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.

Our blogs

Wow, just sent a list of our blogs to Brighton Bloggers for inclusion. It’s getting a bit long. Hadn’t realised just how much blogging Gra and I (mainly Gra) have been doing over the last few years. So here it is…

www.authenticblogging.com – the place for a deep, authentic and truly happening approach to blogging in all it’s potential and ripeness. Blogging courses and an emerging new community – here we are!

www.barkingowl.com/learning – began with documentation of our early learning project and moved on from there into person-centred education, blogging and beyond… still sometimes active and ranks well with Google, loads of good stuff to check out and comment on, but have largely moved across to authenticblogging now

www.gravyland.net – our personal, family blog (including some contributions from Bea age 6, eg. this lovely picture she drew. Still not entirely sure how open I should be online, but this, like everything, is a work in progress.

http://blog.scouta.com – Scouta is our online media recommendations venture. Regularly featured on Techcrunch, actually.

http://presencelabs.com – Business blog for our main consulting vehicle, Presence Labs Ltd.

http://aplacecalledprovidence.com – A group blog for the co-working
office space at 50 Providence Place in the New England Quarter (where Gra is based, while I am at home hanging out the washing in between brain flashes and mad typing). Includes contributions from such neo-reno’s as Snipperoo’s Ivan Pope and the lovely Dom Stockdale.