Tom Printy’s Blog

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 create a page for me to keep track of the players in this space. As new companies are discovered in this space I will document them here.

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, I turned it off.

update July 14, 2007

Loomia has landed a great cleint with The Wall Street Journal. Their widget shows stored that other people have read based on what you are reading. This is like Amazon’s people who bought this also bought this feature.

This is a nice deal for Loomia, it should help their exposure and having their “Powered By” link there really helps get the word out about them. Good Job Guys!

I really like the way Loomia works. They are a web service and have what appears to be three distinct products, a Free version a Media version and a Retail version. The free version is add supported, the media version is $50.00 per month. The reatail version is 2.5 percent referred sales. They are really covering the bases here with thier pricing models.

Setting up Loomia for you site is really easy. First you must publish feed of the items that you want recommendations for. Once you have done this you setup javascrip widgets in your site. These widgets interact with their service to produce content for you site. This is a very smart way to get rapid adoption of their service. This was so easy that I have set this up on my site here. I am using the clickstream widget with the recommendations showing on the left hand side of all my pages.

If Loomia really wants to get wide acceptance they will offer bloggers a rev-share with their free widget. A lot of bloggers are looking for a new way to make money from their blogs.

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.

Matchmine: Matchmine is a MA 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.

Spotback: According to thier website they are a recommender system that uses both collaborative filtering and aggregated knowledge technologies. They offer widgets that you use on your website or blogging platform. Once you add thier widget to your site you get instant Content recommendation, Rating tools, Top stories and Tag clouds. This is a very interesting approach to get adoption of your product.

They also offer a browser plugin that allows the user to rate items directly from the browser. I assume you are rating the whole page unless you are browsing flickr where their software seems to understand individual photos and that you want to rate only that photo.

If you are a user of their service you can login to the site and view your recommendations and what you have rated.

All of these services that they are offer makes this seem like they are trying to be many different things. This feels like a cross between MyBloglog + Del.icio.us + Loomia without any operant way to make money other than inserting ads into the recommendations. As you can see I have installed thier widget on my blog as well to see how it works. It was the easiest intall of a service like this to date since it was a native Wordpress plugin. You can see the rating widget below each post and a recommendation widget in the side bar.

Minkey a new content based recommendation system surfaced today. Minkey uses a widget based approach to add personalized content to your website. From the looks of the widget it appears that they are targeting blogs and other content based websites. They claim that adding their widget will increase page views, create higher traffic, create more return visits, and of course create more revenue. The widget auto discovers content on your site and makes recommendation based upon that. I assume they are using some type of “click streaming” since there is not rating widget. Also it appears that they are using cookies to tie a user to their profile, perhaps annoying to some users who delete cookies often.

As well as offering the widget they are offering stastics based upon the widgets interaction with the users browser.

Adding the widget is easy. Create an account add your rss feed, customize your widget then insert the provided java script. This widget was much easier to install then the one by Loomia, however the Spotback widget has star ratings which I prefer. I will watch this widget and see what happens. Pricing appears to be based on CPM with the first 30 days being free.

Freshnotes a content recommendation service. The offer products that produced recommended content to site visitors. They were founded in 2005 and are a privately held company.

Rollsense claims to be the “Google Adsense” of content. Their widget recommends content based upon the content of your site or blog. It also embeds “targeted ads” that the blog owner gets a piece of the action on.

Colrity provides search and content discovery widgets for websites. They are paid through a shared advertising model with the publishing website.

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.

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