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Posts Tagged ‘Recommendation Engine’

Hunch Takes $12 Million From Khosla Ventures, Adds Former Facebook CFO To Board Of Directors

Recommendation engine Hunch confirms that they’ve raised a new round of financing – $12 million – led by Khosla Ventures. Partner Gideon Yu, who joined Khosla Ventures last year, was previously the CFO of Facebook. He is now joining Hunch’s board of directors as part of the deal. Hunch was valued at $52 million in the round.

I spoke to cofounder Caterina Fake this evening about the round. Fake says that Hunch, which is less than a year old, now has lots of data to work with in making recommendations. In fact, she says, users have answered nearly 50 million questions on Hunch since launch, and the company can use that data to make better and better recommendations.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined the company’s board of directors in late 2009.

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Netflix settles privacy lawsuit, ditches $1 million contest

Netflix has canceled its $1 million contest aimed at finding a better recommendation engine in the wake of a privacy lawsuit settlement. The company informed its users today via the company blog, noting that it had “reached an understanding” with the Federal Trade Commission, leading it to ditch the Netflix Prize contest.

Netflix first announced the contest—actually the sequel to its original contest—in August of 2009. The goal was to crowdsource its active user base to write a more intelligent recommendation engine based on users’ past rentals. This is something Netflix already does, of course, but there’s always room for improvement; the company wanted to find the Next Big Thing™ by offering $1 million to the person with the best algorithm.

Part of the contest involved Netflix disclosing what it considered to be anonymized user data to those trying to come up with solutions. This, however, led to a lawsuit by a closeted lesbian mother who argued that Netflix had not sufficiently anonymized the information and that she (among others) could be easily outed due to her own rental history. Indeed, within weeks of the data being released, researchers had found a way to use an external data source to decode an individual’s viewing history with surprising accuracy, but Netflix did not immediately withdraw the contest.

The FTC eventually got involved and spent the following months discussing the issue with Netflix. That brings us to today: Netflix has officially settled the lawsuit and, as part of the settlement, is giving up the contest. “The resolution to both matters involves certain parameters for how we use Netflix data in any future research programs,” wrote Netflix’s Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt.

This doesn’t mean Netflix is giving up on improving its recommendation engine—Hunt ended the blog post by saying the company would continue to explore better options—but the company will have to come up with new ways to “collaborate with the research community.”

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Windows PC Scout patronizes, offers surprisingly good comparison tool

Want a “high-quality” machine that represents the “best of the best in laptops?” Microsoft’s got your back with its all-new PC Scout, a Flash-based laptop recommendation engine whose delivery is unfortunately more than a little reminiscent of those misguided Windows 7 launch party promos. Ah well, should you successfully navigate your way past bad jokes about space-cats and online dating, and on to the Selection section, you’ll find a thoroughly decent laptop comparison tool — with sliders for price and features narrowing or expanding your available choice in real time. With future plans to expand it to cover desktop hardware as well, Microsoft is making a commendable and seemingly rather useful effort to aid its users in picking out a new machine. Kudos for that, now how about hiring some real actors for a change?

[Via Ars Technica]

Filed under: Laptops, Software

Windows PC Scout patronizes, offers surprisingly good comparison tool originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BillShrink’s new recommendation engine tells you where to stash your savings

BillShrink, a startup that advises its users on how to reduce their monthly bill payments, today launched a new savings tool that recommends the best savings and CD accounts for conserving cash. Calling itself a decision engine, the Menlo Park, Calif. company says it analyzes interest rates offered by more than 60 banks to help users choose the most lucrative combination of accounts.

BillShrink has evolved a lot since its launch last spring. It started out as a service to help users find the cheapest cell phone plans to fit their needs. Soon after that, it started telling people which credit cards to choose for the greatest savings as well. Earlier this year, it introduced a new tool to help users find the nearest gas station with the lowest prices. As you can imagine, all of these features proved to be very popular in the past year following the economic downturn. As consumers tightened their belts, they turned to web solutions for living within budget, and BillShrink picked up a lot of the business, particularly in June when its traffic shot up to 500,000 unique monthly visitors (according to Compete). Overall, it says it saved Americans more than $750 million in the last year.

Now that the economy has started to turn around, the company says it wants to help its users grow the money it has helped them save. The new savings account and CD recommendation tool is meant to do just that. To provide its customers with the best options, it takes into account their monthly saving goals (defined by the users), the fees attached to certain accounts, ATM locations, and liquid versus illiquid cash needs. With all of this data, it confidently tells its users where to put their money, the company says.

BillShrink is one of a flock of companies aimed at saving consumers money in their everyday lives. Mint, recently acquired by Intuit, did roughly the same, allowing people to set budget targets in different area of their lives and recommending deals and offers to save cash. Both Wesabe and Green Sherpa are incredibly similar, although the latter offers a paid subscription service to help its users monitor their general cash flow.

The company last raised funding in October 2008, bringing in $8 million from Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. It has now raised $10 million to date.

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Could Wowd Be the Skype of Real-Time Search? Private Beta Invites

Trying to explain Wowd, a Silicon Valley-based search venture, is a buzzword extravaganza.

Using cloud architecture and crowdsourced data on web pages, this real-time discovery and recommendation engine ranks pages based on whether users actually visited them and returns results from all over the web, not just a handful of indexed pages. Read on for the details on Wowd’s technology, a video interview with their CEO, and yes, invitations to join the private beta.

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It’s a downloaded app, but it runs in a browser. Personal information isn’t stored on a centralized server, and no registration is required; yet browsing history is saved to recommend more personally relevant and interesting content.

The cloud arichitecture – that is, the distribution of processing power and bandwidth needed to power real-time indexing across all user desktops – allows Wowd to acheive a monumental feat core to their value proposition: Real-time indexing of the entire web, not just a handful of sites and not just pages linked to from real-time social sites. Essentially, it’s the same kind of P2P network technology that makes Skype or SETI@home possible; all the nodes in the network share bandwidth-intensive tasks, such as indexing the entire Internet in real time.

Here’s how the indexing and ranking work: Each time a user who has downloaded and installed Wowd visits a website, without his taking any further action, that page is “voted up” on Wowd. Conceptually, it’s a little bit like Digg or Hacker News in that the number of users rather than keywords, backlinks, or timeliness, determine ranking.

At scale, this could mean that Wowd would be a more workable version of the human-powered search engine, which their team believes will always generate more interesting results than a machine-powered search engine.

Wowd is funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), KPG Ventures, and the Stanford University Engineering Venture Fund. Their team includes startup vets with a total of four successful exits and experience working on projects such as the Intel P6 processor and technology for surface operations on Mars.

Check out this interview with Wowd CEO Mark Drummond, conducted by Tim Reha:

In terms of data privacy, Wowd’s system doesn’t look at local files, Wowd searches, IP addresses, personal behavior, secure pages or pages that require a login, or any sites “blacklisted” in a user’s settings. And of course, Wowd’s default setting blocks their gathering data on any adult-content pages; that is to say, all your pr0n are still belong to you.

The first 300 ReadWriteWeb readers to click here will also be able to join Wowd’s private beta and experience firsthand the magic of human-powered recommendations.

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AcceptEdge Launches College Recommendation Engine To The Public

Ah, the college selection process. A time filled with confusion, disappointment, and occasional bouts of joy, along with a nice dose of raging hormones. AcceptEdge, a new startup launching today, is looking to help take a little bit of uncertainty out of the process.

The site starts off by asking you a series of questions about your academic, family, and personal histories. Most of the data entered is pretty run of the mill — things like GPA, SAT scores, and whether you’d prefer a public or private school. But the site also takes into account things like the your interests outside of school, the books you enjoy, and music you like (you can connect your account with Facebook Connect if you’d like to save some typing).

After all of this, it spits out an ‘Edge Score’ that tells you just how competitive you are with your peers (I imagine these will be the source of much angst for students on the site) and a selection of your top college matches, with a percentage indicating just how closely they fit. There’s also some extensive data on each school’s admissions history, with information on the most predictive indicators for admission and plots of GPA vs standardized test scores.

All in all the site is off to a solid start, though it’s worth noting that there are plenty of sites that offer similar college ‘predictors’ that can analyze your test scores. Rather than rely on the site for its ‘Edge Score’, I think it could be more useful for helping students discover good colleges that they may not have heard of.

Other players in this space include CampusBuddy (which is more focused on college communities than test scores), and a host of college review sites like College Confidential and The Princeton Review.

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Lunch.com Launches Micro Reviews, Reveals Its Quest To Make The World A Better Place

Lunch, a review site that made its debut earlier this year, is launching a new feature it calls micro reviews — highly condensed reviews on just about anything, with a maximum length of 140 characters. You’ll be able to see a stream of incoming reviews on the site’s homepage, and you can also syndicate the microreviews you write to Twitter and Facebook.

Of course, review sites aren’t anything new. Neither are so-called ‘micro reviews’ — we’ve seen a number of sites that invite users to submit condensed reviews rather than the lengthier entries you’ll find on sites like Yelp. But there are a few things that make Lunch a little bit different, not the least of which is CEO J.R. Johnson’s ultimate goal with the site: to make the world a better place by changing the way people think about each other.

A lofty goal to be sure, and one that’s going to be extremely difficult. So how does Lunch plan to do it?

Johnson explains that review sites in general tend to change the way people think about what they’re doing — a phenomenon he watched unfold in the travel industry (he founded VirtualTourist in 1999, which sold to Expedia last year). Johnson says that during his time at VirtualTourist, he observed that people who consumed content on the site tended to be more analytical during their own travels, because they had the intent of sharing their thoughts with other members of the site once they got back home. He hopes that Lunch’s new microreviews will have the same effect, encouraging people to more analytically observe the world around them as they look for things to relay back to their peers on Lunch.

He says this effect could also be magnified because of the way Lunch’s recommendation engine (called a “Similarity Network”) works. Based on reviews you’ve submitted and other actions on the site, Lunch tries to pair you up with other members that it thinks are most similar to you — the idea being you’d rather read a review from one or two very similar people than dozens of reviews from users you know nothing about. Johnson’s theory is that if you’re going to be sharing your reviews with a highly relevant audience, you’re going to be even more analytical in your daily life.

Johnson says that the big picture here is to help people understand eachother better, allowing them to use the Similarity Network to find some common ground where they wouldn’t otherwise and encouraging people to approach life with a more critical perspective. And because the site deals with pretty much any topic, running the gamut from ice cream reviews to politics, there’s a lot of things for people to potentially connect on. Micro reviews are a start — a “critical thinking onramp” — and more robust features in the future will continue the trend.

This all sounds nice in theory, but Johnson’s goals are going to be really hard to see through. For one, the site is still quite small, and there are countless other review sites out there, including both generalized sites like Lunch and niche sites. Making the world a better place is a great long-term goal, but in the short term, Lunch is going to need to find a way to drive people to use the site by offering something its competitors don’t. And even if Lunch had an exceptionally large userbase, I have a hard time believing the service would be able to put much of a dent in the prejudices that run throughout the world.

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