For those that don’t know, collaborative filtering is a method of making suggestions for other products, based on your previous shopping habits. It is used by sites/web-apps, like Netflix, Pandora Radio, and Amazon, and, I think, Ulik, and mostly based on user-generated content.

Just working it out logically, you could say several things about user-generated content:

1. there’s a lot of it, but attention is limited to a few leading sites
2. not all users are equal, there are demographic, emotional, intelligence, and other factors that affect how users vote.
3. users are cheap, which also sometimes means that you get what you paid for.

I’m personally not a fan of user-generated content, at least on a massive scale, because of some of the things in that list.

Alternative is the expert-based method, which means that expert-critics analyse a product and give it a rating. It is not often used in a collaborative setting, meaning that it makes suggestions for other products, i.e. Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic would be sites collect expert input, but don’t, afaik, suggest other matching movies.

The most famous example of an expert-based collaborative filtering system is Pandora Radio, which is built on top of the Music Genome Project, a collection of 50-or-so music-experts that analyse music and assign attributes to it. Those attributes can then be used to match songs. Users’ input isn’t ignored, they can vote on songs, which affects their future track-lists.

A few characteristics of expert-based systems are:

1. They entail significant wage-costs for employees that have invested in their expertise. Counter this against the possible income of a service like Pandora—advertising & referral-fees—and there could be a discrepancy.
2. They cannot rate as much content, as quickly, as a more user-generated system could.
3. They, on the other hand, maintain a consistent quality, that is unmatched by the varying quality that comes out of user-input.

I’m personally much more of a fan of an expert-based system, but sceptical of its economic merit, looking just at point 1.

Most systems seem to be orientated at users mainly, which, if you have a dataset like Netflix’s, is a smart way to go about things. There are some limitations that that entails, as the Netflix prize has revealed, namely that it cannot account for “strange” films like “Napoleon Dynamite,” and that it doesn’t take into account any user-based information, such as demographics or mood.

What do you think, audience? Knowing that users are cheap but a-plenty (but also overwhelmed with competing attention-buckets), and experts are few and expensive, is the solution to still go the user-generated route and try to make that work? In my opinion, expert-based systems require different business models than are popular online these days. You cannot get away with charging nothing, expecting users to magically click your advert, and hope to pay those university-educated experts. That, or, the margins for your products have to be so high (e.g. insurance & travel), to make such a system work (not that I think collaborative filtering and insurance really make that much sense—”give me the insurance radio-station please!“… eh no.)

Enjoy the weekend!
Vincent

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A lot more multi-part blog posts on Tech IT Easy; finally some continuity again, which is nice for both you and me! So, today was the ceremony for stage 1 of the New Venture business-plan competition, the submission of the idea, of which a prize of €500 was to be won by 10 contestants. As I expected, for several reasons, I wasn’t among those 10, though the race isn’t over yet! The next submission is February 26th 2009, the feasibility-study, for which I may compete with my own idea or change it (to another, if needed). The feasibility of an idea entails technological and business aspects, and there’s still a lot to be worked out on both ends. I’m letting you know for completely selfish ends—it would be nice to see a familiar face, if only on the other side of the court. Of course, one team-member must be residing in the Netherlands!

So how was today? I wasn’t really top-fit as it feels like I’m doing a 101 things and am a little overwhelmed, i.e. stressed out. So I didn’t come with high expectations, mostly to check out the competition and perhaps meet some people. The event was presented by Roland Koopman, a Dutch TV-presentor, and the awards were handed out by Pim Batist, founder of SellaBand.

Two “insider”-stories were presented, one was SellaBand and other was Taniq, a rubber-company, for lack of a better word—the company makes it so that rubber hoses and similar are more stable, while using less materials and no metal. You should check out the film their site, it’s very well-made. Most important insight from Taniq: the importance of coaches/mentors, which appear to be abundant if you take part in the competition, for bouncing off ideas & solving problems. But also on the hiring process—when the three young founders decided to look for some “grey haired” commercial talent, they found out, the hard way, that big-company sales-talent is not the same as small-company talent. In the end, if you can’t sell your own products as an entrepreneur, you’re probably in trouble!

The best example of this was perhaps Pim Betist; what a magnetic personality! SellaBand is a crowdfunding mechanism for bands, who, instead of walking to a record-company (for whatever reason), can place themselves on the site, after which fans can vote—with their wallets!—for the band they like. And with that a music-cd, etc. can be produced… He came up with the idea in 2001, residing in New York. Then, for reasons unexplained, he decided to take on a 3-year job at Shell, until he finally quit that job, sold his car, moved into some (illegally) free housing and focussed all his energy on working out the idea. He recruited a guy from Sony BMG as co-founder, by posing as a student wanting to write a thesis and holding several meetings with the company under that subterfuge—a side-note: recruiting people from Sony should never be hard, these guys, from my experience, are all chronically made unhappy by the politics in that company. I’m a little more into music over rubber, as you can tell, but that’s maybe also because the presentation was excellent. Not that Taniq didn’t have a nice movie either, definitely to be watched on their site!

So what about the winners? If there was a definite theme to the evening, apart from innovation, it was that pretty much all of the prize-winnars had a sustainable idea. It wasn’t necessary green, but more efficient, more ethical, more social, etc. What I remembered was:

• a one-handed fire-extinguisher for handicapped people
• a crowd-funded electrical cart for people in third world countries
• a way to make fuel consumption more efficient in cars
• a sensor that measures how people sleep

On the off-chance that you are planning to take part in round 2 (send me a mail, if interested), that should give you a hint of where to direct some energy at! Looking at the credit crisis now, it should perhaps not be a surprise that attention is being drawn towards both efficiency, but also more sustainable ways of doing things—that is, incidentally, one the conditions that will probably be imposed on the car-companies, if they receive financial aid: to become more green.

That’s it from me on this subject! It’s not too far a leap for me to write a feasibility study, but I’ll only know for certain if I’ll take part a few months from now. So, let’s hope for a part 3, 4, and beyond!

Have a nice weekend!
Vincent

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