ReadWriteWeb

While the rest of the world was caught up with Google Buzz, Apple was quietly granted a patent for a virtual reality App Store. The store patent encompasses details such as seasonal and time-based lighting, color schemes and a basic storefront representation. A few bloggers have already criticized the patent as a relic from SecondLife past, the store may have more use when we consider it in the context of the XBox Live marketplace.

Today marks the official start to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas where all of the biggest electronics manufacturers show off their coolest and newest products. While CES is mainly a gadget show, entrepreneurs looking for the next big thing should pay close attention to the innovative ideas being pushed into the consumer market.

The big show is just getting underway, but we are already seeing some trends emerge that could point to new opportunities for startups in 2010.

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about websites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Buying a single article from a scientific journal is usually prohibitively expensive if you are not a student or teacher at a school that subscribes to the journal. Most academic journals are available only behind these paywalls, but Deep Dyve just announced a new product that could radically change the marketplace for scientific, technical and medical articles. Until now, Deep Dyve only indexed articles and directed users to the journal's own site. Starting today, users can rent articles from Deep Dyve. Accounts start with a pay-as-you-go account, by which users are charged $0.99 to keep an article for one day, and go up to an unlimited account for $19.99 per month.

During yesterday's Q3 earnings call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings revealed the company's plans to launch a streaming-only service which will allow users to watch movies via their PCs without having to sign up for the DVD-by-mail portion of the Netflix service. Unfortunately, this new streaming-only option won't be available to any Netflix subscribers in the U.S. Instead, it's a part of the company's new international efforts which will launch in the second half of 2010, starting off small in one market then expanding into other countries one-by-one.

After years of struggling to beat Netflix's Cinematch recommendation algorithm by a baseline of 10%, two groups have emerged. While both teams produced qualifying systems, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted their entry 24 minutes earlier than 2nd prize team The Ensemble. Earlier this year ReadWriteWeb covered the Netflix Prize and asked the question, "Will the $1 million dollars be won in 2009?" While the answer is a resounding "yes", it was not January forerunner BellKor that took the prize, but rather an amalgamation of 4 teams that triumphed.

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

In October 2006 online movie rental company Netflix announced a contest called The Netflix Prize; any team that could beat its in-house recommendation engine by 10% in predicting which movies people would like would win a $1 million prize. It was a huge engineering challenge that more than 50,000 teams of computer scientists signed up to take. Today one team, a combination of four of the front running teams actually, announced that it has built a system that delivers a 10.05% improvement.

If that team withstands the month long period of scrutiny that begins now, it will not only mean fame and (some) fortune for them and a big boost for Netflix - it could signal a key turning point for recommendation technology on the web.

Netflix, the popular online DVD rental service, just announced a number of new features that will allow users to personalize their Netflix homepage to a greater extent than currently possible. Netflix users can now also create their own genres by  mixing and matching different categories, and a number of new taste preference settings will allow users to fine-tune Netflix's personalized movie recommendations.

Business troubles at Yahoo! haven't changed the fact that the company has some of the most innovative Open Web advocates in the industry in its ranks, but today one of those innovative people has left. API wizard Kent Brewster told us last night that he's joining Netflix as the company's newest API developer and evangelist. He'll start there at the top of next month.

Brewster's title at Yahoo! was Technology Evangelist and Front-End Engineer, a position he took almost 5 years ago after an amazing 18 years at WebMD and its predecessors. Job changes like this are what we cover on our Jobwire site.