Taste Sharing For Web Personalization

Startupalooza - Portland, OR - 29-Mar-2008

Taste sharing for web personalization

2004 2005 2006 2007 200813

39 41

97

128

Employees

Headquarters in Corvallis, OR

Sales in 2007: $12M

Total funding: $55MFunding in 2007: $49M

2008 is year to market

Investment sources

Media group

Retail Bank

VCTeam

Financials

BusinessHosted solutions to help business deliver

the right content, to the right people,

at the right time

End UserConsumer facing services to help people discover content

Products


About MyStrands

2

Several product announcements in Q2 2008

MyStrands builds recommendation technology for online and mobile web

personalization

• Content and platform agnostic• Scalable catalog and query support• Extensible recommendation strategies• Robust for large-scale deployments• Instant recommendations with no training

RC

RS CS

TWITCH

CORR

ART

H

http

http

WWW


Web Personalization & Cold Start Problem(s)

3

Adapting as our preferences vary over time is a related challenge

RC

RS CS

TWITCH

CORR

ART

H

http

http

WWW

Learning recommender ground truth (solved by harvesting non-personally identifiable data)

Understanding the audience & each member(solved by millions of members/hundreds of visits)

Personalizing the experience from the first visit(solved by portable taste data)


www.dataportablity.org

• “individuals have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it”

4

Half the solution towards web personalization

• “invent nothing” - evangelize, standardize, and build libraries

• discussions tend to be about user-contributed content, not as much about sharing social networks(OpenSocial/MS Live Content API)

• monetization problem - who pays to run APIs and why should they?


Taste Sharing for Web Personalization

5

Taste data has value for us and sites

• data about our preferences/tastes learned from our activities on sites

• The Web 2.0 Golden Rule - Do for others as you would have them do for you - under the user’s control - and the blessings of network effects shall be yours.

• Build on

• “our tastes are ours to share (or not)”


Challenges - Web 2.0 style and otherwise

6

2008 is going to be interesting year for data portability

• Creating open organization(s) with industry participation to create open standards, build software, launch prototypes.

• Educating businesses to examine their current ideas about data so that they can understand and embrace The Web 2.0 Golden Rule.

• Building privacy-protecting solutions, based on the idea that we should be in control of own data, that comfort even informed users.

Contact

MyStrands760 SW Madison Suite 106Corvallis, OR 97333USATel + 1 541 753 4426Fax + 1 541 754 6416


Taste Sharing For Web Personalization

Technology

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