Ness updates its iOS app, a personalized dining guide for you
The subject happens to be dining, but what Ness is up to is really about maximizing the accuracy of personalization. Read more »
Consumers could pay higher switching costs in a data driven world
A conversation with a payments processing company that offers small businesses a side of data, got me thinking about how data may change your customer service experience and maybe distort markets. Read more »
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How to compete with Facebook in 2013
Specialist networks cater to diverse consumer segments, but Facebook’s sheer ubiquity means 94 percent of all social networkers use it. The bottom line: If any generalist network is going to gain mass-market traction, it will be at the expense of Facebook, not in addition to it. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Foursquare takes on Yelp with 10-point rating system
photo: Foursquare
Foursquare has said it’s gunning for Yelp and Google and now it has a 10-point rating system that shows how it will compete head-on in the local search and recommendation space. Read more »
Friendster founder launches social-news app, but will it fly?
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has launched a news-filtering service called Nuzzel that is powered by social-networking activity. But while his previous ventures have been early to the market, his new offering suffers from the opposite problem — the market is already saturated with similar services. Read more »
Wine site Snooth builds a virtual sommelier for Springpad
Snooth is making wine recommendations on every recipe that Springpad users clip. Rather than hire an army of sommeliers to suggest pairings for the countless recipes on the web, Snoot has built an algorithm that deconstructs recipes and matches them to their ideal wine profiles. Read more »
Food Network goes local, builds its own meal finder app
Food Network is continuing its push into mobile media, this time with a new restaurant finder app called On the Road. The app isn’t Yelp or Urbanspoon. It draws its content and recommendation solely from FN’s TV programming, and that’s the way Food Network likes it. Read more »
Foursquare goes into monetization mode with promoted updates
Location-based social network Foursquare is rolling out its long awaited promoted updates, an advertising product that allows local and national businesses to push out specials, news and pictures to Foursquare’s more than 20 million users. It’s the start of Foursquare’s big monetization push. Read more »
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Social-TV apps and consumer behavior
Social TV is any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Startups in this space hope to combine ubiquitous second-screen technology with well-established audience behavior to drive new value around shows. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
The adoption of tablets, social media and new interfaces and the changing nature of the TV itself mean the digital living room will continue on its path of rapid change, thanks to new ways of creating, viewing, bundling, distributing and selling content. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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How social discovery is transforming entertainment
In this busy new world of multiple social networks and recommendations tools, the discovery process itself is being disrupted by innovation and by the changing ways in which consumers now interact online. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Fan service Moviepilot steams into Hollywood with $7m round
The Berlin-based IMDB rival Moviepilot, which is already working with film studios to give them better understanding of their projects’ fanbase, has secured funding to put a sales team in LA Read more »
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10 ways big data changes everything
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Going social: Recommendations engines need to factor in consumer reviews
Ebay’s recent purchase of Hunch illustrates how social media has leveled the playing field for e-commerce recommendations engines. Mixing human-powered reviews with algorithm-powered recommendations will be a key driver of social ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Why eBay is buying recommendation engine Hunch
EBay has announced it’s buying New York startup Hunch, the recommendation engine, to help improve its recommendation services. The purchase helps eBay improve its technology base, compete better with Amazon and it might also be another asset in eBay’s X.commerce platform. Read more »
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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
First look at Oink, Kevin Rose’s app for rating stuff
Oink, Kevin Rose’s much-discussed app about rating not places, but things within places, is now in the App Store. It’s a little like Yelp, and a little like Foursquare, and a little like Foodspotting. But will this pig fly? I kicked the tires to find out. Read more »
Google buys Zagat to add people power to its algorithms
Google has bought restaurant ratings publisher Zagat, in a deal whose value hasn’t been disclosed. The deal helps Google bring in a source of recommendations and user generated content that meshes well with its engineering-centric culture and could boost Zagat’s profile among the digerati. Read more »
Is it time to retire the 5-star rating system?
Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read more »
Isn’t it about time we did content discovery differently?
Is anyone else a little tired of being pushed towards certain content because of mined personal information? It’s kind of like having that friend who resembles you a little too closely; eventually they become tiresome. Here’s how we might try doing recommendations differently. Read more »
Share and Share Alike: BBC iPlayer Gets More Social
The BBC is adding new ways for iPlayer viewers to share what they’re watching with their friends and social networks, with a new share button. In addition to standard networks like Facebook and Twitter, iPlayer users can now send videos to Delicious, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Read more »
Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough?
Media guru Clay Shirky once famously said that the problem of the modern age isn’t information overload at all, it’s “filter failure” — and many new services have been built to help with that. But Eli Pariser says the cure could be worse than the disease. Read more »
Get Quick and Easy iPad App Recommendations With Forage
Last week, Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon released a cool little web app called Forage that taps into your Twitter account using the Hunch recommendation API to provide personalized YouTube playlists based on who you follow on Twitter. Today, there’s a version that recommends iPad apps, too. Read more »
Will Social News Make People Use LinkedIn More Often?
In its latest attempt to build social-networking features into its business, soon-to-be-public LinkedIn today launched a news recommendation service called LinkedIn Today, which it hopes will function like a specialized Twitter for business networks. But will it convince people to spend more time on the network? Read more »
StumbleUpon Funding Another Sign of Its Rebirth
Stumbleupon, which was reborn as a recommendation-and-discovery service in 2009 after an earlier ill-fated acquisition by eBay, produced another tangible sign of that rebirth today with the news that the company has landed a Series B financing round of $17 million from a group of funds. Read more »
Recommendation Is Still the Holy Grail For News
photo: Flickr user Zert Sonstige
What news consumers really need is some way to filter all the information they can pull in and have new content recommended to them, but despite some new entrants like News360, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have so far proven to be the best solution. Read more »
Dining Out With Your iPhone for Valentine’s Day
If you haven’t looked at your iCal recently, we’re less than a week away from Valentine’s Day and if you haven’t made your dining plans yet, time’s running out. Pull out your iPhone and let’s look at apps that will help you with your culinary plans. Read more »
LBS Startups Should Forget Check-Ins and Just Tell Me Where To Go
Local recommendations are becoming a key feature for location-based apps as they look to provide useful suggestions for users. Recommendations represent one way location services are moving beyond check-in, helping them transition from broadcasting a user’s current location to assisting them in finding their next one. Read more »
Can Hunch’s Algorithm Improve Your Gift-Giving Skills?
Hunch, a startup trying to build a “taste graph” of people’s like and dislikes that can act as a recommendation engine, has partnered with Gifts.com to make suggestions about what kinds of presents your Facebook friends might like, based on their Facebook profiles. Read more »
Hunch's Redesign Puts It Right in Facebook's Sights
Hunch, the hot startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and angel investor Chris Dixon, has redesigned the service to focus on recommending products such as magazines and books, rather than answering questions about specific topics. But the new focus could put it squarely in Facebook’s sights. Read more »
Why the Social Web Makes Local Reviews More Useful
Features like Foursquare’s tips give us a glimpse of a useful and monetizable service where we can get valuable recommendations in real-time, via mobile access to reviews that are local, current, relevant, actionable and come from friends. Read more »
NDS Adds Jinni for Video Recommendations
Finding what you want to watch on TV is going to be a big problem in the coming years as more video choices crowd into your living room. As a result, recommendations will play an increasingly important role in our video discovery. To that end, NDS, […] Read more »
iTunes 9 Genius: It’s in the Mix
Having spent a day with iTunes 9 and OS 3.1 on an iPhone and iPod touch, I find that I am completely smitten with a feature I pretty much completely ignored before yesterday. I’m referring to Genius, which hadn’t lived up to its name until this […] Read more »
YouTube Looks to Unexpected Recommendations
YouTube is taking a page from Netflix, looking to recommendations as a way to squeeze a few more video views (with ads) out of its massive audience. Only this time around, the recommendations YouTube wants to make are of a more unexpected variety. The Wall Street […] Read more »
How About a Last.fm for Movies?
Is it time for a Last.fm for TV shows and movies? That’s the question a new online video platform called Whiwa.net is raising. Whiwa is a video community based on scrobbling –- the act of automatically tracking your media consumption habits and sharing them with the […] Read more »
Genius Extended to Movies and TV in iTunes 8.1
I still have a lot of music-savvy friends who deny the validity of the the name Genius for Apple’s recently implemented iTunes music recommendation engine, but regardless of how appropriate the name may be, the service has now been turned on for movies and TV, too. […] Read more »
GigPark: Turning Social Networks into Testimonials
In professional services, you are only ever as good as your last engagement. Which is to say, if you have no one to vouch for the quality of your work, then you’ll probably have a hard time finding more. Traditionally, the best way to sell to […] Read more »
Jinni Raises $1M for Video Discovery
Jinni, a video search and discovery service, has raised $1 million from Israeli investment collective Startup Factory, according to Globes Online. Jinni doesn’t have a live site, but it appears to be looking to license its personalized recommendation technology to TV and online video operators, similar […] Read more »
