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: Tech Crunch

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.)

Firefox Users, You’ll Love the Cool, New “BlueOrganizer Denim” Plug-In

May 23, 2007 / / 0 Comments

AdaptiveBlue, a company we covered here and here last September when they debuted at DEMOfall, today launched the latest version of its BlueOrganizer plug-in for the Firefox browser, which it calls Denim. Alex Iskold, the founder and CEO, is a friend of mine, and a fellow writer at Read/Write Web. (Okay, I’ve written two posts there and he’s done what seems like 50 or more, and they’re all amazingly good.) How he finds time to do all this writing and run a startup, I don’t know. I’m threatening to start calling him Superman. Alex’s firm is based in New Jersey and was funded in a Series A round last fall by Union Square Ventures of New York City.

Anyway, I downloaded and installed the plug-in in about 30 seconds on my Mac. It’s an elegant solution — and the web site is very clean, well functioning, and informative, with good demos, graphics, and explanations. The plug-in worked flawlessly for me right from the start, and I’m now thinking it could turn me into more a Firefox user… 🙂

Blueorganizer
Duncan Riley reported on the launch today on Tech Crunch, noting that “Adaptive Blue also enters the widget market. The new ‘sharing links’ feature allows users to embed semantic links into any web page, include bookmark style lists in a sidebar, or just embed a traditional widget. Affiliate programs are fully supported with no revenue sharing; if a user includes their affiliate code for programs such as eBay and Amazon they keep 100% of any associated revenue.”

Richard MacManus also published a post today on BlueOrganizer on Read/Write Web, under the title “Semantic Web In Action?” He explained that BlueOrganizer “aims to provide extra contextual information to you while browsing the Web. Basically, after you install BlueOrganizer in Firefox, it enables you to discover all kinds of relevant content while you’re browsing – such as books, music, links, related information, etc. Essentially then, it adds personalization and semantics into the browser.”

How’s the new version of the plug-in different? “First,” says Alex, “it’s just much more fun! Its lighter, more clickable, and takes less space both in the toolbar and in the sidebar. There’s also a new BlueMenu right in the toolbar. This makes the menu much easier to use for people who are not into right-clicking.” He also says that the latest context detection algorithm “is a huge improvement over the previous versions. Try it on blog posts about books, music, wine or another topic and see for yourself.”

Probably the most important new feature is SmartLinks, according to Alex. “These are web links that feature contextual shortcuts. They carry all the smarts about the objects right into blog posts, web pages, and social network profiles.” With SmartLinks, he noted, you can share the power of context and semantics with your friends, family, or readers.

“This is fundamental and big,” Alex proudly points out. “We’re bringing semantics into the most basic element of the web – the link. Imagine the web where links no longer point to pages, but point to things….users can get to information faster; information that’s contextual and relevant.” While some people might call this the Semantic Web, “we would not be so presumptuous,” Alex says. “But we think BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks are powering a smarter web and that, in turn, paves the road to the real Semantic Web.”

Time for “Life 3.0” in the Valley?

May 23, 2007 / / 2 Comments

Back in late 2002, in the doldrum years after the Tech Crash, my friend Rich Karlgaard (the Publisher of FORBES) became compelled to start writing a book about a phenomenon he’d been observing in Silicon Valley. People were leaving in droves — entrepreneurs and other business people, tech workers of every stripe. Good people, successful people, and so many of them disallusioned. Life20cover They’d had it with the expensive living and the rat race up and down the 101, and they were determined to find a better life elsewhere. It’s a great book — called “Life 2.0” — and it’s on my recommended reading list in the right sidebar. He came to Minnesota to interview me when he first began writing it.

Well, hold on, but another book could be in the offing here, from somebody, based on what we read yesterday from two leading Valley-based technology bloggers. First, Michael Arrington launched this bomb on Tech Crunch: Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now…the most telling sentence of which was this: “Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.” Here’s another excerpt, his concluding paragraph:

I left Silicon Valley at the peak of the insanity last time around, and I was pleasantly surprised when I returned in 2005 to see so much goodwill and community surrounding innovation. Now, it’s just like the old days again, and Silicon Valley is no longer any fun. In fact, it’s turned downright nasty. It may be time for some of us to leave for a while and watch the craziness from the outside again. In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory. We can focus, once again, on the technology. And the burgers and beer.

The post had 210 comments(!) at last count, so it’s obviously hitting a nerve. But, as if that wasn’t enough, Robert Scoble then chimes in essentially seconding the motion. I like Robert — he’s one of the nicest, most likeable, down-to-earth guys you will ever meet in this business. (And his wife, Maryam, is a real sweetheart, too.) So, when Robert talks, I listen. I respect what he says. Well, yesterday, he further enlightened all us unwashed masses of Valley outsiders with what it’s really like to be an insider there these days. And it does not sound particularly pleasant. His post was titled Why I’m in a malaise…, and here’s an excerpt:

I too look wistfully back at the days when we had almost the entire Social Software industry in one little coffee shop back in 2002 — none of whom were talking about making billions of dollars. Back then it was more like the Homebrew Computer Society, where geeks came to show off their stuff (and everyone was pretty much not getting paid anyway so of course we were doing it just for the love of it).

It seems to me that both Robert and Michael are tired of the grind — the relentless parade of me-too companies and legions of PR people and VCs trying to get their attention, and the hellish treadmill they’re on producing content day after day, night after night. You can only do that for so long before you get burned out — and it seems both of them have reached that point.

Then again, who knows, maybe they just need a vacation? What I do know is that I wouldn’t want either of their jobs. Sure, I’m a blogger, but these guys are hardly your typical bloggers anymore. They’re both part of serious, money-making publishing businesses (Robert also being a VP at PodTech), and both inextricably caught up in the big-money world of tech VC. Now it seems they’re both wondering, “Is this all there is?” And it begs the question: is this crazy Web 2.0 startup world getting closer and closer to a bubble burst?

Makes me glad I live in Minnesota, where things are a great deal more sane. And I know Rich Karlgaard would be the first to agree with me.

UPDATE: To add book link.

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