Written by Richard MacManus / June 18, 2007 /

Spain-based MyStrands announced today that it’s raised $25 Million “to lead the social recommendation industry”. MyStrands is a music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds. We wrote about MyStrands’ technology in January, at which point it had announced a re-vamp. MyStrands is based on “behavior-based recommendation technologies” and their services allow people to organize and discover digital music and other media, through Internet connected devices (computers, mobile devices, etc). The mobile side of MyStrands was significantly strengthened in January, with new support for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, along with a new mobile Web portal to help users network and discover music. There were also a couple of new Flash-built services - music charts and radio - plus a tie-in with Napster. MyStrands has iTunes integration too, making it a very flexible web-based music recommendations app.

The company explained in their blog post where they’re headed to next:

“We feel strongly that the future of the web is about personalization. Personalized TV stations, personalized advertising, personalized news, personalized shopping, personalized music and entertainment experiences, wherever you happen to be, whether it’s at home, on the go, at your friend’s or at a bar… This is what our 50-person team has been focusing hard on and where we are headed with this funding.”

In fact a recent Read/WriteWeb post detailed this kind of future for Yahoo - how Yahoo is in effect making personalization more of a priority than search (although they subsequently backtracked on this). Right now MyStrands’ focus is music, but they’re also expanding into other media types - videos, films and websites, and more. With the $25M, they basically plan to utilize their “recommender engine” across all different forms of media. They already have that portability on delivery (mobile, PC, other Internet-connected devices), so now MyStrands is aiming to expand the media types.

I can see why $25M is being poured into MyStrands - it is already a strong technnology in the music realm and the fact they cover so many platforms (mobile, PC, etc) is a real plus for the company. If MyStrands successfully introduces video, films, web sites etc into their recommendations product offering, then it will be an attractive acquisition target for the likes of Yahoo and Google.

MyStrands Revamp - More Integration Between Mobile, Online and Physical Worlds

Written by Richard MacManus / January 23, 2007 / 2 comments Music discovery and social networking site MyStrands has undergone a re-vamp. It includes better integration between the online, mobile and physical worlds; excellent new mobile features including a mobile Web portal and personalized radio station; new navigation on the site; and a personal version of partyStrands, their service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs.

MyStrands is based on “behavior-based recommendation technologies” and their services allow people to organize and discover digital music and other media, through Internet connected devices (computers, mobile devices, etc). With the re-vamp, the mobile side of MyStrands has been significantly strengthened, with new support for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, along with a new mobile Web portal to help users network and discover music. There are also a couple of new Flash-built services - music charts and radio - plus a tie-in with Napster.

In detail, the new features being released today in MyStrands are:

• New MyStrands Mobile Web Portal - allows you to find and interact with partyStrands parties at bars, let’s you see what your friends are listening to and helps you organize and discover new music through recommendations, tags and the community.
• MyStrands for Symbian - support for Nokia Series 60 mobile phones; features music player, playlist builder and music recommender.
• MyStrands for Windows Mobile
• new embeddable flash music charts for MySpace, Blogger and LiveJournal - lets you tell your social network what you are listening to on your computer, cell phone or iPod.
• new personalized flash Indie radio - this radio doesn’t have many of the restrictions that commercial online radio has; e.g. you can skip back and forth as many times as you want, rate and track your ratings, tag songs, and download them if the artist permits it.
• hook-in with Napster, giving users 2.5 million commercial full-length songs to listen to for free (registration required at Napster.com, only valid in the USA).

Personalized Radio

Regarding the personal version of partyStrands, it claims to give users the ability to “host parties” from their PC. In essence it is a personal DJ and it works with iTunes, WMP and Winamp (a Mac version is coming soon). This has the potential to be very popular with the youth set, because it enables them to interact at parties and clubs via their mobile phones. For example partygoers can choose the evening’s music by using their cell phones, or find a party, or even join a party from their home via phone. The system can also integrate with users existing social network profiles (e.g. MySpace, MyStrands, Last.fm). partyStrands works with all operators in USA (except t-mobile), and Spain. Users in the rest of the world can interact with partyStrands via mobile web at m.MyStrands.com.

Probably the best part of all this is the increased ability for users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones. This really is showing the way for online-mobile-offline integration, so congratulations to MyStrands for ramping it up.

Here are some more screenshots of the new features in partyStrands:

permalink | 发表评论