Gravity Technologies

Gravity - Rock Solid Recommendations
Type Private
Industry Software
Predecessor Gravity R&D, Reignsoft
Founded 2007 (2007)
Headquarters Budapest, Hungary
Number of locations London, Moscow, New York
Area served Worldwide
Key people

Peter A. Csíkos (CEO)
Domonkos Tikk (CSO & Co-founder)
Tamás Urbancsek (CTO)
Viktor Gerő (Board member)

Brian Kemp (Consultant)
Products Recommendation systems for e-commerce, VOD, IPTV[1]
Services Software development
Total assets US$ 600,000 (Dec, 2009)[2]
Owner(s) Hungarian institutional strategic investors, Wojciech Uzdelewicz,[3] Founders
Employees 30
Website GravityRD.com

Gravity - Rock Solid Recommendations (formerly Gravity R&D) is an IT provider specialized in recommender systems. Gravity was founded by members of the Netflix Prize team "Gravity".

Gravity is based in Budapest, Hungary.

Contents

History

Netflix Prize

Further information: Netflix Prize

The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The prize would be awarded to the team achieving over 10% improvement over Netflix's own Cinematch algorithm.

The team "Gravity" was the front runner during January—May 2007.[4]

The leading position was achieved again in October 2007 in collaboration with the team "Dinosaur Planet" under the name "When Gravity and Dinosaurs Unite".

In January 2009, the two teams founded "Grand Prize Team" to initiate even wider collaboration, that resulted in being one of the leading teams throughout 2009.

On July 25, 2009 the team "The Ensemble", a merger of the teams "Grand Prize Team" and "Opera Solutions and Vandelay United", achieved a 10.10% improvement over Cinematch on the Quiz set.[5]

On September 18, 2009, Netflix announced team "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos" as the prize winner, and the prize was awarded to the team in a ceremony on September 21, 2009.[6] "The Ensemble" team had in fact succeeded to match the winning "BellKor" team's result, but since "BellKor" submitted their results 20 minutes earlier, the rules award the prize to them.[7][8]

Details on the algorithms developed by the Gravity team can be found in their scientific publications.[9][10]

Awards and recognition

Investors

Gravity raised in the first round over US$ 600.000.[2] The group of investors include Hungarian institutional strategic investors and Wojciech Uzdelewicz, an all-star analyst at Wall Street according to hedge funds,[3] former Managing Director of Duquesque Capital.[17]

Since the first round investment, Gravity won customers in USA, UK, Russia, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Israel, Czech Republic, Poland and Saudi-Arabia.[18]

References

  1. ^ http://www.uzletiangyal.net/content/file/Gravity%20Technologies.pdf
  2. ^ a b c "Gravity - Rock Solid Recommendations: among Europe’s Top 25 Most Innovative Start-ups, completes first financing round". http://gravityrd.com/gravity/news.php?id=42&gravity=gravity__among_europe%E2%80%99s_top_25_most_innovative_start-ups__completes_first_financing_round&newsgroupid=2&lang=en. 
  3. ^ a b "How Hedge Funds Rate Wall Street Analysts, 2003". http://www.emii.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1032350. 
  4. ^ Hafner, Katie (June 4, 2007). "Netflix Prize Still Awaits a Movie Seer". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/technology/04netflix.html. Retrieved 2010-03-07. 
  5. ^ "The Ensemble". 2009-07-25. http://www.the-ensemble.com/. 
  6. ^ "Grand Prize awarded to team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos". Netflix Prize Forum. 2009-09-21. http://www.netflixprize.com/community/viewtopic.php?id=1537. 
  7. ^ Steve Lohr (2009-09-21). "A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/technology/internet/22netflix.html. 
  8. ^ "Mátrixfaktorizáció egymillió dollárért". Index. 2009-08-07. http://index.hu/tech/net/2009/08/07/matrixfaktorizacio_egymillio_dollarert/. 
  9. ^ Takács, G. B.; Pilászy, I. N.; Németh, B. N.; Tikk, D. (2007). "Major components of the gravity recommendation system". ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 9 (2): 80. doi:10.1145/1345448.1345466.  edit
  10. ^ Gábor Takács; István Pilászy, Bottyán Németh, Domonkos Tikk (2007), "On the Gravity Recommendation System" (PDF), Proc. KDD Cup Workshop at SIGKDD, San Jose, California, pp. 22–30, http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/KDD-cup-2007/proceedings/gravity-Tikk.pdf, retrieved 2010-04-15 
  11. ^ Achim Brueck (2008-07-03). "Konzeptsteckbrief 5: IMPRESS - Instant Entertainment von Reignsoft (Ungarn)". http://blog.interactive-tv-award.de/2008/07/03/konzeptsteckbrief-impress-instant-entertainment-von-reignsoft-ungarn. 
  12. ^ "Deutsche Telekom Interactive TV Award". 2010-03-07. http://gravityrd.com/gravity/news.php?id=22&gravity=deutsche_telekom_interactive_tv_award&newsgroupid=2&lang=en. 
  13. ^ "ACM Recommender Systems 2008 - Home". Recsys.acm.org. 2008-10-23. http://recsys.acm.org/2008/news.html. Retrieved 2010-05-02. 
  14. ^ "Strands Blog " Instant personalized TV entertainment developer, Gravity R&D, winner of the Strands $100k Call for Recommender Start-Ups". Blog.strands.com. http://blog.strands.com/2008/10/24/gravity-winner-strands-100k-call/. Retrieved 2010-05-02. 
  15. ^ http://www.supertext.ch/info/wp-content/themes/supertext/images/news/redherring_europe_finalists_2009.pdf
  16. ^ "Europe Unlimited". E-unlimited.com. 1999-12-04. http://www.e-unlimited.com/events/view.aspx?events_pages_id=463. Retrieved 2010-05-02. 
  17. ^ "Wojtek Uzdelewicz, Managing Director of Duquesque Capital". http://www.spoke.com/info/pDC2TBv/WojtekUzdelewicz. 
  18. ^ "Netflix Prize Runner-up unveils programming recommendations technology". ITVT. 2010-04-13. http://www.itvt.com/story/6631/netflix-prize-runner-unveils-programming-recommendations-technology.