Many thanks to Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent of the BBC, for including me in his article, "Web users driving change in 2007."
It was also pretty cool to have my picture included along with Chad and Steve (although I think my shot of me with the YouTube guys and Joanne Wan was pretty amusing too).
Mark and I chatted about personalization when we were together in London. We talked about how Firefly.com started it all off -- with automated collaborative filtering from MIT -- recommendations based on people, places and things. Firefly's technology now resides inside of Microsoft, although they really haven't done anything with it (yet).
This year, there will be many great and exciting developments in the area of personalization and recommendations, based on trust (not like those biased and off-base book recommendations you get on Amazon). As Mark mentioned, cool little companies like MOG are showing us how music affinities can be a great way to meet new people and discover new genres and songs.
Here are other companies in the personalization and recommendation space that I'm watching:
* Daylife
Some great quotes there in the BBC article Kathy. I strongly believe in the way that recommendations now have to start coming from people you trust and in the right context.
ReplyDeleteThought you might want to start following our new business crowdstorm.com which aims to do exactly that in a social shopping context to help people find what to buy. We let people see recommendations, reviews, comments, and lists of products from people they trust.
Any feedback on it would be great if you ever get a spare min:
Many thanks,
Phil Wilkinson
Co-Founder
http://www.crowdstorm.com