2009

Last week we looked at Baynote, a recommendations company that focuses on real-time community behavior instead of personalization. Today we look at a company that takes a broader approach: richrelevance uses personalization extensively, plus the wisdom of the crowds when relevant. richrelevance claims that its approach is “adaptive AI” and that customers such as Sears … Read more

A new charity effort called Twestival.fm, which bills itself as “a kind of Twitter-driven Live Aid”, aims to raise $20,000 USD in 2 weeks using music donated by artists on Twitter. People can download MP3s for free, but are encouraged to give a donation in exchange. Twestival.fm currently has donated tracks from over 350 artists, … Read more

We’ve written a lot about how Barack Obama’s Internet strategy was a significant reason for his success last year – first in the Democratic nomination, then the Presidential election. We’ve analyzed how the Obama campaign made masterful use of social media and we’ve commented on Obama’s use of the Internet as President – not to … Read more

People’s Music Store is a newly launched DIY online music store. It was created by the founder of MP3 reseller Bleep.com, Ged Day. People’s Music Store styles itself as “the first music store entirely powered by music fans.” Basically the service allows you to set up your own custom-designed record store, with music chosen from … Read more

In a recent post, we looked at recommendation systems, briefly reviewing how Amazon and Google have implemented their own systems for recommending products and content to their users. We had the opportunity to speak with Satnam Alag, author of the recently published Collective Intelligence in Action, about what makes for a good recommendation system, where … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we continue our series on recommendation technologies with a special RWW Live podcast and a review of Baynote; we analyze a new Google product called Latitude, which could change the way you network on mobile phones; we describe how … Read more

Baynote is one of a number of recommendation technology providers which licenses its product to commercial companies. As we’ll see in this article, Baynote places particular emphasis on real-time user behaviors – which Baynote claims goes beyond Amazon’s “first generation” approach to recommendations. One thing that we’ve discovered so far in our series on recommendation … Read more

Band Metrics is a new semantic web application, currently in private beta but about to go public, which aims to give musicians the ability to measure the success of their music online. In particular musicians will be able to get metrics showing them who’s listening to, sharing and talking about their music across various social … Read more

ReadWriteWeb has been running a special series on recommendation engines and this episode of RWW Live is part of that. The show features 3 exciting and very knowledgeable guests: Jesús Pindado, Strands Vice President, Business Solutions; Yosi Glick, Jinni CEO & Co-Founder; and David Selinger, richrelevance CEO & Co-Founder, who previously led the R&D arm … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we continue our series on recommendation technologies, outline 10 ways that social media will change in 2009, look at 8 mobile technologies to watch in 2009-10, review the state of blog search, and more. Also we note the highlights … Read more

Earlier this week we posted a Guide to Recommender Systems, as part of our series on recommendation technologies. In this post we look at some of the challenges in building or deploying a recommender system. And yes, Napoleon Dynamite is one of them. This week an event called Recked was held in Amsterdam, aimed at … Read more

Expert System is a perhaps little known “semantic intelligence” company; but it has 15 years of experience in the tech industry, 115+ employees and is bringing in a very solid $12 Million a year in revenues from over 100 corporate and government clients (at 40% growth over the past two years). The Italian company’s core … Read more

One of the longest-running requests for Google’s web mail service Gmail has been for offline functionality. Now, finally, Gmail users will be able to type up those emails inside an airplane. Google has just announced offline Gmail support via Gmail Labs – to start with for consumers and businesses using Google Apps, but regular Gmail … Read more

Noovo is a full-on lifestreaming / blogging / bookmarking / everything (except social network) app that launched out of private beta last week. It calls itself a “social discovery engine”; and recommendations technology is part of the overall package. The company Noovo is based in Slovenia, has been around for a long time and counts … Read more

We’re running a special series on recommendation technologies and in this post we look at the different approaches – including a look at how Amazon and Google use recommendations. The Wikipedia entry defines “recommender systems” as “a specific type of information filtering (IF) technique that attempts to present information items (movies, music, books, news, images, … Read more