MyStrands

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MyStrands
URL http://www.mystrands.com/
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Recommendation & Community
Registration Free
Available language(s) multilingual (~10)
Owner Strands, Inc.
Created by Communal

MyStrands is a social recommendation company founded in late 2003 by Dr. Francisco J. Martin.

MyStrands develops social recommendation technologies to understand people's taste (in music, books, movies, etc) and help them discover things they may like and perhaps didn't know about. MyStrands' social recommender engine provides real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.

MyStrands' technology is based on human-generated links between items (songs, videos, products, etc) much the way Google uses human-generated links between web-pages. Complex networks of human-generated links between items are the best mechanisms to analyze how our society considers and uses the products it creates and consumes. Although the basic principles behind these networks are simple to explain and define, the resulting network is an immense and flexible medium for analysis and recommendation and is the foundation of MyStrands recommendations.

Contents

[edit] Funding and Staff

MyStrands is funded by advertising and private investment. MyStrands has received $55M in funding so far, $49M in 2007 (series B, series b2). The main investor was Spanish media mogul Antonio Asensio, owner and CEO of the third largest media group in Spain, Grupo Zeta. With headquarters in Corvallis, Oregon and Barcelona, Spain, with additional US offices in New York City and Washington DC and Spain offices in Zaragoza and Valencia, MyStrands currently employs about 70 people worldwide.

[edit] Features/Products

MyStrands makes music recommendations based on a collaborative filtering approach built upon the notion that what people play, rather than what they buy, is what counts. Many people take great care in organizing their music into creative playlists, and it is this information that feeds every MyStrands recommendation. A MyStrands user can get recommendations by visiting the MyStrands website or downloading their desktop recommender.

[edit] MyStrands Website - Music Community and Recommendations

The website enables music discovery through the company's collaborative filtering engine, or through the listening history of other members. The site includes tools to help identify members with similar tastes, and then lets any user browse through and sample the often-played music of members with tastes similar to their own. In addition, members can explicitly recommend music to each other or to the community. The website also provides tools for members to find other members with similar musical tastes to their own, track what those members are playing, and contact other members as desired. Members can add each other as influences, keep an online journal, create photo and video galleries, share playlists, tag tracks and playlists, etc. The site hosts numerous ways to share likes, dislikes, and discoveries with the community.

[edit] Real-Time Music Recommendations

The MyStrands desktop recommender supports the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and the iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Amarok players. The MyStrands Discovery Tool makes real-time recommendations based on the song that the user is currently playing, and tracks the order of songs played. As the user listens to more and more music, the recommendations become more tailored to that user's listening habits. Through the MyStrands Discovery Tool, the user can also build playlists based on a single song, multiple songs, or even a tag. Users can then upload the playlist to his player, as well as to the website.

[edit] Mobile Products

MyStrands' features are also available in mobile versions, supporting a number of phones with Symbian, Windows, and Java-enabled mobile technologies.

[edit] Independent Artist Support

MyStrands allows independent artists to create their presence on the website as well, allowing the potential to be recommended alongside all the "big name" artists, from ABBA to Zappa. By uploading tunes, having their songs on playlists, stating influences, and sharing, independent artists' music can be included in MyStrands recommendations.

[edit] Personalized Indie Radio

To help expose independent artists, MyStrands offers their personalized Indie Radio, which allows any user to listen to the MyStrands catalog of independent music, specifically those songs marked as streamable by the artists themselves, and in many cases, the artists also allow a download. Users can skip forward, replay previous songs, rate songs, and share songs with friends. MyStrands members get the added perk of saving songs as their favorites, as well as banning songs, and these preferences help sculpt the member's profile so that MyStrands can offer more personalized recommendations.

[edit] partyStrands

MyStrands also offers partyStrands, an interactive service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs that utilizes mobile phones, digital music and screens. Using SMS technology, users can interact with others, send text messages and pictures, and affect the music being played.

[edit] MyStrands TV

One of MyStrands' latest products is their TV, which interfaces with youTube via the MyStrands public APIs and their OpenStrands web services to deliver personalized video viewing. Users can simply enter an artist name and immediately begin watching videos from that artist. The TV, like other MyStrands products, makes recommendations for videos from other artists similar to the one being played, and users can watch these recommended videos or choose other artists or genres.

[edit] OpenStrands

OpenStrands services allow users to programmatically perform many of the same functions available through the MyStrands website using a browser. The platform currently includes account, catalog, recommendation, playlist, tagging, and community services. Use of OpenStrands is free to registered MyStrands users.

[edit] Labs/Patents

MyStrands shows its potential future technologies on its labs pages. There users can visit and experiment with technologies as they are being developed. Also shown on the labs page is a listing of the various patents filed by MyStrands.

[edit] Awards

April 18, 2007. MyStrands Social Player wins Orange Innovation Contest.

[edit] References

[edit] Further Reading

[edit] External links

Languages