latest addition, R. Scott Doan, is the 100th member of our team. Already at 100 people...and growing! Scott joins MyStrands as VP, Enterprise Sales. He is a veteran executive with early stage companies with deep enterprise sales, business development and ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/23/100th/ A week ago I sent a note to Chris Saad letting him know that I'd like to participate in the Data Portability group as a part of MyStrands. I wanted to talk a little bit about why we wanted to do that.We're really excited about the work that the ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/23/why-mystrands-is-joining-the-data-portability-workgroup/ Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports today that Corvallis born recommendation company CleverSet is selling out to Art Technology Group for $10 million (CEO Todd Humphrey writes about it in CleverSet's blog). Other players in the same market include Aggregate Knowledge ($25M raised), ChoiceStream ($13.1M in Series B), recently funded Criteo (€10M) and ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/22/cleverset-10/ We are very pleased to announce ACM Recommender Systems 2008 (RecSys08), the annual event on research and applications of recommender technologies, where the recommendation industry and academia come together. MyStrands' CEO, Francisco Martin, will repeat as Industry co-chair this year, along with Unilever's Shail Patel. This conference builds ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/20/announcing-recsys08/ The guys over at the N95 blog have compiled a list of must-have applications that should enlighten the use of your Nokia N95 and give you even more pleasure. Some really cool applications in the list such as Fring, Wwigo, Jaiku, Shozu... and of course our MyStrands Social Player :) ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/18/must-have-apps-n95/ Those of you interested in mobile web 2.0 and especially in personalization of mobile ads will want to attend the Mobile Web 2.0 conference taking place next week in San Francisco. Our colleague Atakan Cetinsoy will be there as a speaker. http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/17/personalization-mobile-ads/ Call out to all Mobile Developers, Barcelona is the place to be next month! 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/16/mobilejamsession-for-developers/ After more than 3 years of sharing space at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), our Barcelona team has found a home of their own. Plenty of space for working and playing, plus a breath-taking view of the sea just one minute away (no kidding). Work hard, play hard, be a ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/15/mystrands-new-barcelona-office/ Open protocols and standards help define the open web by enabling interoperability between sites. We're big advocates of the concepts around the open web and the technologies that are making it a reality. OpenID is an important part of our strategy moving forward and as such we wanted ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/14/openiddevcamp-a-success/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/10/mystrands-gomo-news-mobile-world-congress-blender/ As you know MTV used partyStrands during New Year's Eve to create the coolest interactive experience ever in Times Square. People used their cell phones to send text messages, vote to choose music videos and answer trivia and polling questions on MTV’s 20x40 foot giant HD screen in front of ... http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/08/times-square-rocked-during-new-years-eve-with-partystrands/ Fresh from our Labs... iStrands enables you to build your profile at MyStrands.com in realtime while listening to your music on an iPhone or iPod touch. Brought to you by Marc and Rich.   http://blog.strands.com/2008/01/02/istrands-for-iphone-ipod-touch/ MTV and partyStrands have teamed up to create an unforgettable interactive New Year’s 2007 experience in Time’s Square! 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/28/mtv-partystrands-times-square/ For those of you that just got a Nintendo Wii for the holidays (or like me you claim to have gotten for your kids but somehow you seem to be the one that is always playing it), I highly recommend that you download the Opera Browser (aka "Internet Channel") for ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/26/mystrandstv-on-wii/ [youtube]tXb8OO9-sfg[/youtube] The MyStrands team http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/23/meet-the-team/ Those intrigued by the growing trend of visualization techniques, will be interested in the responses of Justin Donaldson to a questionnaire received from the British publication Five Eight magazine. Justin is a MyStrands' researcher, Indiana University PhD Candidate, author of the Artist Network Visualization and the Maps of Recommendations, and ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/18/visualization-techniques-5-questions-to-justin-donaldson/ By Dr. Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist, MyStrands. Guest column published in MSearchGroove 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/17/what-is-the-recommender-industry/ Last week was an exciting one, with the announcement of BBVA investment in MyStrands. We want to thank you all for your support and enthusiasm! Here you'll find some of the feedback received from the community: New York Times, ReadWriteWeb, Digital Music News, Red Herring, Business Journal, Enrique Dans, Primate Blog http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/13/one-company-youve-got-to-keep-an-eye-on/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/04/mystrands-raises-24-million-to-lead-the-social-recommendation-industry/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/04/mystrands-atrae-24-millones-del-bbva-para-liderar-la-industria-de-las-recomendaciones-sociales/ We are happy to announce that MIT Research Scientist Dr. Peyman Faratin is joining MyStrands. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/12/02/mits-peyman-faratin-joins-mystrands-as-principle-scientist/ Nice job Jane! http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/21/happy-thanksgiving/ We are pleased to announce that Jadam Kahn has just joined the MyStrands team as Director of User Experience. 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, ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/14/jadam-kahn-joins-mystrands/ We are proud to announce that MyStrands is partnering with MobileMonday Madrid and Barcelona. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/09/mystrands-partners-with-mobilemonday/ No, this has nothing to do with that joke "How many is a Brazillion?" 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/08/what-would-10k-brazilians-do-with-their-phones-at-a-party/ http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/06/love-the-smell-of-fresh-code-in-the-morning/ Kaliya Hamlin talks about her brainchild, She's Geeky, as an opportunity for women in technology to discuss the unique issues women face in the digital age. Kaliya started her girl-geek crusade in order to make the online world a better place for women users. If you missed She's Geeky* on ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/05/making-the-online-world-a-better-place-for-women/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/02/mystrands-at-the-annual-nokia-mobile-mash-up-2007/ MyStrands New York uncorked the champagne at their new Tribeca office today. We’re very excited about our new home, we’ve moved into a brand new space with views of Broadway in a great location. Here are some of the in-da-house NYC team: Scott Lehr, Jason Clark, Jane Kwak and Shirin ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/02/mystrands-nyc-in-da-houz/ Motorola is announcing today that it has packed the MOTO Q 9h with the MyStrands Social Player, a move designed to create a more personalized experience for users of the newly-released MOTO Q 9h global smart device. With this offering, Motorola wants to demonstrate how easy it is for consumers to ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/11/01/motorola-packs-moto-q-9h-with-the-mystrands-social-player/ Nice job Bryan! http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/31/happy-halloween-from-mystrands/ 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. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/29/phones-should-be-open-to-anything-new-nokia-campaign-featuring-mystrands/ You might be a geek if you go to unconferences for fun but for women who went to She's Geeky, that is just fine. Unlike any gathering of brilliant minds I have been to, the first order of the day was lunch. Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman, organizer and Queen Bee, ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/26/you-might-be-a-geek-if/ http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/24/freaks-wanted/ I had the pleasure of attending the ACM Recommender Systems Conference, as part of the research division of MyStrands (as well as a participant in the associated doctoral consortium). I was also offered the opportunity to discuss a few of the papers and "themes" of the conference in more detail ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/24/recsys-2007-keynote-impressions/ http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/23/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words/ We just made it supremely easy for MyStrands users to launch music video channels from every Artist and User page. You will notice a new link on each that says "Watch the <artist/username> Channel on MyStrands.TV". Just click the link to open a new tab/window and enjoy the show. ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/22/mystrandscom-now-with-quick-launch-video-channels/ A few of us are in Minneapolis right now attending the Recommender Systems Conference. The conference is in its 2nd year and brings together academics and industry to discuss the future, challenges and opportunities for recommender systems. This year there are about 110 participants from 15 countries, including ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/20/recsys-07/ We are pleased to announce that MyStrands is sponsoring She's Geeky, a Women's Tech (un)Conference, held in Mountain View, CA on the 22nd and 23rd of October. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/19/mystrands-sponsors-shes-geeky/ We're excited to announce that we'll be sponsoring the inaugural Ignite Portland event happening Wednesday October 25th, 2007 from 6pm - 9pm PST. This event is being hosted at the amazing offices of Wieden & Kennedy, Portland's world-class advertising firm.The Ignite style of event is the brainchild of O'Reilly's ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/18/mystrands-sponsors-inaugural-ignite-portland/ I was a panelist at the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco yesterday on the "Disruptive Innovations" panel moderated by Daniel Appelquist who has been organizing the event. The conference was sold out and the level of attendance was very impressive mixing industry experts and veterans from operators, technology leaders ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/16/mobile-20-by-the-bay/ We are extremely pleased to announce that Oliver Bremer has joined MyStrands as VP of Product Management and Strategy. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/14/oliver-bremer-joins-mystrands/ Next week we'll be involved in several interesting events: 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, ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/12/mobile-20-smartphone-show-recsys-and-more/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/10/the-new-tastemakers-in-action/ Last Thursday partyStrands was featured at the Paul Van Dyk interactive concert at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR. partyStrands rocked the house on a 12x9 foot screen in front of a sold out crowd. Partygoers were texting like crazy throughout the night, we received over 760 text messages. See ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/10/02/partystrands-interactive-concert-paul-van-dyk/ 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' ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/09/20/learning-how-to-learn-applying-social-recommenders-to-technology-enhanced-learning/ While the US went rafting during their offsite meeting, the BCN team trekked, canoed and went wild in the Pyrenees. Recognize some US team members in these pictures? They can’t resist a good party (more photos here). http://blog.strands.com/2007/09/14/party-in-the-pynenees/ Complex networks of human-generated links between items are the best mechanisms to analyze how our society considers and uses the products it creates and consumes. Although the resulting network is immense, it is a flexible tool for analysis and recommendation and is the foundation of MyStrands recommendations (read more). This image ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/09/06/mystrands-ultimate-matrix-of-associations/ We are happy to present MyStrands.TV... a free, personalized, Internet music television, with countless channels featuring great music videos and concert footage just for you. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/09/04/introducing-mystrandstv-your-free-personalized-internet-music-tv/ We are excited to announce that Claudio Baccigalupo (PhD student at IIIA-CSIC) and his thesis supervisor Prof. Enric Plaza (IIIA-CSIC) have been awarded the "Best Case-based Reasoning Application Paper" by the 7th International Conference on Case-based Reasoning (ICCBR'07) for their paper "A Case-Based Song Scheduler for Group Customised Radio". MyStrands is ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/20/baccigalupo-and-plaza-best-paper-at-iccbr07/ The Industry Committee of the ACM Recommender Systems 2007 has assembled two exciting industry panels for the Conference: Friday October 19th: Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase value of recommenders? Moderator: Todd Beaupre, Yahoo, Inc. Joaquin Delgado, CTO, Lending Club Corp. Jason Herskowitz, VP of Consumer Products, ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/15/recsys07-panelists-just-announced/ We are happy to announce that Jason Herskowitz has joined MyStrands as Vice President of Consumer Products. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/12/jason-herskowitz-joins-mystrands/ We are looking for fun, outgoing people, to be the face of partyStrands at clubs and bars near you. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/09/new-faces-of-partystrands/ Find out who is who here. http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/08/the-mystrands-us-group-simpsonized/ MyStrands is extremely pleased to announce that long time industry fixtures, Gary Geller and Scott Lehr have joined the team. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/06/gary-geller-and-scott-lehr-join-mystrands/ The MyStrands Team in Corvallis recently decided to shoot the Deschutes River for some class 3 and 4 rapids. Bring on the white water! See all the photos here. http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/01/the-mystrands-river-run/ Get ready for the partyStrands interactive concert series! partyStrands will be featured at events with great names in electronica, hip-hop and more. 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. http://blog.strands.com/2007/08/01/partystrands-concert-series-kicks-off-in-portland/ We are happy to announce that Scott Kveton has joined MyStrands as the Open Technology Lead. 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/07/30/scott-kveton-joins-mystrands/ 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 ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/07/26/get-your-mystrands-pirate-t-shirt/ The technical program for ACM Recommender Systems 2007 is now posted on the conference website. Highlights include: * A Keynote address by Krishna Bharat, principal scientist at Google and creator of Google News. * 16 full-length technical papers, plus an exciting poster and demo program * Still to be ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/07/25/acm-recommender-systems-2007-program-posted-and-registration-open/ We got a couple of iPhones and we've been playing with them for a while. What do we like most? The easy sync with the mac. It's amazing! I've got all my email, contacts, playlists in my iPhone... with zero effort. And of course... MyStrands mobile website looks great! You can get ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/29/mystrands-and-the-iphone/ Today KVAL the Eugene TV Station came into the MyStrands offices. Check Out partyTrevor and Dan’s Television Debut. http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/26/mystrands-on-kval-tv/ Nokia and S60 websites have chosen MyStrands Social Player as the Application of the Week. Zuper kool! The MyStrands Social Player has greatly enhanced the concept of a mobile music player, turning it into a music discovery and social networking tool. Through it, you can not only play your favorite ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/26/nokia-and-s60-application-of-the-week/ Corvallis is not only home of the Beavers, it is also a great place to study, party, live and work. And we are hiring! Let me tell you about Corvallis. Corvallis is located in the Willamette Valley in central western Oregon about 85 miles south of Portland, 45 miles east of the ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/25/come-be-a-beav/ We are happy to inform you all that Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google, has accepted our invitation to serve as Keynote Speaker for the ACM Recommender Systems 2007 Conference. Krishna is the creator of Google News, and also headed Google's Bangalore R&D Center starting in 2004. Please visit the ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/25/krishna-bharat-principal-scientist-at-google-keynote-speaker-at-acm-recommender-systems-2007/ Thanks to everyone! We are receiving great feedback after our recently announced round of financing, these are very exciting times for us! There has been a lot of coverage on the B round, this is some of it: Peggy Anne Salz over at MSearchGroove asks Is Recommendation Ready For Primetime? Spanish-American recommendation ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/19/is-recommendation-ready-for-primetime-mystrands-in-the-press/ En español aquí. We are very excited to announce that MyStrands has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The main investor is 25 year-old Spanish media mogul Antonio Asensio, owner and CEO of the third largest media group in Spain, Grupo Zeta, with existing investors Debaeque and Sequel R&D also ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/18/mystrands-raises-25-million-to-lead-the-social-recommendation-industry/ For English click here. Nos alegra anunciar que MyStrands ha atraído 25 millones de dólares en financiación. El inversor de referencia es Antonio Asensio, propietario y Vice-Presidente Ejecutivo del Grupo Zeta, y los actuales inversores Debaeque y Sequel R&D también han apoyado a MyStrands en esta ronda. La inversión total en ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/18/mystrands-atrae-25-millones-de-dolares-para-liderar-la-industria-de-las-recomendaciones-sociales/ Next week is an exciting one. Not only is there going to be great news but we will actively participate in these very interesting events: Monday, June 18th Nokia has invited us to showcase MyStrands Social Player in Nokia Connection 2007 in Singapore. Nokia Connection is an annual event and ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/12/next-week-is-a-big-week-for-us/ We are very honored to participate in the first edition of Mobile Monday Monte-Carlo that will launch tomorrow Monday June 4th, the evening before the opening of MEM 2007 and Global Messaging 2007. Jane Kwak will be presenting the MyStrands Social Player. Reitek and Telephia will also be there. Thanks to ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/03/mystrands-at-mobile-monday-monte-carlo/ Yes, the first time many Chinese use the Internet, or take a photo, is with a mobile. This is just one of the conclusions that Dan (partyStrands) and Trevor (aka mobileTrevor) heard during the Nokia Mobile Application Summit that took place in Beijing last week. Some more ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/06/02/the-first-time-many-chinese-use-the-internet-is-with-a-mobile/ The highly popular techno-pop group Ole Ole appeared at the Buda del Mar Bar this past Monday for their album release in front of 400 members of the Spanish press, in Madrid. Before and after the 45 minute concert, partyStrands was running for the partygoers and press. As you see in ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/05/25/partystrands-with-ole-ole-at-the-buda-bar-madrid/ MyStrands Social Player has been nominated for the Webware 100 Awards in the mobile category. We are proud to be in company with some other cool services such as 4Info, ShoZu, Google Maps Mobile, Google Gmail Mobile, GoWare DoMo, WinkSite and others. You can vote here. The Webware 100 has been organized ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/05/24/mystrands-nominated-for-the-webware-100-awards/ There are many things that make us love Beta Records. But clearly a big reason is their use of technology to help independent artists gain exposure. Today we are pleased to announce that MyStrands has partnered with Beta Records to help their users and artists discover each other. Beta Records is a ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/04/30/with-beta-records-because-music-really-does-matter/ MyStrands Social Player has just been selected as WINNER of the Orange Innovation Contest, during the Orange Partner Camp that took place in Cape Canaveral this week. This is excellent news as the Orange Innovation Contest is designed to showcase radical technological breakthrough and innovation. It is a competition for the ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/04/18/winners-of-the-orange-innovation-contest/ If you are in Oregon this weekend come down to Corvallis or Eugene, two great college towns, home of the Beavers and the Ducks. partyStrands will be running in several venues and parties. Here are some: Bars - Clubs Cantina, Sanchos, Tailgaters, Taboo, Rock 'N' ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/04/06/oregon-the-partystrands-state/ La dee dee la dee da... hear it from the nightlife diva herself, Crystal Waters who will be opening for the new in-house Thursday night production, POPulation: Music for the Masses at Element. This is a party for you! Get ready for an extravaganza of resident DJs Steve Coleman ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/04/05/today-in-nyc-population-music-for-the-masses/ We are very pleased to announce ACM Recommender Systems 2007. This Conference builds on a wonderful legacy of research workshops and the Recommenders06 Summer School on the Present and Future of Recommender Systems, organized by MyStrands last year in Bilbao. The Conference will bring together the leaders of ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/31/acm-recommender-systems-2007-conference/ All you Mac lovers, the long awaited release of partystrands for Mac is here! Included as part of the MyStrands app, djs, bars, clubs and home users can now officially party it up with partystrands. What are you waiting for, your ultimate party tool is only a download away! http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/27/welcome-to-partystrands-mac-users/ If you are a Linux user, you can now discover new music using the MyStrands Amarok plug-in. Capture your playcounts, build your music profile and share your tastes with others. This will allow you to go to MyStrands and get instant song, album and artist recommendations, whenever you want. Also, you can ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/26/amarok-plug-in-is-finally-here/ It's been a while since we presented our music player for Windows Mobile devices (SmartPhones and Pocket PCs), but we did not have a video. Now, we do... [youtube]BICVKBT_JOw&eurl[/youtube] MyStrands for Windows Mobile devices is a music player with three main characteristics: it helps you discover music, it is a strong community ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/23/mystrands-for-windows-mobile-devices/ Thanks to all of you for the great feedback on the MyStrands Social Player (our initial post here). We are having a huge response with lots of calls and lots of reviews! John Biggs at MobileCrunch broke the story early on Wednesday focusing on the community building ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/19/is-changing-the-way-that-i-listen-to-music/ Interacting with partyStrands (download here) just got much easier! Before you get to the party: Link your phone number with your MyStrands account. To do so, go to Preferences in www.MyStrands.com, then "Change my cellphone information" and update your mobile phone number. Then, send the following message to 81890 in the ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/16/interacting-with-partystrands-just-got-easier/ The MyStrands development team has some news for us today. Version 0.8.3.002 of MyStrands for Windows is here, and it includes new functionalities in partyStrands. Download it here. What's new? A partyStrands set-up wizard that allows party hosts to set default values for parties. A new tab on the host interface that ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/16/new-functionalities-in-partystrands/ Update (03/19/07): Check out some of the feedback received so far. Update 2 (04/18/07): MyStrands Social Player has been awarded the Orange Innovation Award! See more here. MyStrands Social Player is here! It is a music player for mobile devices (Symbian Series 60, 3rd edition) with two main characteristics: it is ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/14/mystrands-social-player-is-here/ You have tons of songs in your PC but a limited space in your mobile. How to choose the best music for the phone? You can browse through all those gigas and select the music yourself, or you can have MyStrands help you. The Auto Fill function in MyStrands for PC ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/12/automatically-fill-your-mobile-phone-with-your-pc-music/ We have linked our social music recommendations with Wikipedia facts. Check it out in our Labs. It is easy, fun and informative. Sure, it's fine to say, "if you like Green Day then you'll like Blink-182", but why stop there when we can bring that connection to life by tapping ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/07/linking-behavior-based-recommendations-with-wikipedia-facts/ Save the date you partyStrands fans in Austin! On March 12th partyStrands will be showcased during SXSW at an event at the Karma Lounge. Brought to you by Singlepoint, Rave Wireless, Distributive Networks and the Rights Group, partyStrands will provide music and interactive entertainment for the partygoers. As an ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/03/02/partystrands-at-sxsw-on-march-12/ In the next few days and coming weeks we have several exciting events featuring our beloved partyStrands to make nightlife in the big apple just as glamorous and cool as ever! 1) First ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/02/23/new-york-city-partying-strong/ A very productive and absolutely crazy week! 3GSM is a fantastic opportunity to meet vis-a-vis, and put a face to the person behind all those emails and conference calls. With the Congress being so immense, it just might be that the best opportunities to spend quality time with people take ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/02/16/3gsm-recap/ Today Mark Baard writes a column at The Boston Globe about partyStrands. Song requests by mobile phone. Some party people are using their mobile phones to influence the music at their favorite nightspots. Der Spiegel, Europe's biggest and German's most influential weekly magazine, had a great article about partyStrands ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/02/12/partystrands-in-the-news/ If you come to Barcelona for 3GSM, please drop me an email so we can get together at the conference, there will be several MyStranders around. Below is where you will find us during that busy week, apart from the Congress itself, of course: Sunday, February 11, at 6pm ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/02/01/mystrands-3gsm/ Hey ladies and gents, time to let go of your mid-week stress and join partyStrands at 49 Grove, NYC and Hands On Entertainment which have prepared a special weekly Wednesday night party starting tonight, Jan 30th from 10pm-4am. 49 Grove in NYC is a beautifully blue velvety for-those-of-you-in-the-know lounge made even ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/02/01/get-your-hands-on-in-the-air/ MyStrands Social Player looks great in the N95. Definitely, we are approaching a wonderful age to be a music fan! [youtube]jZvmyA6YVwo[/youtube] http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/28/mystrands-in-the-n95/ After the first partyStrands Bustamove party at the Manor in the meat packing district, partyStrands will be featured again at Element, a high profile and stunning venue in the nightlife hub of the Lower East Side. This gloriously restored bi-level bank building's modern decor and open dance floor is a great ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/25/latest-release-of-partystrands-to-be-featured-at-element-nyc-with-bustamovenyc-jan-26th/ MyStrands.com has been revamped with new features for music lovers and partygoers in the mobile, on-line and physical worlds. What's New covers it all! All three worlds, mobile, on-line and physical are seamlessly integrated at www.MyStrands.com and all the information (music, people, photos, text messages, and more) generated through any ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/24/mystrands-gets-revamped-with-new-features-for-the-mobile-on-line-and-physical-worlds/ It’s been a frenetic weekend in Midem (Cannes) for Francisco, including his discussion panel on the "Long Tail: is small the new big?" Great conference by the way. http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/21/in-midem/ Hold on to your seats and your hats! MyStrands is on the verge of unveiling its newest release and it will blow you away! You can soon visit www.MyStrands.com to experience the new MyStrands. (We're still working out some kinks as some languages-Italian, German, French and Portuguese are still being translated ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/18/on-the-verge-of-unveiling-the-newest-release/ Friday night’s party at the Manor hosted by BustamoveNYC in partnership with partyStrands was a great, crazy, hyped up night! The party was pumping by midnight and we still had people lined up trying to get in at 1am in the morning. People got up on the seats and danced ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/14/post-kick-off-partystrands-at-bustamove/ Heads up for those of you slowly getting back into the humdrum of things in the new year. Back to work, school....and bust A move!   For the first time partyStrands will be featured in corroboration with Bust A Move, a NYC based party with a “no cover, come one come all policy” ... http://blog.strands.com/2007/01/11/party-like-its-2007bust-a-move/ Hey NYC isn't the only city enjoying a partyStrands flavor to their New Year's Eve parties...there's more! Browse through partyStrands.com online or m.partyStrands.com from your cell phone on the 31st to see how people in other cities and countries celebrate the end of the year. FYI: for all those lucky guys who find themselves ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/12/30/celebrating-a-global-new-years-eve/ If you happen to be lost wandering the chilly streets of West Village in NYC on New Year’s Eve, perk up and listen. There’s a party at Dohwa to close 2006 and start off 2007 right. While open for regular business, around 10:30pm Dohwa will undergo that magical transformation into ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/12/30/at-the-stroke-of-midnight-with-partystrands-dohwa-nyc/ Oh did you think you could only have a blast partying in your favorite bar or club? Well you were wrong. Throw parties at home, fraternity or why not for grandma’s 100th birthday, all with partyStrands. There’s more… when you’re just chilling with your friends or are in the mood ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/12/29/throw-parties-in-your-home-fraternity/ MoMoParis 1 year anniversary party was crowded, 400+ people enjoyed partyStrands' Parisian debut, it has been a great night. Along with a short presentation and brief demo of partyStrands LIVE combined with other presentations about the advances in mobility by key speakers from Microsoft, Voluntis and the CRNS. partyStrands had a ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/12/07/partystrands-in-paris/ MobileMonday France is now one year old and they have invited partyStrands to the anniversary party to introduce our interactive music and entertainment service. Utilizing screens, mobile phones and digital music, partyStrands will offer the Paris MoMo crowd a new, colorful and fresh way to enjoy the music experience ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/12/04/partystrands-at-mobilemonday-paris/ Some really good crowd yesterday at Mobile Monday New York, aprox. 60 people came to listen to Peter Rojas, Michael Gartenberg and Scott Weiss . After the presentations, people gathered to chat at the mixer. partyStrands was providing the entertainment, some cool electronic beats which you can see at ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/28/good-crowd-at-momonyc/ partyStrands will be providing the entertainment at next edition of Mobile Monday New York, as we did with the October edition. If you are in NYC tomorrow Monday November 27th, you should come and join us at Samsung Experience Center, at 7 pm. For more details, check Mobile ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/26/partystrands-at-mobile-monday-new-york-2/ partyStrands went to Bed with TechCrunch, yesterday night. And what a night! Mike is good at it, he knows how to party!! TechCrunch rocks, NYC rocks, this was a good party! Of course, lots of networking, lots of opportunities, and also lots of (well, 3) screens running ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/17/partystrands-goes-to-bed-with-techcrunch/ You missed an amazing party tonight and if you were there you know what I mean. About 200 people showed up at the See Sound Lounge, a great venue in the heart of Seattle, to celebrate the arrival of partyStrands to the local bar and club scene. It was ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/16/seattle-does-party/ partyStrands Mobile got mentioned today at Mobilecrunch: Now partStrands can be your knight in shining armor once again partyStrands Mobile. In addition to information about your possible venues, you can accesss a mobilized version of myStrands that can help you localized your friends and help you make music selections based ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/12/partystrands-at-mobilecrunch/ For all those who are subscribed to blog.partystrands.com, our tech team has seamlessly integrated the partystrands blog and feeds into the mystrands blog (that's why you're seeing this post here too :-) From now on we'll continue blogging at blog.mystrands.com. Stay tuned, loads of neat stuff coming up the next weeks/months... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/11/partystrands-blog-continues-at-mystrands-blog/ Amazing club See Sound Lounge will be the place to launch partyStrands in Seattle on November 15th at 8pm. The perfect place to launch partyStrands with its 100'' projection screen and two 50'' plasma monitors. Drop us an email if you want to participate to this launching event. http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/10/partystrands-launch-in-seattle/ Just wanted to give you an update about the recent MoMoNYC event where MyStrands showcased the Mobile Client and partyStrands this past Monday the 30th. Thank you to Stephen and David for their tremendous help and to the Samsung staff, especially J and Derek for their expert assistance. ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/11/03/momonyc-update/ (click the image to view the animation video) http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/31/partystrands-interface-demo/ There’s no doubt that the 8th TechCrunch Party in New York is going to be fun. It’ll be your chance to “ping the jukebox” with a text message. With partyStrands, music will not be programmed by just one person, it will be programmed by all those who “join the ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/19/techcrunch-ny-text-your-taste/ If you are in NY, don't forget to come and visit Dohwa, a trendy and stylish Korean Bar and Restaurant in the West Village. You can catch partyStrands Tuesdays and Thursdays during the happy hour from 5-8pm. Try out partyStrands at the bar while sipping a ginger kamikaze cocktail or nibbling ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/18/partystrands-at-dohwa-nyc/ Many of you know probably a bit about the jukebox and it's famous models like the Wurlitzer, but how about the real history of the jukebox? Travis Jovais got it all together in his problem statement for his Senior Design Project called The Travelitzer last year. "The life of the ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/18/the-history-of-the-jukebox/ partyStrands will be presented at the next Mobile Monday New York meeting on October 30th. Justin Oberman from MoPocket.com and a partyStrands affiliate will present the partyStrands application and Jane (Jae Jong) Kwak will present the MyStrands Mobile application(s) in a session on "Innovative Mobile Content" together with Jason Cirillo ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/16/partystrands-at-mobile-monday-new-york/ Barcelona and New York City were both partyStranding last weekend. BelChica bar opened last Thursday in Barcelona, check out the fun at the BelChica partyStrands webpage. Meanwhile partyStrands' Jane and Justin Oberman from MoPocket.com introduced partyStrands at a LABA party at the China Club in New York City. Check out Jane's ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/15/partystrands-in-barcelona-and-new-york/ partyStrands has been featured today on spanish national TV in "Canal 24H todo Noticias" and TVE Internacional. You can view an excerpt here. [youtube]lWxZtNc3iMM[/youtube]. http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/09/partystrands-on-spanish-national-tv/ This Wednesday 11th of Ocober at 10pm, partyStrands will be launched at bar BelChica in Barcelona. The only bar in Barcelona where you can taste a collection of more than 40 Belgian Beers. Owner Michel has a unique collection of music that goes from alternative rock, hip-hop, dub, reggae to ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/09/partystrands-launch-in-belchica-barcelona/ Did you know that partyStrands works with an affiliates program? Here's what's it all about... Affiliates spread the word about partyStrands to their favorite bars and clubs. In return, affiliates receive a percentage of revenues generated by the bar or club through partyStrands. If you're an outgoing individual with friends ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/06/become-a-partystrands-affiliate/ Are you more than a music lover? Do you like to go beyond the boundaries of your iPod and see your favorite artists perform live on stage? Then we've got some recommendations for you. We'll tell you not only where your favourite artists are appearing soon, but also where and when ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/06/map-of-concerts/ A great and interesting evening yesterday at MobileMonday Barcelona. Bill Houghton from MyStrands presented a MyStrands Mobile demo and partyStrands was running during the networking cocktail. Check here to view the complete Flickr set from yesterdays' event. Scott Cohen from The Orchard and Ian MusselWhite from Bango where also giving ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/03/mystrands-at-mobilemonday-barcelona/ partyStrands is an interactive service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs, that utilizes mobile phones, digital music and screens, and offers partygoers a new and fresh way to have fun. (Download MyStrands (with partyStrands) for iTunes, Windows and Winamp here). Organize interactive partiesWith partyStrands, partygoers can interact with each other by ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/10/01/so-what-is-partystrands/ The open-air macroparty in Gandia started yesterday evening and it looks like a lot of fun. Here some pictures from the yesterday's event. If you feel the itch to join, the fiesta still goes on for the next 3 days... Check our partyStrands Flickr Group for more festival pics, thanks ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/30/partystrands-festival-in-gandia/ The Fira of Gandia in Spain will be the scene for the world-premiere of partyStrands outdoors, the audience will be able to influence the music a huge beach party by sending an SMS with their favourite artist(s) to a shortcode. During the Borja Dance Sessions, the DJ will make a proposal ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/29/open-air-partystrands/ partyStrands will do a live-demo during the networking cocktail at MobileMonday Barcelona on Monday, October 2, 2006. Bill Houghton from MyStrands will do a presentation together with Scott Cohen, co-founder and VicePresident of The Orchard and Nandi Gurprasad, VP Global Alliances, Bango Ltd. on "The Future of Mobile Music". To attend the ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/29/partystrands-demo-at-mobilemonday-barcelona/ Here below an interactive screen demo of partyStrands application taken at La Botellita - Serrano in Madrid last Thursday. [youtube]wvNI-b8_aSU[/youtube] see who/what is playing incoming user request (through SMS) influencing music with artist (x) recommendations of similar style music users in the waiting queue another incoming influencing music request user chat screen (cut) More info at partyStrands.com. http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/26/partystrands-interactive-screen-video/ Wondering what to get your music-loving friend who already has every song he's ever wanted? Get him to put down the headphones and pick up a book! There is a new feature on the labs to suggest books based on an artist. This is achieved by combining ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/25/cross-content-recommendationsfrom-music-to-books/ Last Thursday MyStrands launched the partyStrands website in Madrid, Spain with a press conference and a party in La Botellita - Serrano. A lot of press coverage (more on this later on this blog) and another great party afterwards. Pictures here at our partyStrands Flickr Group. Below a screenshot of the ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/24/partystrands-online/ Madrid is the place to be these days for partyStranders. Hardly recovered from the party last week, and yet we're proud to announce another party, this time on Thursday, September 21 in La Botellita - Serrano, Calle Serrano 63 in Madrid (28006). Feel free to join and spread the news! And ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/19/another-partystrands-party/ Since the first rumours early September about partyStrands got quite some attention in the press and in the blogosphere. Here's an overview of articles and mentions we encountered as of today: TechCrunch The New Tastemakers - New York Times BusinessWeek - MyStrands Adds Music to Web 2.0's Mix MobHappy.com - Music + Mobiles = ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/19/partystrands-in-the-blogosphere/ Introducing a new mashup from the MyStrands labs page, allowing you to play the tracks from any MyStrands playlist in Rhapsody's web player. This is achieved by combining our OpenStrands API with Rhapsody's Web Services SDK. Start by entering a MyStrands screen name to get a list of ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/18/mystrands-rhapsody-say-it-and-play-it/ Excellent (!) beta-launch of the partyStrands concept in the Imperio Pop bar in Madrid. Great location, 3 plasma screens, a wonderfull, exciting and smiling crowd... and there was partyStrands... Check the pictures from that evening using partyStrands tag at Flickr.com. There is now a partyStrands Flickr Group to collect the images from ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/15/partystrands-in-imperio-pop/ The MyStrands recommender system is built on a highly complex network of music relationships. We do our best to sweep a lot of this complexity "under the rug", so that you can get the best recommendation with a minimum of fuss. However, we think this music network stuff ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/13/maps-of-recommendations/ partyStrands pre-launch in Madrid next Thursday 14/9 in Imperio Pop. Stay tuned for updates here! http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/08/partystrands-pre-party-launch-in-madrid/ We've been working long and hard, it's taken a total of 200 Red Bull energy drinks, 100 Twinkies and more than a few overnighters, but all of the hard work has been worth it. MyStrands will soon be presenting: partyStrands... the future of interactive bar and club entertainment.partyStrands is ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/09/01/partystrands-the-future-of-interactive-bars-2/ partyStrands is an interactive music discovery service for bars and partygoers. It helps people share tastes in music with friends, and to discover music with other partygoers, at bars, clubs, or groups in general. http://blog.strands.com/2006/08/30/about/ This past weekend, the MyStrands sponsored "Team PartyStrands" took part in the great adventure that is the 197-mile Hood to Coast relay race. The 12 runners, each running an average of more than 16 miles, covered the distance from Oregon's Mt. Hood to the coastal town of Seaside in ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/08/29/team-partystrands-rocks-running-relay/ Curious about how many people per million are listening to your favorite artists? Take a look at these graphs. Simply enter up to 6 artists, and indicate the location of the users to be considered in the computation. You can also select the time window of the graph and see how ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/07/28/artist-reach-graphs/ MyStrands' recommender exposed through OpenStrands allows you to build a personalized stream of music tailored to musical tastes. So if you are thinking of developing your own personalized Internet-based radio, this is just for you. Not only will OpenStrands allow you to build a personalized stream of music, you can ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/07/12/thinking-of-developing-a-personalized-radio/ So what's with MusicStrands calling itself MyStrands? What does My have to do with Music? Well, after more than a year of learning to understand people's musical tastes and behaviors, we realized that music is not the only category where we can help people discover more of what ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/07/11/so-what-the-is-mystrands/ The latest version of MyStrands Discovery for Windows is packed with new and updated features that you--our loyal MyStrands community members--requested. We're excited about them, and think you will be too. Check out these new features: iPod synch: include your iPod plays in your MyStrands.com music profile, and track your iPod ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/07/10/re-discover-mystrands-discovery-for-windows/ MyStrands is the Winner of the Under the Radar Best In Show Award in the music category! Thanks to the panelists and to everyone at the event for making this happen! http://blog.strands.com/2006/06/14/winners-of-the-under-the-radar-best-in-show-awards/ We have been wondering about how to make Cross-content Recommendations that would be interesting to the music lovers of our community. The first Cross-content Recommender that we would like to propose is about recommending music given a movie. We believe music is an important aspect in our life, and furthermore ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/06/09/cross-content-recommendations-from-movies-to-music/ We have just produced a Flash demo about our Mobile MyStrands client for Windows. Check it out! Download the demo as a standalone application for Windows PC Download the demo as a standalone application for Mac OS X http://blog.strands.com/2006/06/09/flash-demo-of-our-mystrands-mobile-for-windows/ Justin Donaldson wins the 1st place award in the Netsci06 poster session with ZMDS: Visualizing Negative Structural Entropy in Queried Network Sub-Graphs. Justin, a student at Indiana University, who has been collaborating with MyStrands ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/27/winner-winner-chicken-dinner/ Developing on the MyStrands Platform Calling all developers! You can now build applications that leverage the power of MycStrands. The OpenStrands 1.0 web services platform is a set of web services for outside developers interested in adding MyStrands functionality to their non-commercial applications. OpenStrands services allow you to programmatically perform many of ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/18/calling-all-developers/ The MusicStrands mobile team has released a new version of MyStrands for Windows Mobile 5.0. Previous support for Pocket PC devices has been extended to Smartphone devices. + The same great MusicStrands technology is now available on cheaper, more portable cellphones. In addition to broadening the platform base, ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/06/mystrands-mobile-for-smartphone/ Not too long ago, several of us were betting how unlikely it was that someone would compose some of the playlists submitted to the site. There is a virtually unlimited number of songs out there, millions and millions of songs and growing everyday. So, with such great diversity and ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/03/of-the-unique-beauty-of-unique-playlists/ Try our new CBR Playlist Recommendation Engine in our labs! This project implements a Case-based Reasoning (CBR) approach to musical playlist recommendation. Our CBR approach focuses on recommending new and meaningful playlsits. The Case Base is formed by a large collection of playlists. Then, the CBR system first retrieves from the ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/03/case-based-reasoning-to-musical-playlist-recommendation/ MusicStrands members can now receive Mashups of multimedia content from their favorite Web 2.0 sites. By selecting any artist, we fetch the artist biography from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, blog posts from Technorati, pesonal goals from 43things, and events from Upcoming. You can also get recommended ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/02/mashups-for-your-favorite-artists/ In the Labs, users of last.fm can get recommended music and users, and now we've made this feature even better. In addition to recommending MusicStrands users from a last.fm profile, the feature now displays the artists you have in common, plus other artists you should check out based on ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/05/02/recommendations-for-lastfm-users-even-better/ A new version of MyStrands for Mac OSX is available, packed with features for discovering new music, discovering people who like the music you like, and rediscovering all the great music you already own. Recommendations, playlist builder, community discovery, and music tagging features--it's all there! Download your copy from ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/04/10/feature-filled-mystrands-for-mac-osx-now-available/ If you are using last.fm, you already know they offer great services like nice weekly artist recommendations. MusicStrands is now offering instant song recommendations based on your last.fm profile, so that you can have a music discovery experience with another flavor. Also you can meet MusicStranders who share your musical ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/04/08/are-you-a-lastfm-user/ Introducing the latest release of MusicStrands.com. We've upgraded our site to make it easier to use, and easier to discover great new music. Introducing Improved "Personal Recommendations" Our world-famous music recommendations are now even better. You can customize your recommendations to reflect the music you've been playing lately. You can even adjust ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/04/05/now-it%e2%80%99s-even-easier-to-discover-music/ The research team at MusicStrands has been working to deliver cool new features from our labs. Here's a summary of our latest work. Visit our labs page to try out these new features. Musical Chain of Discovery In some cases, music discovery is like a chain of recommendations. You discover an artist ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/03/29/what-is-new-in-the-labs/ The MusicStrands mobile team is hard at work providing more MyStrands features for a mobile world. Another new release of MyStrands for .NET Mobile is available for download. MyStrands for .NET Mobile version b0.2.2.000 (for those keeping track) includes all of the great features described in the March 9 posting, and ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/03/29/tag-more-mystrands-for-net-mobile-features/ This just in from our Mobile Team! We have updated the MusicStrands Labs site with an interim release of the .NET MyStrands Mobile client. If you have a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC, check it out at: http://labs.musicstrands.com/features/mobile.html Scroll to the Windows Mobile Client for the downloads. Here are the new features and fixes in this ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/03/09/go-mobile-with-mystrands/ We interrupt our regulary scheduled programming to bring you this important announcement from our Human Resources Department! We seek a Senior Search Engineer (Ph.D. in Information Retrieval or equivalent with strong software development abilities). Does Levenshtein Distance sound familiar to you? Have you read Managing Gigabytes and know all the pros and cons of ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/03/01/come-join-the-fun/ If you've read previous entries in this blog, you know that MusicStrands is about creating more and stronger connections: connections to music and connections to friends who can, in turn, connect you to more music and more friends, and more music, and more friends...you get the idea. It's a not-so-vicious ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/02/09/35/ We here at MusicStrands have a commitment: To help you discover music you like. We started by providing you with recommendations based on how your playlists compare to the aggregate music tastes of the world (or at least as much of it as we can learn about). We moved on ... http://blog.strands.com/2006/01/14/sharing-your-music-tastes-with-friends/ With the new release finally out, time to look up and see what has been going on. Perhaps most interesting to us is the release of a report Consumer Taste Sharing Is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture by Derek Slater with the Berkman Center for Internet ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/12/23/your-momma-taught-you-to-share/ Although we are constantly making little enhancements to the website, we have committed ourselves to releasing significant new features across the MusicStrands products quarterly. And this week is that time once again. Just in time for the holidays, we are introducing a bunch of new features and we ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/12/13/the-next-dance/ Well your chance has come. If you were at the CMJ conference in NYC last month, you got a sneak peak. Now we've finally rolled out MusicStrands Indy. We believe the future of music, and indeed civilization itself, is helping every musician find his or her audience. ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/10/11/so-you-want-to-be-a-rock-n-roll-star/ Have you ever woken up and said to yourself, "I rock! I blog! I should be Rockin' in Blogistan!"? Well now you can rock your blog (or any HTML page, for that matter) with my favorite new feature from the Site: M-Charts. Yes, friends, Chongo here, pimpin' for ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/09/29/29/ We apologize for the interruption and now return to our regularly scheduled blog. We've been busy here at MusicStrands working on new music discovery stuff that we will be announcing very soon. What they will let me talk about is what I hear when people talk about "Music Discovery" ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/08/20/watch-this-space/ One of my pivotal musical memories is from 7th-grade study hall when Michael Jackson's Rockin' Robin came on the radio. (Yes, for some reason we were allowed to listen to the radio in study hall.) We were psyched but the teacher, Mr. Bracken, just laughed and said bemusedly, ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/08/06/running-for-covers/ A comment we sometimes hear at MusicStrands from the uninitiated, is "but that mega-eRetailer already tells me people who ordered this also ordered...". Our company anger management consultant has taught us to count 1,2,...,10, and then reply in measured tones that even though it is now common knowledge throughout ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/07/30/dominating-the-known-universe/ Yesterday I eagerly twisted off the cap of my Snapple Iced Tea to reveal that, once again, I was an instant loser. No trip to Hawaii for me but as Snapple connoisseurs know, a fine consolation prized awaited: "Real Fact" #442 Bees' wings beat 11,400 times per minute. I have to say ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/07/16/bee-still-my-beating-moby-2/ Most of the time when my TV is on, it is just as audio wallpaper. Several times in recent days, however, I have been startled by what seemed to be the distinctive and poignant music of Nick Drake. The venue notwithstanding, my first hope was that these ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/07/14/wwnd/ Jazz may be the first indigenous American music form, but some recent music news items reminded us that rock owes the wild and crazy part of its soul to some real country originals. We read with sadness earlier this year of the passing of psychobilly pioneer Hasil Adkins. Notable amongst ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/07/06/chicken-rock/ 1.- Requiem For A Hit - (featuring L.A. Williams) by Miss Kittin & The Hacker 2.- Leave Them All Behind - Whitey by Various Artists 3.- Emerge by Fischerspooner 4.- Somebody Told Me by The Killers (Rock) 5.- Paranoiattack by The Faint 6.- Agenda Suicide by The Faint 7.- Posed To Death by The Faint 8.- Galvanize ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/06/30/elektro-rock/ 1.- Companera by Silvio Rodriguez 2.- Trova De Edgardo by Silvio Rodriguez 3.- La Desilusion by Silvio Rodriguez 4.- Y Mariana by Silvio Rodriguez 5.- Abracadabra by Silvio Rodriguez 6.- Hombre by Silvio Rodriguez 7.- Monologo by Silvio Rodriguez 8.- El Necio by Silvio Rodriguez 9.- La Guitarra Del Joven Soldado by Silvio Rodriguez 10.- Quien Fuera by Silvio ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/06/30/companera/ I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do. So I leave it up to you -- Ten Years After, "I'd Love to Change the World" It's not hard to imagine that a 16-year old Bob Geldof was among the millions hearing the lyrics of that 1971 hit song. ... http://blog.strands.com/2005/06/30/walking-to-justice-with-a-beat-2/ Welcome to MusicStrands, The Blog! Here you will find posts about discovering and exploring music, the latest goings on here at MusicStrands, and whatever random miscellaneous musical musings we can manage to muster. http://blog.strands.com/2005/06/29/welcome/