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Posts Tagged ‘Discovery Engine’

DFJ-Backed Clixtr Marries Photos With Location, Launches Website

Clixtr, a startup that first presented itself to a wide audience at this year’s TechCrunch50 Conference (our take), kicked off things with a relatively limited offering – a paid iPhone app – but is now upping its game with the launch of an accompanying location-aware photo sharing website.

It’s also dropping the price of its iPhone application to zero, so if you and the rest of the family will be taking pictures today over Thanksgiving dinner, take notice.

The fledgling company, founded by MIT and Stanford grads, aims to turn smartphones into what they refer to as ’smartcameras’ or ’social cameras’. The basic idea behind the service is that when you’re at an event, be it a birthday party at your home or at a massive rock concert, photos from multiple people attending could be turned into one single, centralized photo album for all to enjoy.

To make this work, even when pictures are taken by people you do not know, Clixtr uses location as the tying factor. The app essentially combines the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera and built-in GPS to geo-tag photos and determine when photos are being taken at the same location. Clixtr thus enables users to automagically create instant, location-aware, group photo albums in real-time (lots of buzzwords there, but that’s the way it works).

Before, Clixtr users could only add photos to albums using the now free iPhone application (which cost $2.99 at launch), but with the launch of the corresponding website at Clixtr.com anyone can now contribute to the group albums. Since the application can also detect which other events are happening around you based on where you’re taking photos, Clixtr can double as a discovery engine for other happenings going on around you.

No word on if and when the company plans to extend its service to include other smartphone platforms.

Clixtr founder and CEO Fergus Hurley waved goodbye to his PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT to incorporate the startup back in 2008, and went on to raise an undisclosed amount of seed financing from Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in March 2009.

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Rippol’s Video Discovery Engine Launches To The Public

Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp.

We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

But the site also has a social component, allowing users to identify each other as friends by importing their social graphs from services like Facebook and Gmail. You can use Facebook chat to talk with these friends in real-time. And today, it’s launching a new feature: Friendcasting, which allows users to share a interesting video in real-time with your friends on the site. There’s also a ‘global view’ that lets you see a stream of videos that are being watched by other users on the site, which helps surface content your friends haven’t come across.

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Will Google Listeners Bankrupt Lala?

The question period after today’s launch of Google’s OneBox music search focused a great deal on the project delivering users with easy “legitimate music” versus other illegitimate sources. While discussion was centered around squashing the millions of illegal torrent files available for download, the truth is that a number of streaming music sites like Imeem have worked hard to pen legitimate label deals. While some may wonder why iLike and Lala were chosen above others to benefit from the Google deal, many more are worried that the companies will be unable to offset label fees via premium subscriptions and advertising.

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Said rap superstar Mos Def, “I personally wasn’t happy to see how the labels responded to Napster. I thought that was a missed opportunity with the fans. It seems to me that this project revisits this with a better perspective towards the fans- not from an adversarial point of view. ” Still, many wonder whether this new fan-friendly discovery engine will bankrupt those footing the bill. While iLike likely has a huge amount of resources from MySpace, Lala is betting on the fact that users will use up their initial 25 song credits and take the plunge to premium.

Last month MOG CEO David Hyman spoke to ReadWriteWeb about the launch of his subscription service. When asked if he would offer free listening, Hyman declined saying, “The problem with free services is that if too many people use them, you can’t offset the licensing fees with ad revenue. There’s only so much you can do with advertising, but the [pure] subscription model ensures that you’re running something sustainable.”

In anticipation of a future European launch, one reporter suggested Spotify as a legitimate source for streaming music to Google VP of Search Marissa Mayer. Said Mayer knowingly, “Your suggestion is duly noted.”

If Hyman is as confident in his hunch about freemium services as we think he is, he may even be hoping that Spotify cuts a European Google deal and burns through its cash before its US launch. It’ll be interesting to see if Google will be the catalyst in swaying listeners to pay for their purchases or if streaming music startups will continue to tweak and revisit their monetization strategies.

For complete launch details visit Frederic Lardinois’ ReadWriteWeb coverage.

Photo Credit: Ibrahim Lujaz

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New Video Discovery Site Promises To Make a Rippol In The Stream (1,000 Beta Invites)

The last thing the world needs is another video site, right? Well, that’s not stopping Aaron Crayford, who convinced a bunch of his supercomputer engineer buddies to put together Rippol, a video discovery site that blends hardcore machine learning with social streams. Rippol (not to be confused with rrripple, the media sharing site) is coming out of stealth today into private beta. Be one of the first 1,000 people to try it by signing up here. (If you don’t get an invite, the site will be launching publicly in a month at our next Realtime Crunchup).

Rippol is still in raw form (the UI needs more polish, not all the buttons work the way they should), but it is experimenting with some powerful ideas in online video. You can sign in with Facebook Connect, or create your own account (it will also support Twitter and Gmail sign-ins soon). Once you have friends on the system, it lets you discover new videos through your friends. The homepage is an activity stream of the videos you and your friends have watched, favorited, rated, and reviewed. And a global stream in the left column shows what the broader Rippol community is watching. Links to any video can also be shared on Facebook or Tweeted out.

You can click on any video mentioned in the stream to watch it, and chat with friends via Facebook Chat, which pops up from the bottom left of the browser window. Displaying videos as a realtime stream of information is a discovery mechanism that we are beginning to see in cutting-edge video sites like Magma (our review). And I suspect it will become adopted more broadly.

However, Rippol doesn’t rely solely on your friends’ activities to help you find interesting videos. The site is also a standalone video discovery engine in its own right. You can watch about 500,000 videos right now in the Rippol player, which can be detached like a chat box and moved around in front of the screen, while you search for more videos, check out your stream or chat with friends.

Rippol ingests videos from other sites like Hulu and YouTube and then it runs them through its “Butterfly Network” (see diagram at right, click for larger image). Here is where the machine learning comes in. The Butterfly Network looks at all of your video-related activities in the site, those of your friends, and those of people in your demographic. All of the videos on the site have particularly good metadata (titles, genres, actors, descriptions), which lets Rippol take advantage of data-mining techniques to recommend videos for you. It creates a genre cloud for different categories of videos (TV Shows, Movies, Sports, News),and then generates a list of videos for each genre tag you click on.

Depending on what genre of videos you are looking for, Rippol’s realtime ranking servers shows you videos associated with ones you’ve watched or liked in the past, your friends have watched or liked, and people in your demographic have watched or liked. If you click on comedies and martial arts videos, those will rank higher for you in the future.

Since Rippol has all the realtime stream data as well, the video results are skewed towards what people are watching right now. Your own actions impact the rankings the most, followed by those of your friends, followed by those of people in your age and gender group. And if you are a 45-year-old male who tends to watch videos more like a 25-year-old male, it adjusts the demo it associates with your actual watching habits.

The system is supposed to get smarter the more you use it, and the more your friends use it. So it’s hard to evaluate how effective it will be right now with only a handful of users, but it is a promising approach. Soon users will be able to suggest videos to add to the site. (Crayford says he’s come up with a novel way to filter out inappropriate videos from the broader community by taking into account what is acceptable to different social groups).

Crayford’s last company, Vusion, specialized in high-definition video streaming over the Web. It’s patents, intellectual property, and other assets were acquired by the Clarendon Foundation in June, 2009. Craydon learned from that experience that advanced technology can only take you so far, and this time around he is trying to create a complete consumer experience rather than just an enabling technology. Rippol is completely bootstrapped so far.

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Deezer Raises $9.5 Million More For Free Music Search And Streaming Service
Music search and discovery engine Deezer has raised €6.5 million ($9.6 million) in a second round of financing, bringing the total amount invested in the French upstart to approx. €12.2 million ($18 million). The additional capital was raised from from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, thus joining the historical shareholders who make up the DOTCORP Asset Management funds.

Deezer is one of the most popular music services in Europe. Formerly known as BlogMusik, it ran into lots of legal trouble when it launched its free music streaming service a couple of years ago. However, unlike many other ventures of the kind the startup turned itself around, reached essential agreements with copyright associations, and ultimately relaunched as a ‘legitimately’ free music search engine back in August 2007.

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TC50: YourVersion Wins Peoples’ Choice Award In The DemoPit

The second company to emerge from the TechCrunch50 DemoPit as a peoples’ choice winner is YourVersion, a discovery engine that looks to help recommend new content based on your past searches and interests. The company was among the top two recipients of TechCrunch50 tokens, which are used by conference attendees to vote on their favorite companies in the DemoPit, and shares today’s Peoples’ Choice Award with oDesk.

YourVersion launched today, and looks to help users search for content across blogs, multimedia sites, Twitter, and other social sites, updating with relevant content in real-time. Rather than force users to run the same searches multiple times or rely on a clunky bookmark system, YourVersion pays attention to your interests, and presents results accordingly. You can browse through results from all of these content sources, indicating which ones you like (or dislike) using thumbs up or thumbs down functions.

For mobile users, YourVersion offers an iPhone application, which you can download for free on the App Store here. There’s also a Firefox extension that allows users to quickly share their favorite blog posts and news articles on Facebook, Twitter, and other services.

Q: So it’s like Digg and reddit without needing user submissions? Do you have commenting?
A: Yes, this also helps prevent the editorial tone you get on those sites. We will have comments in the future.
Q: How do you get more passive discovery?
A: There’s a line between implicit and explicit. You’ve got thumb, share, etc as explicit. Below that is implicit — if people repeatedly go to the same sites again and again on the same topics, that’s a good indicator.

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Grooveshark Launches Subscription VIP Service

Not to be outdone by recent announcements from streaming music site Spotify, Gainesville-based Grooveshark announced a $3 per month or $30 per year ad-free Grooveshark VIP service. Grooveshark VIP offers users early access to development pipeline releases including early testing on the upcoming Grooveshark iPhone application and early August 24th access to Grooveshark 2 – the site’s next generation. In addition to offering users WordPress and Facebook integration, Grooveshark spokesperson Josh Bonnain laid down some key differences between Spotify and Grooveshark.

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Bonnain went on to explain that Grooveshark’s subscription services cost less than a quarter of Spotify’s monthly fees, and will offer many of the same features. For instance, both services stream ad-free music and both allow members to connect and discover premium content. Nevertheless Bonnain points out, “We’re in 231 countries, we’re web-based and our users can upload their entire catalogue to our site. Spotify requires users to install it on every machine they own and they’re only available in a few countries.”

Additionally, Bonnain went on to point out the Grooveshark artists community and quiet honestly, we were thrilled to discover it. Beyond the fantastic experience of the music discovery engine and the listener-focused features of the site, Grooveshark actually has a Bandcamp-style service for artists to promote themselves.

The Artist Dashboard allows bands to track their most popular songs, fan favorite play lists and measure play counts. Additionally, Grooveshark also allows bands to sell merchandise via Junkytees and TuniPop, license music via Creative Commons, land deals via YouLicense and crowdsource album funding via SellABand.

Within the artist’s environment, Grooveshark monetizes its service by offering musicians a chance to have their music advertised and played alongside similar bands. With more than 7 million tracks in its catalogue, the company is effectively leveraging its size and existing audience to make a case as the premier destination for artist promotion. Artists can expect to see their tracks in community playlists and distributed via widgets, links and soon, through mobile playlists.

While Spotify’s iPhone application has received a ton of buzz for its ability to play cached music streams, Grooveshark also has an iPhone application in the works. While the app’s current iteration does not allow for offline play, Bonnain assures ReadWriteWeb that the feature is in the mobile developer pipeline and it won’t cost $15 a month to try it when it arrives.

While both Grooveshark and Spotify’s premium subscription programs are in their infancy, it will be interesting to see which service will find the right features and licensing partnerships to come out on top.

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Twitter Redesigns As Streaming Trends Site

Twitter just announced its new home page redesign complete with trending topics and search. Publicly launched at the 2006 South by South West interactive festival, users first flocked to the site as a way to communicate with friends and festival attendees. However, as we’ve seen in the past few years, the site has evolved into a multifaceted real-time tool. The community has given timely updates on earthquakes, the Iran election and we’ve even seen professional poker players bluff in real-time Tweets. Twitter has evolved into a community where users can discover breaking news and trends and the new home page certainly matches that.

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Says Twitter cofounder Biz Stone in a blog post , “Demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

And it seems at this point, if you haven’t gotten involved you’ve been living under a rock. While the site always contained the ability to search and discover trends, these features were buried. Today, with the new design, all of those television viewers who refused to give into the peer pressure of Oprah and Ashton Kutcher’s hour-long Twitter tutorial will finally understand the value of the service. Twitter isn’t just an emotional weather report generator, it’s a taste of zeitgeist.

In some cases, the spirit of our times is simply our lust to win an iPhone in a Twitter sweepstakes or our willingness to spam our friends with Spymaster, and in other cases it is breaking news about the events, companies and issues that effect our lives. One of the interesting aspects of the new trends section is that unlike real-time search engine One Riot, Twitter not only offers the list of related-tweets, but it also offers a short rationale for a topic’s popularity. This contextualization makes it particularly useful for news discovery.

Those who’ve abandoned their Twitter accounts might point to the frivolity of some of the home page’s current trending topics; however, Twitter’s ebb and flow is only as silly or intelligent as our society dictates. When the President of the United States encourages you to tweet your senator to support health insurance reform, you know you should probably continue to keep an eye on this micro blogging superstar.

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