I don't know about you, but if I ever have to listen to that same, 12-song playlist on the local classic rock station ever again, I might go completely insane. Thankfully, we live in the modern age of music recommendation engines, where I can simply ask for a stream of music that lies somewhere between Wilco and Weezer and, voila!
We spoke with Pandora founder Tim Westergren and Slacker Radio VP of marketing Jonathan Sasse to find out a little bit more about what goes into this seemingly effortless and unending flow of personally catered music.
One of the leading trends this year has been check-in apps. Typically mobile apps, they allow you to announce that you're at a place or doing something. The excitement started with the location check-in apps: Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude and others. But over the past year the practice of "checking in" has expanded to many other 'things' beyond location. You can now check in to TV shows, movies, books, food, events, and more.
Below we list some example check-in apps, so that you can check out this phenomenon yourself!
Caterina Fake was one of the co-founders of Flickr, an iconic web 2.0 online photo service that was sold to Yahoo. Her latest product is Hunch, a service that started out as a Q&A service but is now being positioned as a personalization service. It's basically a recommendation engine that shows you movies you want to see, books you want to read, vacation destinations you want to go to, and much more. Fake and her three co-founders at Hunch - Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Dattis - are on a mission to "map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."
I spoke to Caterina Fake to find out how Hunch got started and the progress the company has made in its ambitious mission.
Yesterday we looked at the evolution of GetGlue, a service that allows you to "check in" to TV shows, movies, music, and more.
One of the striking things about GetGlue is how it has used cutting edge web technologies (recommendations, Semantic Web) to build a future-proof foundation. And how it has taken advantage of currently hot platforms (like iPhone and iPad), while also targeting future platforms (like Internet TV). In Part 2 of our interview with Alex Iskold, the founder and CEO of GetGlue, we find out how he's steered his company towards the future. We also find out what other trends Alex Iskold is tracking currently.
Where should we eat lunch? What should we have for dinner tonight? Recommendation engines try to match our tastes to music, movies and books - why not help us answer these other eternal questions? Here are a few sites that try to do just that, whether it's through personalized recommendations restaurant reviews, aggregating restaurant reviews or helping us figure out what to make out of our leftover rice and sprouts.
Sometimes a successful web product takes a while to find its niche. Occasionally it morphs into a different product altogether, along the way. Both things have happened to GetGlue, the service where users "check in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music - indeed, to just about anything.
I caught up with GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold to discuss the evolution of the product since its inception. It's changed from an under-used geeky Firefox browser add-on, to a mainstream service where hundreds of thousands of people check-in to Mad Men and other popular entertainment shows. How has GetGlue made this transition? One word, by getting emotional.
We have written quite a lot about the decline of the startpage and the dismal state of RSS readers. No matter the state of these two markets, Genieo manages to combine these two with a sophisticated recommendation engine to bring you a personalized startpage based on the sites you visit throughout the day. As you surf the web, Genieo constantly learns about the topics you are interested in and automatically subscribes to the feeds of those sites you visit regularly. Thanks to its sophisticated recommendation engine, the service can then determine which stories to show you on its startpage.
Dennis Crowley, co-founder of location based social network Foursquare, told attendees of the Picnic conference in Amsterdam today that the company has built a feature that recommends new locations users ought to visit, based on their past activity, their to-do lists and what's popular at the moment. The system is being tested internally by Foursquare staff and Crowley hopes that Foursquare user data will be used by outside developers to build even more kinds of recommendation services. Recommendations, generally, are like searches you hadn't thought yet to perform - in Foursquare they could be a great way to foster new experiences for users and additional activity for businesses.
Crowley's talk was first reported by watchdog blog About Foursquare, where a video of the 20 minute presentation from Picnic can be found.
Recommendation engines have been an increasingly critical component of the Web in recent years, especially when it comes to retail and finding pretty much anything, from places to eat to films to watch.
Big players like Amazon and Netflix are known for their innovative and effective recommendation engines, the latter of which famously held a contest offering $1 million to anybody who could improve their movie recommendation algorithm.
Recommendation engines will often rely on the wisdom of crowds to suggest music. But there are a lot more ways that can be used to determine what music a person may like.
Paul Lamere writes a lot on this topic. He's a former researcher at Sun Labs where he explored ways to organize, search for and discover music. He's the author of Music Machinery, one of the best blogs out there about music and technology. Lamere now works at Echo Nest where he manages the company's developer community. Echo Nest is a music intelligence company founded by Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, who met at the MIT Media Lab while pursuing their doctorates in music understanding and synthesis research.
