Recommendation Ventures powers ahead: IceTV recommendations live

I haven’t talked a lot about Scouta for a bit… We’ve been internally capacity building. And we’ve been focussing on providing recommendations as a web service to web and media companies with members and content that can be enabled for recommendations.

We do this under the banner of Scouta’s real company name, Recommendation Ventures, which you’ll hear a lot more about in the coming months.

There’s a lot of specialist knowledge around providing good recommendations, and packaging a recommendation services as a set of web services makes a lot of sense. We can take a set of content (URLs) and some identified members and visitors, and produce personalized recommendations in real-time to embed in a website or provide on a set top box, mobile etc.

But, the big news today is that our recommendation services are powering IceTV’s new IceTV Recommendations. IceTV say:

IceTV customers can now automatically receive intelligent suggestions on TV shows that may interest them based on their favourite TV shows, series recordings and similar recording decisions made by fellow IceTV users.

IceTV Recommendations are provided to IceTV users on an ongoing basis thanks to a recent partnership with Perth based Australian start-up, Recommendation Ventures Pty Ltd. The two pioneering companies have teamed-up to give users intuitive recommendations, based on the individual user’s tastes. When combined with the existing value-add features of IceTV, Recommendation Venture’s intelligent technology will allow user’s to receive truly personalised suggestions and as a result, an even greater TV viewing experience.

We’ve had some good press coverage. It has been picked up by TechCrunch and Gizmodo

Recommendation web services

We’re starting to roll out recommendations as a web service as a part of the Scouta product set. See more info at the new Recommendation Ventures website.

Scouta Wins Australian Startups Carnival 2008

Scouta, our social recommendation service startup, has just been awarded first prize in the Australian Startups Carnival 2008. This is brilliant news. The competition results are here. More info and commentary on the Scouta blog.

This means we’ll have a stand and will probably be presenting at CeBIT Australia 2008.

Scouta Agents for Mac and Windows released

Over at [Scouta](http://scouta.com) we have just released the [Scouta iTunes Agent for Windows](http://scouta.com/download/win), following on from releasing the [iTunes/Mac](http://scouta.com/download/mac) version about a month ago. If you’d like to get recommended online audio, video and podcasts based on what you watch (no ratings required), the grab and install the Agent, and it will watch what you watch and listen to and recommend more relevant content for you.


Over at dconstuct 2007 last Friday, [Tom Coates](http://2007.dconstruct.org/speakers/#tom) was talking about how your product extends further than your website. Well, adding these agents means that you can get the Scouta recommendation experience without leaving your iPod, Apple TV, or iTunes. It can be a pretty magical thing to get recommended content just showing up on your iPod without having to do anything apart from syncing your iPod now and again.

Busy commuters are going to totally love this.

Rich talking about Scouta in 1 Minute

Here’s my mate Richard Giles, Scouta’s CEO, giving a one-minute interview. One minute isn’t long, but he managed to fit a fair bit in there.

Brighton office for Presence Labs

I’ve moved in to share an office with the Snipperoo crew in Brighton.

Here’s a map:

And there more about the place on the Scouta blog.

Scouta #6 Web App in Australia

Our social media recommender playground scouta.com has come in at number 6 in the top 60 web applications in Australia as named by Read/Write Web.

Web application response time monitoring

I’ve been out there looking for a simple and affordable online service that will give me web app performance monitoring for Scouta. Ideally, I’m looking for something that give more that simply working out if the server is up or down. There are lots of services that do that. That’s a bit simplistic for a web service where we have multiple servers running, and where response time to our visitors and members is pretty important in the user experience.

What I’m really looking for is something that works on response time across a bunch of requests, and when a modified average goes above some response time limit, I want to get an email and an SMS.

So, today I’m brewing up something in python that will test one or more URLs and will SMS and email me when this modified average goes above some limit I set.

Delivering emails is easy once we’ve detected a response time issue. For SMS, I’ve signed up with TextAnywhere to get SMS delivery from a http web service interface.

Media Object Metadata

One of the things I’m working on at the moment is to model a reasonably complete set of metadata associated with an online media object. This is to give us in Scouta the best internal representation of media objects that we can get, to help with recommendation generation, searching and content delivery and embedding.

The source for all this metadata? Well, we start with RSS 2.0, then add on the Media RSS extensions and the creative commons licensing extension.

Then add in the Atom Syndication Format. Then add in the data returned from who knows how many online media site APIs. Also ID3 tag information from MP3s and other embedded tags from other file formats.

There’s a bit to work through here, as you can see. I’ll try and post a summary here when I get something reasonably complete.

Scouta in Australian Anthill

There’s great article about our Scouta in the latest Australian Anthill.

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