TasteKid Lets You Find Stuff Similar to Stuff You Like

Written on 28th October 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

I came across this awesome web app via Friendfeed and it’s one I can genuinely see myself using frequently. Tastekid, created by Romanian Andrei Oghină, is a recommendation engine for music, movies and books.

“Emmy” (the sites friendly face) will ask you to type in a movie, band or book and in return will recommend a list of similar artists, movies or books. When you visit the site you’ll almost wonder why the design is so understated, however, therein lies it’s beauty…nothing over the top, non wild statements about how it will change the web! It just does it’s job and does it remarkably well for a (very) new product.

You may wonder how the engine works and “Emmy” is kind enough to explain:

Let’s say one day I ask somebody about his/her favorite music. If the answer is that he/she enjoys listening to, let’s say, Massive Attack and Backstreet Boys I will keep that in mind. Now, this is very important, I don’t have to be judgmental about it. If you’ll ask me to recommend you something considering you like Massive Attack, I will most probably not mention anything like Backstreet Boys, because hopefully other 100 people that liked Massive Attack haven’t told me anything about them. Moreover, they would probably mention some other bands more often and so I will recommend those to you instead.

I typed in “The Descent” one of my favorite recent horror flicks and the results were remarkably impressive.

For more information of the app, I highly recommend trying it out and/or reading a bit about “Emmy’ herself.

For other recommendation engines out there, I highly recommend having a read of 10 Recommendation Engines by RWW.

recommendation engine, Romania, Webapp

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Directed Edge, recommendations all the way from Berlin

Written on 20th September 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Scott Wheeler and Valentin Hussong, co-founders of Berlin-based start-up Directed Edge. They provide web sites with a recommender system. Basically they serve three different types of sites, namely social networks, stores, and informational sites. Wheller and Hussong are now ready to conquer the world with their products and currently looking for a web applications and infrastructure expert and a marketing kinda guy. Exciting times. How did they get to this stage?

How did you come up with the idea of Directed Edge?

“Many years back Scott was doing some work on desktop search. Desktop search tends to not produce nearly as relevant results as web search algorithms because it’s basically using technology from the mid-90s. The critical moment in the modernization of web search was a shift from looking at text and tags and stuff like that to looking at how information is connected. So he was really interested in figuring out how to model connected data and use that to find related content.

If we fast-foward a few years, there was this “ah-ha” moment after watching movies suggested by IMDB as related to Scott’s favorite movie and being blown away by how horrible the recommendations were. So the pieces started dropping into place — recommendations are a huge part of modern web sites, combined with the rise of social media, there was a chance to use the social web’s structure to find content users are interested in. We started pitching the idea of doing recommendations as a service to some of our friends in the local web community and they helped us — and continue to help us — refine the idea.” (more…)

berlin, five questions for start-ups, germany, recommendation engine, recommendations, Start-ups

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