We are proud to announce that Team Strands is now accepting applications for athlete sponsorship for the 2010 calendar year.  Interested athletes should submit a running resume along with a one-page sponsorship proposal.

The resume should include, but is not limited to:

• Running Background
• Personal Bests
• Race Highlights
• Tentative 2010 Race Schedule

The proposal should highlight why you believe you would be a good brand advocate for Strands.com.  It would be helpful to include information about your level of involvement in the running community, and your “reach” online with social networking sites and blogs.  Preference will be given to athletes willing to relocate to Corvallis, Oregon, and your sponsorship proposal should indicate whether you would be willing to relocate as part of your sponsorship.

You must be willing to share your training and interact with the Strands.com community.  So, familiarity with Strands.com is a must.  If you would like to apply for sponsorship and have not yet set up a profile, please do so at Strands.com before applying.

When you have completed your application, please send an email with both documents attached to teamstrands@strands.com by December 15, 2009. We will begin notifying athletes starting January 1, 2010.

The number of online services providing users with real-time recommendations has increased exponentially over the last few years. Recommender Systems that were originally only accessible to a limited number of high-tech companies are now widely available through a growing number of both technical choices and vendors. The acceptance, however, of automatically delivered recommendations by users depends on numerous factors that go far beyond the algorithms that constitute the major focus of researchers.

Over the past 10 years, Strands has been creating and operating recommender systems in a multitude of domains, ranging from digital music to fitness plans and personal finance management, and in a multitude of business settings ranging from lightweight integrations to highly-coupled integrations within secure bank environments.

As summarized by Neal Lathia of MobBlog, below are the top 10 lessons we’ve learned developing, deploying, and operating real-world recommender systems:

Lesson 1 – Make sure a recommender is really needed! Do you have lots of recommendable items? Many diverse customers?… also think Return-on-Invesment… a more sophisticated recommender may not deliver a better ROI.

Lesson 2 – Make sure the recommendations make strategic sense. Is the best recommendation for the customer also the best for the business? What is the difference between a good and useful recommendation? Good recommendations vs useful recs; obvious recommendations may not be useful; risky recs may deliver better long-term value.

Lesson 3 - Choose the right partner! Select the right rec vendor vs hire some #recsys09 students. If you are a big company the best thing you can do is organize a contest.

Lesson 4 – Forget about cold-start problems (!) …. just be creative. The internet has all the data that you need (somewhere…).

Lesson 5 – Get the right balance between data and algorithms. 70% of the success of a recommendation system is in the data, the other 30% in the algorithm.

Lesson 6 – Finding correlated items is easy but deciding what, how, and when to present them to the user is hard… or don’t just recommend for the sake of it. Remember, user attention is a scarce and valuable resource. Use it wisely! … dont make a recommendations to a customer who is just about to pay for items at the checkout! User interface should get at least 50% of your attention.

Lesson 7 – Dont’s waste time computing nearest neighbours (use social connections)… just mine the social graph. Might miss useful connections??

Lesson 8 – Dont wait to scale!

Lesson 9 – Choose the right feedback mechanism. Stars vs thumbs …. the YouTube problem. More research on implicit and other feedback mechanisms is needed. The perfect rating system is no rating system! … focus on the interface.

Lesson 10 – Measure Everything! … business control and analytics is a big opportunity here.

Keynote Takeaway – Think about application context; Focus on interface as much as algs; be creative with startup data. … the UI needs to get the lion’s share of the effort (50%) compared to algorithms (5%), knowledge (20%), analytics (25%).

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.

Complete workshop schedule and details can be found here.

Recommender systems help users deal with large amounts of information by assisting them in their decision-making processes.  Recommender systems have been applied very successfully in a variety of domains, and one of their most exciting characteristics is that they combine interest from industry while posing very interesting research challenges, having significant impact on end user experience, and on business.

Motivation and Topics

Recommender-based industrial applications have hit the mainstream: they are being used today by millions of users in a variety of domains (e.g., film, music, book purchases, travel, advertising, etc.), having significant impact on end users and contributing to the generation of millions of dollars of revenue in some industries.

In addition, the explosion of social network websites, on-line user-generated content platforms, and tremendous growth in computational power of mobile devices are generating incredibly large amounts of user data, and an increasing desire of users to find what best matches their personal interests.  This is creating new technical challenges as well as new business opportunities.  However, in spite of significant progress in the research community, there are still important gaps in making accurate and timely recommendations in industrial applications.

This workshop aims at bringing the gap between academic researchers and industry practitioners on the area of Recommender Systems.  We are interested both in research work that faces real industry problems, and in industry cases that create research challenges.

We aim to discuss problems the industry is facing in real-world applications when applying recommendation and personalization techniques.  The goal is to bring together top-level researchers from academia and recommendation practitioners.  Ideally the workshop should serve to establish new collaborations and projects involving academic researchers and companies.

Topics of interest include industrial applications and research challenges related but not limited to:

• case studies of recommender system implementations and deployments
• personalization vs. content-based vs. collaborative-based applications
• evaluation and user studies of recommender systems
• recommendations in the long tail
• user preferences and recommender systems
• social and cultural impact of recommender systems
• security and privacy in recommender systems
• sparsity and lack of data in recommender systems
• context-aware and ubiquitousness in recommender systems
• user interfaces and usability issues in recommender systems
• scalability in large recommender systems
• new business models related to recommendation and personalization
• search vs. recommendation

Workshop Chairs

• Dr. Alejandro Jaimes, Telefonica Research
• Dr. Marc Torrens, Strands

Please address questions to recsys [at] strands.com.

The two-time Olympian (2000, 2004) has participated in 7 World Cross Country Championships, 3 World Outdoor Track and Field Championships, as well as the World University Games and Goodwill Games.  In four of her seven World Cross appearances, she helped lead Team USA onto the podium, with team bronze medal finishes in 1998 (4km), 2000 (8km), and 2003 (8km), and team silver in Portugal in 2002 (8km).

Dryer, who has a personal best of 1:11:42 from her 2007 USA Half Marathon Championships title, was selected based on her 7th place finish at the USA 20 km Championships earlier this month.

Dryer will team up wth Amy Yoder-Begley (Portland, Oreg.), Desiree Davila (Rochester Hills, Mich.), Serena Burla (Baldwin, Mo.), and Amy Hastings of Mammoth Lakes, California.

“I am honored to be representing the US in the World Half Marathon Championships in Birmingham”, Dryer said. “My goal is to help bring home a top team finish.”

The invitation came just days after Elva elected to forgo racing in the US Marathon Championships in what she says will be an effort to “focus once again on reconnecting with the shorter distances”.

The race will begin at 9:00 a.m. (Birmingham) on October 11, with a web cast from Universal Sports. For more information, visit the official IAAF race website.

Hartmann paced himself a few seconds ahead of the lead pack for much of the race, before making a decisive move to the front on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul, dropping the 2004 Twin Cities Marathon Champion Augsutus Mbusya of Kenya (2:13:03), John Njorge (2:13:26), and Joseph Mutinda (2:13:47).  It was the first marathon for Hartmann since his 2:15:27 tenth place finish in the Olympic Marathon Trials.

The win caps a strong road-racing season for Hartmann, which included a runner-up finish in the USA 25 km Championships, ninth place in the USA 10 km Championships, and a sixth place finish in the USA 20 km Championships last month.

For complete results, visit the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon results page.

Team Strands Update: USA 10-mile Championships
Team Strands athletes Mike Sayenko (48:28), Mike Reneau (48:53), and Josh Glaab (49:20) raced in the US 10-mile Championships, placing 11th, 15th and 18th, respectively.

Complete results for the 10-mile Championships are available here.

SHOP.ORG SUMMIT – LAS VEGAS, Nev., September 23, 2009 – Strands Recommender a leading provider of personalization and behavioral recommendations announced today that TravelSmith, a Cornerstone Brands company, Body Glove and MotorcycleSuperstore.com (#223 on Internet Retailer’s Top 500) have selected Strands to employ a new level customer experience throughout their websites.  The sites implementation of Strands Recommender will provide automated cross-sell and up-sell opportunities for visitors of the site based on real-time behavioral data, historical data, and merchandising.

“We chose Strands as a partner because we were confident in their ability to help us cross-merchandise our products appropriately, while driving our online conversion rates. The ultimate result was an enhanced user experience and lift in sales”, said Jeff Miller, Director of Interactive Marketing and E-commerce, Body Glove.

Strands Recommender increases conversion rates and average order values by continuously learning about the behavior across all sections of a website.  This flexibility allows for the most relevant and timely recommendations for each site visitor.  “We are happy to become the partner of choice for a growing number of Internet Retailer Top 500 merchants and look forward to rolling out large-scale infrastructure enhancements and innovative features in the coming weeks,” said Jesus A. Pindado, VP and General Manager, Strands Recommender.

About Strands:

Strands is the leading provider of social recommendation technologies that deliver personalized shopping experiences and targeted product recommendations for online shoppers. The Strands Social Recommender™ learns consumer tastes and preferences as they evolve over time and is typically used with email marketing solutions, search engines, shopping carts, and e-commerce platforms.  Strands is headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon and has offices in San Francisco and Madrid, Spain.

To learn more about Strands products and services, visit us at http://recommender.strands.com or call 415.398.4333.

Well, don’t fret because you have other options.

If you are looking for a free personal finance tool as your Mint alternative, moneyStrands has a number of great features to offer including:

Adding Accounts

• Support for more than 8,000 financial institutions, so you can keep refreshing your data automatically with the ability to link your checking, savings, loan and credit card accounts.
• The choice to create manual accounts you can maintain by importing your own data files (CSV, QFX, OFX). This allows you to aggregate all your accounts even if your financial institutions is not on the list.
• The ability to manually key in transactions once you add a manual account.

Insightful Analysis & Comparison

• Widgets that let you know where your money goes, your spending trends and whether or not you are living within your means month-to-month.
• Ability to create custom reports and export data to a CSV file.

Budgeting & Alerts

• Ability to set monthly and annual budgets.
• Ability to configure customizable alerts that let you know of balances running low, large purchases or deposits, budget goals approaching your limit and the like.

Highly Customizable Interface

• A highly customizable widget-based user interface where you can design your own page layout with the personal finance widgets most important to you.
• News feeds from the most popular personal finance portals and blogs.

Security & Privacy

• 256-bit encryption and industry standard security infrastructure. Read more.

Multi-lingual, Multi-Currency

• English and Spanish version of the website.
• Support for 44 currencies.

Mobile Access

• A free iPhone app with unmatched visual drill down spending analysis. Read more.
• A mobile web version for quick access to your balances and more, available at m.money.strands.com

SIGNING UP IS EASY

1. You can sign up for moneyStrands with any valid email address here.
2. Add your financial accounts with daily automatic feeds and you’re in business.

BRING IN YOUR MINT ARCHIVE TOO

Adding your financial accounts gets you going quickly, but if you would also like to transfer your transaction history data from Mint follow these steps:

1. Export your data from Mint.com by logging into your account and visiting the “Transactions” tab. Scroll to the bottom of the list and you will see the “Export all transactions” link in the bottom right hand corner. Click on this link and hit “Save”.
2. Login to your moneyStrands account or click here to create one.
3. Visit the “Accounts” tab and click on the “Add account” button. Look to the bottom of the pop up box and click on the link that says, “Try our manual file uploader.”
4. After you click on this link an account box will appear. Here is where you can name your account, identify the type of account, the initial balance and the currency.
5. Once you click OK, you’ll be taken back to the Account overview tab of your moneyStrands profile. Here you should see the manual account you created. In the lower right hand corner of this box you’ll see the “Import” button and this is where you can manually import your CSV file.
6. After you click Import, the uploader box will appear. You can browse for your CSV file and easily upload your data in seconds.

For more information, check out our how-to video on creating manual accounts:

NOTE: Those who plan to auto link accounts in moneyStrands AND import archived data should be aware that there may be some overlap in transactions since your auto linked account will pull part of your transaction history too. This will only occur the first time you import the data and duplicate transactions can easily be deleted from within the “Details” tab.

As always, please let us know how we’re doing and in what other ways moneyStrands can help you improve you financial well being.

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.

With the addition of our manual upload feature, we’ve received requests to make our iPhone app available on the UK and Canada app stores. We’re happy to announce today that the moneyStrands app is now available on these app stores.

To download the app, click here or search “moneyStrands” in your iTunes application.

To learn more about our iPhone app, check out our recent blog post on v2.5 of the app.

Next week the app will also be added to the Australian and New Zealand App stores. If you are an international user and would like to see the moneyStrands iPhone app on your App store, please contact us.

Based on your current training and previous performances, we are now able to accurately 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, age, gender, location, and shoes.

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

Find your next race in the Events section of Strands and click ‘registered’ to show what you are training for.  As the event approaches, your trainings will be logged toward that event, and you can challenge yourself to beat the prediction.

For all our global fans out there, moneyStrands is pleased to announce the addition of 33 new currencies to our personal finance management tool. With these additions, moneyStrands now supports 44 currencies! (see our full list below) This enables people from all over the world to take control of their finances and save money with moneyStrands’ innovative, easy-to-use platform.

Along with additional currencies, we’ve added the ability to view your financial analysis and overview in your specified currency.

Setting your account to your native currency is simple. Just click on the settings icon in the top right hand corner of your profile. This will open up the setting panel, where you’ll see an option to set your currency. Choose your currency of choice and click on the save changes button to complete the process.

Please note that currency exchange rates vary by day as they are calculated by the most current exchange rate. Here is a complete list of all 44 currencies we now support:

Team Strands athletes Mike Aish and Justin Young will race the IAAF World Championships Marathon tomorrow in Berlin.

Aish, New Zealand’s lone representative in the marathon, has a personal best of 2:13:21 from his victory at the 2008 PF Chang’s Rock and Roll Arizona Marathon in Phoenix.  In January he returned to Phoenix and ran a 2:15:43, placing 6th overall.  His crowning achievement for the year came with an easy victory in tough conditions at New Zealand’s Christchurch Marathon.  Aish ran 2:18:18 in spite of strong winds, snow, and hail.

Aish has competed for New Zealand at numerous championships including the World Cross Country Championships (2000, 2001), World Indoor and Outdoor Track & Field Championships (2003, 2007), and the Olympic Games (2000, 2004).  He will be joined in Berlin by Team Strands teammate Justin Young, who will be representing Team USA.

Young was selected to the USA roster based on his breakthrough run in Rotterdam in April 2008, where he ran 2:13:52.  His time in Rotterdam was the third fastest by an American for the year.  This will the second time Young has represented Team USA — the first coming in 2004 at the IAAF World Half Marathon Championships, where he led Team USA with an 18th place overall finish.

He will be racing in Berlin with Team USA teammates Dan Browne (Portland, Oreg.), Nate Jenkins (Lowell, Mass.), Ed Torres (Boulder, Colo.), and Matt Gabrielson (Minneapolis, Minn.).

Check out the comprehensive men’s marathon preview, and be sure to send encouragement to Mike and Justin on their Strands.com profiles.

The race will be broadcast live on Universal Sports at 5:45 a.m. EST.

If you’re a fan of the moneyStrands iPhone app, be sure to update your current version to the newly released version 2.5. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you’re missing out! We’ve launched a slew of new features that make our app even more user-friendly and convenient for managing your finances on the go. Here’s what’s new:

• The ability to update your bank account data from within the application. This new feature can be found in the upper left hand corner of the My Accounts page. Just look for the curved arrow icon. You can now bring your account data up to date without you having to access the web site.
• A newly designed analysis page allows you to see the total amount of your income or expenses in the pie chart. Click on each color-coded category to see the total amount for those individual categories.
• The new Analysis page also features various time range options you can select. These are located along the top of the page. Scroll through them by sliding your finger across e.g. this month, last month etc.
• A newly designed budget tab allows you to see the total amount spent for all your budget allocations. You can also choose to view monthly or annual budget allocations by selecting the appropriate tab at the top of the page.
• We’ve added new support for our Spanish version

Check it out by downloading the moneyStrands v2.5 app on iTunes.

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.

The 45-min webinar discusses the best practices for optimizing implementation with the Strands Recommender and shares the experience of customer Nimli, an online marketplace for eco-brands as told by CEO/Founder, Rajat Arora. The key points summarize Strands best practices for:

1. Uploading your product catalog
2. Tracking user behavior
3. Installing recommendations for multiple use cases

These guidelines were followed by a walkthrough of Nimli’s current implementation on the product detail and shopping cart pages and ongoing improvements to them. In the next phase, Nimli will use personalized Strands recommendations in the purchase confirmation and abandoned shopping cart emails. Seventeen percent of the revenue is attributable to Strands recommendations, along with a CTR of 40-50% on the recommendations. Rajat also shares his key takeaways and best practices such as treating recommendations as a continuous process for improvement and leveraging the customization features. Learn more today by creating an account at recommender.strands.com.

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.

Armstrong ran 39:06 in her return to the roads, laying claim to her second U.S. Road Championships top-ten finish in her first year as a professional.  Armstrong was fifth in the Road Mile Championships in the Twin Cities last May.  Teammate Zoila Gomez, in the midst of World Championships Marathon preparation, was 31 seconds back in 12th place, and Elva Dryer ran 40:18 for 15th place in the women’s Championship race.

On the men’s side, Cele Rodriguez placed 11th overall, running a 34:07.

For complete results, visit the Bix-7 Results page.

Boston Scientific Heart of Summer 10k – Minneapolis, MN
Also active this weekend was Team Strands athlete Nicole Aish, who overcame a bout of food poisoning and still managed a second-place finish at the Boston Scientific Heart of Summer 10k.  Aish ran 34:56 on the loop course around Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis.

For complete race results, click here.

This week Tú Cuentas was awarded by Actualidad Económica, the Spanish business magazine, as one of the “100 best ideas of the year.”

But our joy does not end here. Our personal finance project has been recognized twice recently:

First, we are tremendously honored by the Actualidad Económica Award of the 100 best ideas of 2008. This is just another endorsement of the enormous value that we believe the tool has and the awesome potential it has to complete the ideas that we plan to develop with BBVA.

The second milestone is the publication by Forrester Research, of a case study monograph. In it, under the title “BBVA’s Tú Cuentas Shows What Next-Generation Online Banking Will Look Like,” Forrester places BBVA and it’s Department for Innovation as a benchmark for innovation in the global financial world, providing detailed information and explaining how Tú Cuentas is better than similar tools in the market. Undoubtedly, something that makes us extremely proud.

With this, we see how the path we started next to a year ago is generating encouraging results and will continue to encourage us to come up with new ideas as we team with BBVA. According to Manuel Castro, director of Innovation and Development of BBVA, “the goal of innovation in the Group is to generate products and services that are useful to people. In that sense, Tú Cuentas is really an example of how to develop innovation in BBVA.”

In the end, the key to success are the users of Tú Cuentas, for using it, for giving us feedback, conveying their ideas, and, above all for positioning the tool as a project made by all and that is enjoyed by everyone.

Therefore: Thanks to all and thanks to you!

(To read the Spanish version of this blog post please visit the BBVA Tú Cuentas blog)

Financial services companies that offer personal finance solutions increase their customer retention by up to four times.  This proves the importance of relying on this technology to build customer loyalty. In Spain, BBVA was the first to implement Strands’ technology last November and to launch the Tú Cuentas service.  A month after it’s launch, more that a 130,000 users had already tried the tool and to this day, more than 250,000 customers have already improved their personal finance management.

Now, Strands is proud to announce that ING has launched TIM for their customers in the Netherlands. The Dutch bank has chosen Strands technology to offer new services to their customers that allow them to better manage their expenses and income.

For the moment, TIM has been launched in the Dutch market in a private beta and only for a limited number of customers who have applied to participate in this pilot phase.  In the future, ING will offer the service to the bank’s online customers in the Netherlands.

The main goal of the new tool is to allow users to have a clear and complete overview of their financial situation.  Some of the innovative functionalities of the new tool include:

Automatic categorization of information:  The application automatically categorizes the users’ information into a set of predefined categories that make it easier to manage (for example, food, household…).

Analysis of a customers’ finances:  Based on the categorization, the information is presented to the user in a graphical way, enabling him to analyze his financial situation to better understand what his money is spent on.  The customer can see the evolution of his income and expenses in time and print pre-defined reports to consult at any time.  The information is displayed on the screen in an simple way that can be easily interpreted at first glance.

Comparisons with other users:  The service also allows users to compare themselves anonymously with other community members of his choice.  This helps customers better understand their financial situation and compare it to other collectives which can be useful to him or her.

Budgets and alerts:  The service allows the user to define his own budgets for different expense categories and set up alerts on their evolution by email or SMS

To learn more about Strands Personal Finance Technology, download the PDF brochure and discover why hundreds of thousands of people are using it to manage their personal finances.

I continue to be impressed with the breadth and depth of BBVA’s social technology offerings; this is the most advanced bank in the world when it comes to social technologies.  For example, they have built Tú Cuentas a tool customers can use to benchmark their spending against their peers, and Actibva, a financial community.  Learned: Once a company gets started with applications, the pace of social applications accelerates.  Have seen it here and at Dell, Intuit, Best Buy, and other places.

Developed by BBVA and Strands, BBVA Tú cuentas (You count, in Spanish) is an innovative personal finance tool that allows online users to better manage their personal finances, offering friendly analysis tools to better understand spending and savings.  Likewise, Strands’ own moneyStrands provides similar services to users in the United States and abroad.

Additionally, Strands recommendation technologies power Actibva Predicciones, a community-based prediction network offered as part of BBVA Actibva.  Through Actibva Predicciones users can ask the crowd’s opinion, express opinions through a market game, and win points and prizes based on accurate predictions.

We are looking forward to further developing our technology through agreements with other banks looking to offer new value-added services to their users.  To learn more about Strands Personal Finance Technology, download the PDF brochure and discover why hundreds of thousands of people are using it to manage their personal finances.

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.

The men’s champion was Ridouane Harroufi of Morocco who narrowly defended his title over Kenyan John Yuda.  The pair ran 17:44 and 17:46, respectively.  Boaz Cheboiywo (Kenya) claimed the final podium position in 18 minutes, 2 seconds.  Complete results are available at http://onlineraceresults.com.

Team Strands Weekend Race Recap
In Duluth, Team Strands athlete Mike Reneau finished fifth at the Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon.  Reneau ran 1:05:56.  Eugene Kebenei of Kenya won the half marathon title in 1:05:15.  Complete Results are available at http://www.onlineraceresults.com.

Ryan Kirkpatrick cruised to a 15-second vistory in 14:52 at the Sailin Shoes 5k in Colorado Springs—missing the course record by only 4 seconds.

Team USA’s Kami Semick (Bend, OR) finished first overall in the Women’s race with a time of 07:37:23, and teammates Devon Crosby-Helms (Seattle, WA) and Meghan Arbogast (Corvallis, OR) finished 07:59:17 and 08:04:28 respectively.

Both Kami and Meghan are local Team Strands runners, and you can discover out how they prepare for upcoming races by checking out their training logs on Strands.com.

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

Meghan’s tip of the week…get regular massage therapy. Massage is a great tool to keep you healthy and running faster than ever. Massage therapy keeps your muscles supple and strong by promoting blood circulation, elasticity, flexibility and relieving stress from both workouts and everyday life. And did I mention; it feels great!

A quick note: after your first session of massage you may not feel like normal, your legs may feel “heavier” than usual. However, with continued therapy you will see the results you are looking for, namely an increase in work capacity and faster times.

Think massage therapy would be too much of a burden on your wallet? Think again. Search online or the phone book for a local college offering massage therapy. Students are always looking for volunteers on which to hone their skills. And it is great for you because you get a person who is enthusiastic about what they are doing and usually at a deeply discounted price. I personally have tried many different massage therapists and can say without a doubt that Suzie, a student at St. Paul College, gives the best massages. In an hour’s time my legs go from tired and sore to feeling refreshed and ready for my next workout.

Massage is just one little piece in the puzzle of becoming the best runner you can be. People often emphasize the importance of a great workout, but you shouldn’t forget that recovery from workouts is equally as important.

2008 Olympic Trials 800m champion; Two-time USA Outdoor runner-up (’06, ’07); 2007 USA Indoor champion; Seven-time NCAA Div. III Outdoor champion (800m, 1,500m)

I can still remember my first season of high school cross country with stunning clarity. It was an exciting time as I embarked on a new chapter of my life. I recall how those first few weeks of conditioning were brutal and I would go home every afternoon barely able to lift my fork at dinner. However, each day after school I would throw on my beat up trainers and head to the track to meet the coach and find out what new form of torture he thought up for us. At the time, I hated everything about running (except maybe the fact that the men’s and women’s team practiced together). I hated the pain; I hated the way my body was always drained of energy and I didn’t like the coach telling me when to go to bed and what to eat. But, the thing I remember hating most was the t-shirts we were given the first week of practice. Now, I certainly don’t claim to be any kind of creative genius, but these shirts were the worst. They were relatively standard issue: white, cotton and our school’s letters on the front. But it was the quote on the back of these shirts that really rubbed me the wrong way. It read, “Our sport is your sport’s punishment.” It was seeing these words and understanding their truth that made me realize how masochistic our daily endeavor really was.

To understand my feelings you have to know what led me to the cross-country team in the first place. In the fall of 1998 I stood just over 5′0″ and weighed in at a whopping 95 lbs. Up to that point, my sport and passion in life had always been soccer. I dreamed of playing on the high school varsity team and perhaps one day in college. However, there was very little interest from the head soccer coach in putting a pre-pubescent fourteen year old anywhere near the playing field when there was a good chance he would be obliterated by fully developed juniors and seniors. Instead, it was suggested that I spend a season with the cross country team and work on my fitness so that when I returned a year later I would be more developed in my cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength. This was tough for me to hear because I loved everything about soccer. I loved the team, the games, even the practices. In fact, I would say that the only part I did not enjoy were the times when we would mess up a drill or show up late to practice and the coach would actually PUNISH us by making us run laps. So, imagine my utter disgust when I was asked to wear shirt advertising the fact that we were, as the coach put it, “running for fun!” I thanked the team captains for my shirt and as soon as I was home tossed it in the bottom of my closet.

I continued to push my body to its limits each day at cross country practice and found myself growing stronger and faster and, of all things, winning races. At first it was the winning part that kept me going. I loved crossing the finish line in first, knowing that on that particular day I defeated an entire field of people in a physical challenge. Of course, as a late bloomer, the cross country course was one of the few places where I could actually achieve such a feat. For years it was the pure desire to win competitions that fueled my training. Though I would dread the countless miles that I would have to log day in and day out to be great, knowing that the next competition was only a few weeks away would keep me going.

Then, somewhere along the line, everything changed. I learned to love the training as much, if not more than the competitions. There was something incredible about going for a ten mile run and knowing that I had seen and accomplished so much, usually before noon! Whenever I ran in a foreign city I would return to my hotel room knowing that few tourists saw the sights and places I had been; those out-of-the-way bike paths and trails that we runners eagerly search for the second we touch down in a new place. Running a workout no longer felt like a punishment of any kind, but rather more of a challenge to surpass my prior achievements. I got to the point where training had become so much a part of my life that my eating and sleeping cycles completely revolved around my workouts. To this day, I live my life the same way. I love to race and feel the rush that competition provides, but I have learned to appreciate the process and cherish the journey.

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.

Aish led the field through most of the race, with help early from Commonwealth Games bronze medalist Andrew Letherby.  The pair brought the field through 5 km in under 16 minutes, but a strong headwind, hail and occasional snow drifts saw them slow from Jack Foster’s national record pace (2:11:18) to the more modest SBS Christchurch Marathon course record (2:15:12) pace.  They came together through the half at 1:07:28, but by mile 18, Aish was out in front alone – forging ahead and extending his lead to a decisive 4-minute margin before claiming a win in his first marathon on home soil.

“It wasn’t a great day to run fast out there,” Aish is quoted in release from the marathon.  “And to be honest, we sort of gave away the records at about 20 km.  I felt good, and the support on the course from spectators was awesome, but the wind was just too tough today.”

In second place was Australian Paul Martinico finishing in 2:22:50, and rounding out the podium was defending champion Rowan Hooper at 2 hours, 24 minutes.

Complete results are available at the SBS Christchurch results page.

Team Strands Weekend Race Recap

At Freihofer’s Run for Women in Albany, Team Strands athlete Elva Dryer placed 18th in 16 minutes, 42 seconds.  This was Dryer’s first race since a 12th place Boston Marathon finish (2:38:50).  For complete results, visit the Freihofer’s results page.

In the Reebok Grand Prix, Meghan Armstrong finished 11th in 16:25.53.  The race was won by Linet Masai (Kenya) in a surprise victory over Beijing gold medal winner and world 5000 meters record holder Tirunesh Dibaba (Ethiopia).  Complete results are available on the Grand Prix results page.

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.

Team Colorado teammates Fernando Cabada and Edwardo Torres finished 13th and 17th, respectively, giving the trio a total of 42—just 5 places shy of 3rd place Kenya.  Ethiopia won the overall team title, with a strong run from men’s champion Tilahun Regassa (28:17) and runner-up Tadese Tola (28:36).  Team USA placed third in the team competition. For complete results, visit the Bolder Boulder elite men’s results page.

Team Strands athletes Josh Glaab and Ryan Kirkpatrick raced the Citizen’s Race at the Bolder Boulder — with finishing times of 30:58 and 31:18, respectively.  Glaab was third overall and the first American finisher in the citizen’s race.

Also this weekend, Team Strands athlete Matt Downin was runner-up at the Ridgeline Ramble in Eugene, Oregon.  Downin was edged by brother Andy for the 10 km title.

Team Strands athlete Justin Young has been selected to represent Team USA at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin this August.

Young was selected based on his breakthrough run in Rotterdam Marathon last April, where he ran 2:13:52. His time in Rotterdam was the third fastest by an American in 2008.  This will the second time Young has represented Team US, the first coming in 2004 at the IAAF World Half Marathon Championships, where he led Team USA with an 18th place overall finish.

He will be racing in Berlin with Team USA teammates Dan Browne (Portland, Oreg.), Nate Jenkins (Lowell, Mass.), Fernando Cabada (Boulder, Colo.), and Matt Gabrielson (Minneapolis, Minn.).

The 12th IAAF World Championships will take place in Berlin from August 15 – August 23.  The men’s marathon is scheduled to take place on Saturday, August 22.

For a complete schedule of events and more information about race, visit the Berlin 2009 web site.

“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!

Zoila Gomez was selected based on her fourth place finish at the 2008 Olympic Trials Marathon where she surprised the field and ran a 1.5-minute best of 2:33:53 – highlight video here.  Gomez also represented Team USA in the 2007 World Championships Marathon, and was third in the 2006 US Marathon Championships where she ran 2:35:26 on a tough Twin Cities course.

The Adams State graduate was an 11-time All-American and six-time NCAA champion at distances ranging from the mile to the 10,000 meters.  Capping her outstanding collegiate career was the 2004 Collegiate Sports Award for the Division II Athlete of the Year.

When she’s not training, Gomez spends much of her time with community outreach programs—teaching English as a Second Language classes to unschooled youth, speaking to local clubs and schools and working with youth in after school programs such as In the Arena.

The 12th IAAF World Championships will take place in Berlin from August 15 – August 23.  The women’s marathon is scheduled to take place on Sunday, August 23.  For a complete schedule of events and more information about race, visit the Berlin 2009 web site.

Check out her training log on Strands.com and see what it takes to represent Team USA.

Hartmann, a Grand Rapids native, gutted out a 1:16:14 finish in pouring rain and strong winds—matching his highest-ever US Championships placing with the second-place finish this weekend.  In 2006, he was runner-up in the US Half Marathon Championships.

Dan Browne (Beaverton, OR) pulled away from the men’s field near mile 13 and extended his lead to 16 seconds over Hartmann before finishing at 1:15:56, to claim this third 25 km title (2003, 2004, 2009).  Browne now has 14 national road titles. Fasil Bizuneh of Flagstaff was third, Ryan Sheehan (Rochester Hills, MI) fourth, and Josh Eberly (Gunnison, CO) fifth.

Watch the post-race interview with Jason Hartmann below:

Complete results are available at the River Bank Run web site.  Addiitonal race coverage is also available at RunTheRoads.com.

Hooley won the marathon by nearly 8 minutes in his first overall marathon title.  He ran a new personal best and course record of 2:18:38 in the process.  The second place finisher, Chad Worthen crossed the finish at 2:26:36 after local 2:18-marathoner John Lucas dropped out late in the race.

Jason Pyles placed second overall, running 1:11:48 in the half marathon and Marian was third overall in the women’s race with a new best of 1:21:57.  Visiting Team Strands masters athlete Paco Ribera of Spain, led from mile 3 of the half marathon until he was directed onto the marathon course, where he fell out of contention after running a mile on the wrong course.  Ribera was a 2:12-marathoner during the 90’s and ran 1:08 in Madrid as a masters athlete earlier this year.

Photo: Amanda Smith, The Eugene Register-Guard

For complete marathon and half marathon results, please visit the Online Race Results.  Another recap of the race is also available from the Eugene Register-Guard.

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

Strands is pleased to announce and introduce Team Strands!

With gear support from Puma Running, Strands is excited to be one of the few non-running company or shoe-store sponsors of runners on the national and world class level. Team Strands currently includes a handful of Olympians, Pan American Qualifiers, NCAA All-Americans, and USATF road-race circuit finalists. Many of them have been running for Team Strands for over a month now, and you can become a fan or catch up with their latest victories on the Team Strands Facebook group.

Team Strands is led by Matt Downin and is currently comprised of 25 runners, but there will undoubtedly be more added to the roster as we continue to grow. All of the runners have been using Strands.com to log their training and preparations for upcoming races, and you can find links to their training logs from the Team Strands page to discover how they train, and see where they’ll be competing next.

A couple of articles have already been generating some buzz about Team Strands, including an interview with Matt Downin on Track Shark.

tunesBag uses Strands™ 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 Strands™, 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 Recommender™ 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 Recommender™ 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.

First off, staying true to our intent to keep improving our site we are happy to announce you can now access moneyStrands on your iPhone using our new native iPhone App. This first version requires that you have an existing registration with moneyStrands and currently let’s you:

• See all your account balances on one screen
• Drill down to the account level and see your transactions organized by date
• Manipulate transaction categories, and assign your own tags
• See your most recent budget status
• Get a list of recent alerts as configurable from within the web app

More cool features and updates are on their way, but we are looking forward to hear back from you in the meanwhile. The app is totally free, and you can now find it in the iTunes Store. Once you install the app we welcome you to rate and write a review as you see fit!

We have not forgotten about those of you not using iPhones either. In fact, since our launch we have had our mobile web site. It is still alive and well ready to get the job done for you on any browser enabled smart phone. Simply type in ‘www.moneyStrands.com’ in your mobile browser, login with your moneyStrands credentials, and “Voila!” you have everything the web version has to offer optimized to be viewed on your mobile screen.

So, how about some potent financial fusion for the road? Yes, we thought so too!

We’d like to send a big “THANK YOU!” to all our private beta testers for their valuable feedback and patience all along. We know any online service is by definition a work-in-progress so admittedly we still have a long list of improvements that are being prioritized and scheduled for upcoming releases. Stay tuned in for frequent updates to the application.

For those of you looking to jump on the bandwagon you may want to download and check out the moneyStrands poster describing how it can complement your existing money management rituals no matter how perfect they may already be

Tell us what you think and let us know what else you would like to see included. Always looking forward to new faces and more shout outs be they rants or raves.

We’ve been busy at Strands Business Solutions, working with some really great partners.

We have some insightful and interesting content about our technology, as well as some case studies up on our new site, and you can check them out here:

The secret sauce: What Strands technology is really all about
http://recommender.strands.com/tech_social.sbs

The Strands recommender API for developers
http:/recommended.strands.com/dev/

Skymall: Personalized Recommendations drive double-digit sales lift
http://recommender.strands.com/ecommerce_case.sbs

IHeartMovies: Personalized recommendations result in double digit CTR (Click through rate)-lift
http://recommender.strands.com/social_case.sbs

We’re also out and about meeting some great people at conferences this month and next, and would like to introduce ourselves!

Here’s where we’ve been and where we’ll be:

eTail West 2009 in Phoenix, AZ
http://www.wbresearch.com/etailusawest/

eTail has been around for 10 years and it is the premier event to discuss e-commerce small and large.

Jane Kwak and Scott Doan were there representing the team and would love to follow up with you.   Email us at sales-sbs@strands.com

South by Southwest: Interactive (SxSWi) – March 13th -17th
http://www.sxsw.com/interactive
Austin, TX

We’ll be making a splash in Austin this year at the Superbowl of internet technology conferences.   If you’re planning on going, be sure to make it to our panel session:

“You may also be interested in…”
How recommendation affects our digital lives.  An interactive discussion about recommendation technology, implementation and analytics.  How can it help your site or app?  Come find out.   Sponsored by Strands Business Solutions.

Drew Olanoff of Strands will be moderating, and the panelists include Mike Hudack from Blip.tv, Trevor Legwinski from Strands Business Solutions, and Alex Hillman, founder of IndyHall.

The session is on Monday the 16th at 5pm, come out and join the discussion!

As those of you closely following the online personal finance and banking space would know, Finovate conference series organized by the authoritative banking technology research firm Online Financial Innovations (also behind the popular blog NetBanker) have become the marquee event in this category. Last year Strands came out announcing the acquisition of Expensr at FinovateStartup in San Francisco and followed that up with the announcement of the NetWorthIQ acquisition shortly thereafter.

This year moneyStrands has been picked as one of the participants of the event that will be held once again in San Francisco on April 28th, 2009. We are looking forward to showcase our new look and a host of new capabilities while getting a chance to see what fellow presenters have been working on.

FinovateStartup’s high octane 7 minute live demo format coupled with plenty of well organized networking sessions against the beautiful backdrop of the “City by the Bay” surely make it a can’t miss gathering to keep up with the pulse of what’s happening on the financial innovation front.

Check out last year’s presentations from FinovateStartup08, and learn more about this year’s event… hope to see you there!

11870.com, the European equivalent to Yelp, is used for people to save, share and keep track of the places and services they like around the world through reviews, pictures and videos.

From now on, 11870.com will offer its users suggestions of places and services based on users interests and behavior. 11870.com will use Strands Social Recommender, which delivers advanced social recommendation and personalization technology, as an easy-to-use Strands hosted service.

The recommender works in several areas:

Personalized recommendations: when user log in, they will find a list of places and services tailored just for them.

Recommendations within a specific location: each city or location includes a “recommendations” feature, where users will find personalized recommendations of places and services within that region.

Recommendations inside categories: when you visit a category such as “hotels in London” or “Spanish restaurants in San Francisco”, the recommender suggests each user a number of services that might fit with his or her interests.

Similar services: when you go to a product page, the system suggests a list of similar services, broadening the list of options for you to chose from. This is available both for registered and non-registered users. For example, if you chose an Italian restaurant, the recommender will suggest similar Italian restaurants.

Strands is especially happy to be involved in this project, as 11870.com is one of the most successful European start-ups. Watch them carefully!

You can read more information on the 11870.com blog.

Thanks to everybody who attended Recked, the informal event for engineers interested in recommender systems. It was awesome. And thanks to Robert Gaal for putting the event together.

You can find the three presentations (Strands, Wakoopa and Reccoon) below.

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!

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!

Launching in early November, Strands Social Recommender™ will be powering personalized product recommendations for SkyMall’s extensive online store of over 7,500 gifts, gadgets and home innovations—from the unusual to the practical—just in time for the holiday season.

Strands Social Recommender will provide an enhanced shopping experience to SkyMall customers, providing highly relevant recommendations to help them discover products based on their taste and intent.  Analyzing thousands of customer touchpoints, Strands Social Recommender “learns” what SkyMall shoppers are looking for, and then dynamically recommends tailored suggestions, while they browse.

We are thrilled to be working with SkyMall!

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

Business owners and charities shop at DollarDays to find deals on small business-sized orders for more than 30,000 consumer products–from toys and household décor to apparel, electronics and seasonal merchandise.

Strands will also offer a free 30-day trial of Strands Social Recommender™ to DollarDays’ 1.1 million retail customers/members.  Starting October 1st, members will be able to trial the same recommendation and personalization technology powering www.dollardays.com without any setup fees and implementation costs.

DollarDays adds 900 new members each day that include a variety of retailers from convenience stores, medium-sized brick & mortar retailers, shopping mall kiosk companies, discount stores, seasonal shops to large established companies.

Strands Social Recommender™ is a SaaS plug-and-play recommendation engine that can be easily and quickly installed by eCommerce and Media Web sites. The Strands Social Recommender can be 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.

We are thrilled to be working with Dollar Days and its network of members!

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

Developed by BBVA and Strands, BBVA Tú cuentas (You count, in Spanish) is an innovative personal finance tool that allows online users to manage their personal finances better, offering friendly analysis tools to better understand spending and savings. A 100% customizable interface, personalized suggestions, and versions for the iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia phones are some of the unique characteristics of BBVA Tú cuentas, being offered to BBVA customers.

BBVA has 4.1 million online customers performing over 1.3 billion annual online transactions. Strands Social Recommender, a key component in the solution, will help BBVA better understand its customers’ needs and behavior, offering them personalized suggestions of financial and non-financial products.

BBVA Tú cuentas is launched today in private beta with the following features:

- Analysis of personal financial information. BBVA Tú cuentas displays a graphical representation of the customers’ financial health, break-down of their income and expenses, as well as their evolution through time. Charts help customers better understand their finances and see whether they have done better or worse than planned over time.

- Categorization of transactions. BBVA Tú cuentas organizes all transactions into a series of categories, and customers can also use personal tags if they prefer them. Having data well organized can help customers make better financial decisions.

- Comparison tools. Customers can tag themselves and BBVA Tú cuentas will compare them to similar customers. Offering meaningful comparisons with similar customers will help people better understand their personal finances and put them into context.

- Budget Goals. BBVA customers can set up their budget and keep their spending within the limits of what they can realistically afford. Additionally, they can choose to be notified if they happen to go over their set budget.

- Alerts. Customers can configure their own financial alerts and BBVA Tú cuentas will notify clients whenever they cross predefined limits. To round things off, customers can also combine these Alerts with their Budget Goals.

- Just for me. The collective knowledge of BBVA user base allows for BBVA Tú cuentas to offer an automatic selection of personalized suggestions for customers to make better decisions. (1) Practical financial and consumer tips to inform customers before they make money choices; (2) short list of most liked products matching each customer spending patterns; (3) financial products and services that may better address customer needs; (4) relevant facts and insightful aggregate stats based on community behavior.

- Aggregation of accounts. BBVA Tú cuentas allows BBVA clients to keep all of their financial data conveniently in one place. In addition to aggregating their BBVA accounts, customers can automatically add any other bank and utility accounts they may have.

Other key characteristics of the Strands personal finance solution are:

1.- A powerful widget platform enables maximum customization with minimum set-up time. Each of our 20 widgets is a little application that performs a specific feature. Clients can personalize each tab with the widgets they choose, to view the content they need.

2.- Powered by Strands Social Recommender, BBVA Tú cuentas provides users with the best personalized suggestions possible, helping them find new ways to save money and invest.

3.- It comes with 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.

BBVA 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.

We are thrilled to be working with them in this amazing solution!

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.

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Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist, MyStrands

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.

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.

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.

• 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:

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!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXb8OO9-sfg

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!

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).