Posts Tagged ‘recommendation’
All posts tagged recommendation.
Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.
The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.
It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »
I wanted to dash off a quick note and point everyone to an interesting conversation that happened here on The Guidewire. I’ve written about Songkick a couple of times recently, giving the service praise for its focus on semantic-based recommendation for consumers. In my most recent post, I specifically raved about its new capability of recommending concerts to users based on their music preferences. My friend Shellee, very much a tech outsider and a live music fanatic, gave Songkick a spin and wasn’t as happy with the results. She said so in the post’s comments and, after a request from me, the company responded to her in kind.
I say this not to needle Songkick, who posted an excellent, well-reasoned reply to Shellee, but to again stress the importance of the mass consumer, a theme we return to repeatedly on this blog. Rave reviews from The 250 are great in the short run, but end-user stress-tests are the only reviews that truly matter in the end. It’s a good lesson and ego-check as we tech insiders continue to debate our role in product analysis.
I met with Songkick at SXSW, a Y Combinator startup that aims to bring live music to the masses. The London-based company is announcing some exciting new features next week (I call it “music semantics”) but for now, I’ll share what interests me about its current offerings.
CEO Ian Hogarth wants to “change the way people think about their Friday nights.” His reasoning is simple: when consumers want to see a movie, they do a quick check on Fandango or Moviefone and head out. Going to a concert just isn’t as easy. Even following the tour dates of mainstream artists is a headache, with listings and ticket sales scattered far and wide online. Songkick scrapes all those sites for you, grabbing venue and ticket info from major ticket hubs, as well as MySpace pages and music blogs. Users have a one-stop-shop for band listings, in addition to an instant price comparison list of competing vendors.
That’s all well and good for music lovers but what I really like about Songkick is its intent to appeal to the mass consumer. Through several innovative tools, the company wants to create more music lovers out of its audience. The Songkicker plug-in for iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player scans users’ music catalogs and lets them know of artists in their library playing nearby. Bandsense is a distributed ad platform that recommends area bands based on your IP address (check it out at www.missingtoof.com). And Battle of the Bands is a fun little app that combines MySpace data, blog mentions and Amazon sales to produce an Alexa-like ranking chart for bands.
Throughout our conversation, I kept attempting to bring Ian back to the technology; how recommendation and discovery are a hot market sector and that his algorithms could possibly be applied to other areas. But he would have none of it. Songkick isn’t interested in boasting about the brilliance of its technology. They’re singularly focused on using that technology to make live music more approachable to the general public. It’s a refreshing attitude to encounter in a startup and bodes well for the company’s future success. With most companies in tech today, considerable force is usually necessary to make them keep end-users top-of-mind. Songkick has been there from the start.
Sometimes, my ego gets the better of me when I read an article like this. I morph into an immature teenager and must resist the urge to whine, “But I said that first!” I suppose I’ll take the path of a modern adult and blog about it instead – the 21st century method of whining, if you will.
Back in July of 2007, I wrote a market analysis for The Guidewire Report, snappily titled “You Can’t Spell Internet Without an ‘I’.” In it, I posited that the growing sector of recommendation “might very well be Web 3.0,” that “the era of the one-size-fits-all Web page was over” and the current Internet was being transformed into “an individually customizable Web.” If I really wanted to feed my ego, I could tell it that the Guardian writer was inspired by my lyrical prose. But of course I wasn’t the first to hypothesize that Web 3.0 is about personalization and recommendation and I won’t be the last.
At the time, Aggregate Knowledge, Loomia, and VortexDNA received mention as movers in the space. Since then, Aggregate Knowledge seems to have dropped off the radar a bit, while companies like Matchmine and Seethroo have offered their own takes on recommendation, as well as a fascinating service called Strings. Read the rest of this entry »
