Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: personalization (Page 1 of 2)

Inveni Launches Discovery Engine That Gives You Human-Filtered Recommendations Based On Millions of Crowd-Matched Movies

October 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Inveni-logoInveni LLC has launched a discovery engine that is says “will drive social recommendations in the Web’s next wave.” The company’s free consumer service will also enable better targeted advertising — and, says the firm, change how consumers both make and receive recommendations on the Web.  The service is now publicly available, after more than a year in development and several months of private beta testing. The company (formerly known as Open Preferences, and based in Minnetonka, MN) made its debut at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco this week, and also presented the same day at the midVenturesLAUNCH startup conference in Chicago.

“The next wave of the Web will be about personalization. We’re focusing on using personalization to meaningfully improve discovery and decision making,” said Aaron Weber, CEO and cofounder. “The Inveni discovery engine leaps ahead of other online recommendation services.  What we’ve developed is unlike anything previously available.  Inveni consolidates ratings you put anywhere online – Netflix, IMDB, and more – provides tools to make and receive recommendations wherever you are, and helps you make better, more informed buying decisions.” The service has received positive feedback from users during the private beta over the past several months, said Weber.

Inveni-PersRecommendations Inveni provides its highly personalized product recommendations based on a consumer’s universal taste profile.  To create a personalized taste profile, Inveni empowers users to aggregate product and service ratings they’ve made across the Internet to quickly build deep, rich profiles of their tastes.  Beginning with the media categories of movies and TV, users can share their taste profile information with friends and other services online.  Inveni also facilitates product recommendations between friends (word of mouth), based on their tastes.

“We use this taste profile data, along with our unique crowd-refined recommendation engine, to provide highly targeted advertising, while simultaneously providing consumers with a compelling personalized service for discovery and sharing,” said Robert Bodor, CTO and cofounder, “We aim to become the premier provider of highly targeted consumer data for advertising online. We do that by turning the current consumer data model upside down, putting the user in control of their information.  We are entirely opt-in, and are raising the bar on consumer privacy protection.” Inveni-MyTastes

The company produced a fun, two-minute video to describe its value proposition to consumers, which you can view here.

Inveni describes itself as being “dedicated to driving the personalization revolution that will be Web 3.0.”  It was founded in 2008 by two experienced Internet entrepreneurs, Aaron Weber and Robert Bodor, and has a stellar set of successful Internet-industry executives acting as advisors. It is privately funded. 

Prior to Inveni, Aaron Weber, CEO and Cofounder, was COO and cofounder of W3i (formerly Freeze.com), a software marketing company based in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Aaron helped bootstrap the company to $25 million in annual revenues in seven years.  W3i has been profitable every year since its inception, and has provided initial investors with a 10x return in the first 5 years.  Aaron has received the SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Ernst & Young Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Robert Bodor, Inveni’s Chief Technical Officer and Cofounder, spent four years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company before he and Aaron founded Inveni.  There, he advised Fortune 500 clients in the high-tech industry on operations, innovation, and product development.  Previously, Robert was cofounder, president, and CTO of Point Cloud, an Internet company that provided interactive product visualization to prominent online retailers.  Robert holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering. He has invented and commercialized multiple Internet software technologies and has authored seven patents.

Follow Inveni on Twitter at www.twitter.com/discoverinveni and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/inveni.

NOTE: A version of this post first appeared on Minnov8.com, a site that showcases web innovation in Minnesota.

(Disclosure: the writer has a consulting relationship with Inveni LLC.)

DEMO 09 – Interview With DEMO Presenter 7 Billion People

March 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~Blog interviews Mark Nagaitis, CEO of 7 Billion People, at the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

I’d been wanting to get to this company since hearing their on-stage pitch Monday morning, and I finally got a chance on Tuesday afternoon when, for once, their booth wasn’t mobbed. Talk about a company with an interesting naming strategy: some think names beginning with “A” are good, to get you to the front of the alphabetical listings — well, this outfit jumped even ahead of that by using a number. A big number. I asked CEO Mark Nagaitis to tell me more about his firm’s new approach to personalized online shopping.

7BillionPeople-DEMO09-350w

Download the MP3

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – mSpoke…Finally, Feedreader Relief

September 30, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Didn’t you just know that somebody was going to address the information overload in your RSS feedreader? How often do you even add a new subscription anymore, for fear of not even having time to read what you already have? Mspokelogo
Not to worry — the guys from mSpoke just introduced Feedhub, a personalized, customizable RSS feed that automatically selects the most relevant posts from the set of feeds you select.  I just registered and uploaded my OPML file (easy to do in Google Reader, in my case), and — voila — I have a personalized feed!  I can’t believe how easy it was….

Mspokeonstage_4

"We make your feedreader smarter," crowed CEO Dave Mawhinney from stage Wednesday afternoon. "We let you stay informed without being overwhelmed."

How does it work?  The company uses its mPower Adaptive Personalization Engine, which dynamically adapts to your reading habits.

"Are you ready to declare RSS bankruptcy?" asked Sean Ammirati, mSpoke’s VP biz dev from stage. "You can take advantage of Feedhub no matter what popular RSS reader you use — Google Reader, Bloglines, NetNewsWire, etc."  And he added: "Are you ever reluctant to subscribe to a new feed because of information overload? If so, this is perfect, because it will give you only the posts from that source that are relevant to you."

Here’s a screen shot of the Feedhub home page (where I simply clicked
to register), followed by a screen shot showing how I selected the
amount of content I wanted (after I uploaded my OPML file), and, finally, a screen showing what my Google home page now looks
like with my Feedhub Personalized Feed just where I want it (upper
left).

Feedhubscreen_3

 


Feedhubscreen2_4

 

UPDATE 10/5: Here’s a great explanation of Feedhub that Guy Kawasaki posted yesterday…"Reality Check: FeedHub."

Mygooglehome_4

Semantic Web Goes Blue at DEMOfall

September 22, 2006 / / 1 Comment

Adaptiveblue is launching its blueorganizer Firefox extension at DEMOfall next week. Chris Shipley, executive producer of the conference, said it will give us a “glimpse of powerful semantic Web technologies to come.”

Adaptiveblue is a personalization and smart browsing company founded by Alex Iskold in early 2006. Adaptiveblue500w The vision of adaptiveblue, says the company, is to invent new browser technologies that deliver a personalized Web experience, enhance productivity, and save time.

Among other things, Alex writes frequently for Web 2.0 journal, Ajax World magazine, and the Read/Write blog. There’s more about him here. And here’s what some people are saying about the product. Amazon’s Web Services Blog recently said this.

Blueorganizer uses Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), which it calls “storage for the Internet” … “designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”

Tag:

Eurekster: With Passive Collaboration, Who Needs Tagging?

March 26, 2006 / / 1 Comment

One of the past firms that launched at PC Forum and was in attendance at this year’s event was Eurekster, a Web 2.0 search personalization company. This company debuted two years previous at the 2004 PC Forum. I sat down with CEO Steve Marder to get an update on what’s been happening lately with the company. Marder recounted how, in November 2005, his company introduced “Swickis,” which are community-powered search engines for personal and small-business websites. (Search + wicki = swicki.) He described that launch as a “self-service beta.” [Prior to PC Forum, I had actually taken Eureksterlogo advantage of that service and created a swicki for my own blog, which I set up and took live in about 15 minutes. You can see it at the right, complete with what’s called the “buzz cloud” within the widget itself.] In its announcement, Eurekster said publishers are invited to create their own swickis, free of charge, with the Eurekster SwickiBuilder here, and “can opt to share in the search-related advertising revenue, a feature that will be available soon.” Harder told me some 5000 blogs have signed up so far and set up a swicki.

Marder continued: “We operate on the ASP model. And it’s easy to integrate our look-and-feel into your site.” He said he and his co-founder, Grant Ryan, Ph.D., who is based in New Zealand, had previously cofounded another technology company, which was focused in enterprise search. That firm is SLI Systems, which Marder said is profitable, and both he and Ryan continue to serve on that firm’s board.

“Eurekster is all about the end user,” said Marder. “Our engine learns from your community. We enable personal networks.”

But, in addition to targeting “the rest of the Web,” as Marder put it, with the swicki concept (meaning the smaller sites), Eurekster also has an offering called SearchPublisher, which is an enterprise-level platform for delivering a highly customized, branded search feature on large web sites. Customers include such companies as Bolt, Gartner, Friendster, Hollywood.com, Community Connect, and Locker Gnome. Eurekster also announced, on the first of day of PC Forum, that Popular Science, the world’s largest science and technology magazine, had integrated Eurekster’s SearchPublisher community search platform into its website, PopSci.com. That site is a destination for readers interested in the latest developments in science and technology, including cars, electronics, communications, tools, space and aviation, among other topics.

“We allow passive collaboration, with no tagging. It’s the concept of ‘auto-tagging’,” said Marder. “Your users are communicating with you via search.” He said Eurekster gives the publisher control. “Small or large, they have community. We harness the collective intelligence of that community, while leveraging the expertise of the publisher.”

Eurekster is a privately held firm based in San Francisco and currently has 20 employees, with R&D based in New Zealand. It received angel backing in December 2004. What’s on tap for the company? Marder had this heads-up for me: “Monetization is coming next.”

« Older posts

© 2024 Graeme Thickins on Tech

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑