In a world more swamped with content options every day, recommendation technology is poised to make a huge difference in our experience online. We identified recommendation tech as one of the 5 most important trends for 2008 but we may have jumped the gun just a little bit. Below is a quick profile of each of the five Strands finalists working to bring more of this paradigm into the present market, followed by our thoughts on which one we're most interested in.

Gravity R&D

Sentimetrix is another four person team, this one from the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Sciences. This startup analyzes text content around the web and "has automated sentiment extraction/analysis/scoring, the ability to find and quantify opinions in text." If this kind of technology is of interest to you, see also our review yesterday of the new BooRah API.

iletken is a mysterious project built by four Turkish college students at Koc University. It balances personal and social behavior to recommend advertisements "based on relevance."

Reccoon is a stealth project built by Peter Tegelaar and Dominiek ter Heide in the Netherlands. Ter Heide also worked on the Japanese social learning platform iKnow, which launched an API yesterday. Recoon appears to use the iPhone's GPS, user attention data like Last.fm listening history and the GeoNames reverse lookup API to notify you when you're near the location of an event you might like to participate in.

Commendo is a four person team from two universities in Austria. Team Commendo is both the Grand Prize winner and in first place for the Progress Prize in the Netflix Prize leaderboard.

Strands describes Commendo like this: "Commendo uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry, including speeding up drug development and the minimization of adverse drug reactions."

Our Take

All of these sound interesting but the one we're most excited to learn more about is Commendo, the pharmaceutical drug development recommendation engine. We're dubious about the political and economic world of big pharma, but we love innovation and that's a field where there's enough money and science on the line that there's a premium put on magic. Strands has products for all kinds of industries (we think their banking service is the coolest) but we'd love to see what Strands plus the Netflix Prize champs Commendo can do in pharma research.

Will Any of These Make a Difference?

Could these startups change the world? With a little bit of funding and possible acquisition by Strands, they could. Strands has customers around the world in everything from music to banking and mobile. They have a lifestreaming service, ala FriendFeed, that doesn't seem to be going anywhere yet, but getting backing from Strands is a great step for any little recommendation startup.

Bring on a smart future augmented by powerful recommendation technology!

Disclosure: Strands is an RWW sponsor. We'd have written about recommendation startups anyway, though, because we think they're really cool.

Google is definitely using its 10th anniversary to enhance the visibility of its philanthropic efforts. Google has lately been using its official blog to talk about its energy and health initiatives. Just yesterday, Google wrote about its Predict and Prevent initiative, a project that is looking at novel ways to detect the threat of a pandemic before it can turn into a crisis.

Submissions for Project 10^100 are due by October 20.

To be in to win one of the 3 prizes, we asked: for the 'Web Meets World' charity auction at the Web 2.0 Summit later this year (5-7 Nov), what would YOU bid on that web celebrities could offer? The 3 best answers, subjectively chosen by the RWW team, are printed below.

"I'd bid to send three web celebrities on a week long trip to visit AIDS orphanges in Malawi, Africa, with the condition that they would write web articles about these two things upon their return.

A. Their experiences with the children and orphange operators while there.

B. Their ideas on how "Web 2.0" can make a huge impact on really, really big problems like this."

The second full pass goes to Andraz Tori of Zemanta (comment #11):

"I'd bid for very first versions of business plans of MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Wordpress, Skype, eBay, ...

Comparing them with where they are now would be a fun and very very interesting reading!"

And for the consolation prize, we liked this suggestion by Alex Capece:

"A Metallica CD signed by Shawn Fanning." (comment #37)

Congratulations to all of the above, we'll be in contact by email regarding your prizes.

Though basing a business on a browser extension might seem crazy, for the select few companies highlighted in Mozilla events like this it can lead to a big increase in user numbers, especially if support from Mozilla continues.

The Winners

The most sophisticated winner may be the most niche-targeted, and that's the Minimap Sidebar Extension, by Tony Farndon from the UK. This extension lets users do all kinds of things by dragging and dropping map and location data in their browsers. Whether it's just text identifying a location or a whole KML file, Minimap lets you quickly view map data in a wide variety of platforms - from the big online mapping services (G/Y/M) to Google Earth of map mashup maker Platial. User created sidebar maps can also be saved for later reuse. Many readers might not have a daily use for this extension, but I know I might find myself working on a particular project for which this cool tool would be perfect.

SamePlace IM is an XMPP based multiclient IM service with a sidebar display or flyout client. It was built by Massimiliano Mirra in Italy. You can drag and drop images and text into conversations, play games, sketch together and extend SamePlace with an internal scriptlet editor. There's Twitter and OpenID support, too. While Meebo isn't intended for power users, SamePlace clearly is.

Finally, Jay Meattle's Shareaholic lets you quickly post any URL to 13 of the coolest social bookmarking services online. From Ma.gnolia to FriendFeed to Tumblr. It also lets you easily email a link to friends and see how many times it has been tagged in Del.icio.us and Dugg.

I appreciate all of the above, but personally I only foresee myself using the Minimap extension, and that only rarely. It might be a good idea for me to use Shareaholic, too, so that I can get the superior features of Ma.gnolia but participate in the public space of Del.icio.us. I really like the Ma.gnolia submission tool, though. Don't forget to check out the runners up, too, if you love Firefox extensions.

Details will be posted soon for the next contest, Extend Firefox 3 , kicking off in early March.

"Right now, if you want images, you have two options. You could hire an artist (expensive, difficult, and time-consuming) or you could surf microstock sites (cheap, but frustrating and time-consuming). Pixish seeks to be a middle path," writes Pixish founder and CEO Powazek.

Powazek compares Pixish to Threadless, which uses the wisdom of crowds to design t-shirts, with the key difference being that Pixish members can create open submission calls for any visual product or need. But a better parallel would be design contest sites. There are a number of them, but one of the biggest and most well-known is SitePoint's Contest area (which is in the process of being spun off and rebranded as 99Designs.com).

Similar to Pixish, SitePoint facilitates open calls for design jobs where designers submit work. Unlike Pixish, SitePoint requires that winning designers are compensated with cash. Which approach will work? I know from experience as a volunteer moderator at SitePoint that the design contest approach is often the target of criticism from people who believe that spec work is detrimental to designers. I personally disagree, and know plenty of designers who use spec work like design contests to gain real world experience, build their portfolios, and have also found long term clients by participating in sites like SitePoint's Contest area... but I digress.

I think it is likely that sites like SitePoint's will likely attract more professional designers, while Pixish will attract people who do art and design for fun. For someone who is trying to pay the bills with design work, competing for copies of a magazine might not be the best way to spend their time. But for someone who does design as a hobby, it might be a fun way to hone their craft.

Full disclosure: I recently sold a design contest site that I co-founded in 2005 called GFXContests.com and remain a volunteer moderator on SitePoint's forums (moderators of which also moderate the contests area).