Tom Printy’s Blog

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Seems like the recommender system space may heat up a little more this year so I copied my recommender systems review to its’ own page . I have also added the following review of Minematch.

Matchmine is a CA based company that uses demographic data to help with the “Cold Start” problem that many recommender systems face. They have built a flash application to help recommend movies (soon other categories). They would also like to partner with other recommender systems to collect data. I can only assume that what they are looking to do it collect market data that they can sell. I think that selling this data has great potential. “Data is king” and isn’t that what the new internet economy is all about selling data? It will be interesting to see if any other recommender systems partner with matchmine.

I have been watching the recommender systems space ever since I joined Sourcelight Technologies back in 2004. It is an interesting space that I don’t think many media outlets understand. So I thought I would put out some information about companies that I think are the major players in this space.

Sourcelight Technologies: This is the company that I have the most experience since I worked full time for them and still do on a consulting basis. The Company has been in business since 1997. It was started by a guy who owned a chain of video stores and some students and professors from Northwestern University in Evanston IL. Obviously I am biased towards the recommendation engine that Sourcelight produces.

Choicestream: This is the 500 pound gorrilla, based out of Cambridge MA. They have raised a ton of cash in the last couple of years. I beleive something like 35 million from at least 3 different rounds of funding. Currently they are being used by AO, Yahoo, SmartBargains.co, eMusic, Vongo, Akimbo, Movielink, DirectTV and Overstock.com. While this is an impressive list I am not ceratin that these are enough customers to satisfy thier investors. From dealing with them as a competitor the prices they are offering thier clients are WAY to low to support thier business. As of yet I am not convinced that thier recommendations are any better than any other approach.

Agent Arts (Fast Search): This company was based in Australia and now seems to be based in California. They make a system for recommendations as well as promotions. They primarily seem to be concentrated on mobile systems including Verizon, and infosapace mobile. I have never used thier technology so I cannot comment on how good or bad it is. I have spoken to Andrew Coates on the phone and through email. Seems like they are on a roll since they have been acquired.

Media Unbound: This is another group based out of Cambridge Ma. They have a bunch of people listen to music and record various aspects of music in order to recommend music. I have had Lunch with Michael Papish and he is a very easy going laid back guy who really gets music. So much so that he has his own record label, how cool is that? These guys also are little know to the media, however they power the recommendations that are used on MTV’s URGE digital music network. (Congrats guys). Thier music recommendations are super and I really would like to see a pandora like service from these guys.

Aggregate Knowledge: This company is realatively new and they claim to offer the first Collective Discovery Service. Not sure what this means really but if it means that you aggregate the data collected across multiple clients then this is in fact not a first and I am sure the all the other companies in this list do the same thing. This company is currently venture backed and has raised 25 million. As of yet I am not sure if they have any clients. Since there are no clients I cannot comment on how good thier recommendation engine is. I think it is intersting that they call thier product “Discovery Engine” copying Sourcelight Technologies.

Pandora (Savage Beast): Everyone’ favorite free online streaming system tried to seel thier recommendation system before making a go of it as Pandora. They follow Media Unbound’s model where they have employees listen to music and record attributes of that music. As far as I can tell they are no longer interested in selling thier recommendation technology but rather selling advertisements on thier site and in thier streams. They are going to seriously get hurt if they RIAA dosen’t relax thier royalty payments for interent broadcaster.

Criteo: The only company that I know of participating in the netflix prize contest. They are based out of France and seem to have picked up glowria as client. They supposedly have an api but the documentation for it seems to be down. They seem to have raised 3 million euros and have recently opened an office in California. Other then this I don’t know a whole lot about them.

Loomia : I actual thought that this company had gone away but it appears that they are back. They offer a total ASP solution with a free ad supported or pay per transaction solution. It seems thier only clients are some very low traffic web sites. These are the only guys who offer a free ad suported service. I actually tried this service on my old blog and it only ever recommended one story, Iturned it off.

Cleverset: This is another new company in this space. They are interesting in that you can sign up and start using thier service right away. Esentaily what they do is recommend products via javascript code on the checkout page of a website. This estentially follows Amazons user who bought this also bought….. They have clients like 1800backery.com and alpineer.com. From reading thier blog it seems like they are building the company to be aquired. I wish these guys luck.

I hope to keep this list up to date. If you have something to add please feel free to leave more inforation in the comments.

Fast Search a company in Norway has just acquired Agent Arts, a recommender system that has been focused on mobile systems. This is great for the Agent Arts guys. I was talking with them when I was looking for my last full time gig. They were based in Australia at the time but they moved to California sometime this year.

While this is well and good what frustrates me the most is that my past fulltime employer Sourcelight Technologies is never mentioned. Sourcelight has been in business for 10 years and has powered the movie recommendations on Hollywoodvideo.com Moviegallery.com comcast.net and digitarian.dk . So why do people ignore Sourcelight? Do they not know about it? The amazing part of this is that there is no VC money involved just some smaller investors. The really interesting part is that Sourcelight started by creating Kiosks that people could use in the store to get recommendations. These kiosks were deployed in Blockbuster stores in Chicago and Texas and other places.

So what does the recommender space look like? It is highly competative. There are a few clients and you always are bidding against the same competitor. I wonder when some of these companies will start cahnging direction or closing. I also think Choicestream will be interesting to watch. They have raised a ton of cash and thier burn rate has to be incredible. I haven’t heard a lot from them lately so I wonder if thier business is slowing.

Recommendation systems are still in thier infancy. The eventaul goal of all these systems in advertising. The company that does that the best first will win this game.

Goodbye Slashgeo. I am sorry to see you go. It was nice to have a neat little blog to keep track of everything geospatial. I guess the rest of us are going to have to pick up the slack.

Thanks for you efforts and hope to see you back in the blogspehere soon.