Spain/US-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.
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