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What do you think of my startup idea?

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Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#31

Post by greendestiny »

Delicious allows users to put a permissive license on their RSS feeds, so (IANAL and within reason) you can probably get those bookmarks and importantly tags. So how closely would making recommendations per tag match your idea?

Tags are a little messy, and perhaps overly specific, so you may need to cluster them and then do recommendations on that.

I'm not sure I understand how you plan on making 'influence' work, if someone bookmarks a link recommended to them do you simply increment all those who have bookmarked it before?

Please don't use the word incentivize, its terrible :)

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#32

Post by dcurtis »

mercurio wrote: post #30
dcurtis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a very rough mockup that was put together with some brainstorming, just to give an idea of what the first user introduction might be like. http://quarkfactor.com/topiat_example.png

You are too modest. That mockup was great. I couldn't make out from the thread if you and steffon are working together?

Yeah, steffon and I are working together. Between the two of us, we can make a pretty great interface that is very focused and has defined boundaries. The problem of boundaries tends to be what most potential investors are worried about. We've definitely got that concern covered.

What we need is someone who is amazingly good at neural networks, algorithm design, and advanced mathematical engineering with programming languages. These people don't grow on trees; they're extremely few and far between. But the main asset for this idea isn't the idea itself, or even-- to some extent-- the user interface, but the way the math works behind the scenes. That's our innovative secret, and it's the reason I'm excited.

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#33

Post by fauigerzigerk »

I'm not sure if it's possible to get enough traction for a general purpose recommendation system. Could this be a service that you offer to providers of niche sites? In terms of machine learning, I think you need to look at algorithms that work well with sparse data. This is particularly important in the beginning, but even later you might not have much data in every single field of interest. Good luck.

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#34

Post by kabanossen »

dcurtis wrote: post #25
ardit33 wrote: post #22

utter crap. Go back at the drawing board. Make something more tangible, enough with the pies on the sky. These are concrete ideas: Facebook, just like your silly school book, but online, and you can add friends Google - search engine Yelp - reviews of restaurants and businesses las.fm - music recommandations from your friends pandora - discover music according to your tastes reddit/digg/news.yc -- recommending news a…

I don't think you described those sites very well. Facebook: Digitize your real relationships Google: Find websites based on keywords Yelp: Find restaurants, share experiences about restaurants Last.fm: Discover new music based on popularity Pandora: Discover new music based on constituent pieces reddig/Digg: Discover news based on popularity This idea: Discover new things based on constituent pieces, popularity, and…

Benefits

Facebook: Better contact with more people

Google: Answers to questions. Solutions to problems.

Last.fm: Good music

Pandora: Good music

reddig/Digg: Inspiration, quick and easy learning about tech, internet, politics

This idea: ?

For example, what's the benefit of getting movies that are similar to Jurassic Park? If you say "comfort and delight" I'd like to know how it's more comfortable than checking the movie with imdb and checking the recommendations. It has to be a bit more comfortable than the way people find movies today. Why would they check your service instead of just walking down to the video store and look at the selection?

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#35

Post by aston »

The idea seems to be, basically, make a better social filtering application. I definitely think there's space for something really cool here, but no one's done anything close to useful yet, short of Amazon.

If I were you, I would try to, at least for the time being, try to pare the idea down into something much smaller and more manageable. Once you have that done as a proof of concept, if it's still too small you can expand to other areas. Along the way, you will've learned a lot about what you'll need to execute on the bigger idea. Why not start with the movie suggester you mentioned later on in the thread?

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#36

Post by anamax »

dcurtis wrote: post #15
anamax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that the netflix system won't do the right thing if we both put some music in our "groups of content" labelled "movies"?

I'm not sure what you're asking here-- Netflix doesn't care about anything but movies, and it probably wouldn't be able to recommend movies any better if it knew your musical tastes, or even how your tastes compare to mine. The idea is that if you search for "sony SSK70ED," on the "discovery engine," it will show you what other people have paired with those speakers, such as receivers, furniture, and televisions. In…

> I'm not sure what you're asking here-- Netflix doesn't care about anything but movies, and it probably wouldn't be able to recommend movies any better if it knew your musical tastes, or even how your tastes compare to mine.

That's wrong. The only thing that is movie-specific about the netflix recommendation system is the preference data that it runs over. It doesn't know movies from eyebrows.

If netflix (the company) also collected preference information about music, the recommendation engine would predict music preferences. And, since it would have both music and movie info, it would use music prefs to recommend movies and the reverse, just as it uses movie prefs to predict movie prefs today.

Amazon's "users who bought {something} also bought" is an example of "doesn't know anything about the domain". (They have to tone it down to keep it from recommending "strange" things that are way out of category.)

Disclosure: I know the guy who implemented NetFlix first recommendation system and have written a collaborative filter myself. I know what I can do with the fact that we both like the Pogues and Chunky Monkey. I still don't see what I can do with how we group those preferences.

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#37

Post by steffon »

anamax wrote: post #36
dcurtis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're asking here-- Netflix doesn't care about anything but movies, and it probably wouldn't be able to recommend movies any better if it knew your musical tastes, or even how your tastes compare to mine. The idea is that if you search for "sony SSK70ED," on the "discovery engine," it will show you what other people have paired with those speakers, such as receivers, furniture, and televisions. In…

> I'm not sure what you're asking here-- Netflix doesn't care about anything but movies, and it probably wouldn't be able to recommend movies any better if it knew your musical tastes, or even how your tastes compare to mine. That's wrong. The only thing that is movie-specific about the netflix recommendation system is the preference data that it runs over. It doesn't know movies from eyebrows. If netflix (the compan…

"I still don't see what I can do with how we group those preferences. "

The way in which this site will allow users to group their preferences seems like a slight organizational difference when compared with other recommendation sites that use collaborative filters, but it has huge implications. This post is meant to give people a taste of what I'm starting to try and find others who are interested. I'd love to talk about any and all specifics and their implications especially if you are programmer. If you want to chat my AIM is rocksld3.

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#38

Post by sbraford »

rms wrote: post #12
menloparkbum wrote: post #10

Description is too long, doesn't make sense. However it also sounds like the plan of no fewer than 10 already existing startups with tons of venture money that are already doomed to failure ... Except for Ning.

It made sense to me. It's a great idea but implementation is going to be incredibly challenging. It's only doomed if the founders don't have the skills to actually implement a better recommendation everything. I think an uber-short pitch here is "A better recommendation engine for everything" which of course only makes sense if you know what a recommendation engine is.

Even if you built the most perfect possible recommendation engine, it still wouldn't matter unless you were able to build a large enough user base who was actually using it.

Re: ability to get recommendation engines working better, see the Netflix $1M competition as an example of just how hard it is.

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#39

Post by sbraford »

dcurtis wrote: post #20
alaskamiller wrote: post #17

sounds like it can be taken care of by mahalo. machine learning or... i might have said that because i want to discourage you from using this great idea and save it for myself... hmm...

Mahalo is trying to reinvent search by letting people chose the results, and that's not going to work. Using Google, I can manipulate the "machine" to give me precise results. This idea is about finding new things based on things you already know. It's not possible to manipulate the Google "machine" to discover things that are similar to what you know you like.

Calacanis may be a dick but he has proven himself (to the tune of $30M or whatever).

I don't use Mahalo but I have no doubt he'll be able to monetize that kind of business and eventually sell out for a decent payday.

Re: What do you think of my startup idea?

#40

Post by nailer »

dcurtis wrote: post #25
ardit33 wrote: post #22

utter crap. Go back at the drawing board. Make something more tangible, enough with the pies on the sky. These are concrete ideas: Facebook, just like your silly school book, but online, and you can add friends Google - search engine Yelp - reviews of restaurants and businesses las.fm - music recommandations from your friends pandora - discover music according to your tastes reddit/digg/news.yc -- recommending news a…

I don't think you described those sites very well. Facebook: Digitize your real relationships Google: Find websites based on keywords Yelp: Find restaurants, share experiences about restaurants Last.fm: Discover new music based on popularity Pandora: Discover new music based on constituent pieces reddig/Digg: Discover news based on popularity This idea: Discover new things based on constituent pieces, popularity, and…

You have a good idea, but I don't think you're good at communicating it. The above is a good example - I don't know anyone that sets out to 'digitize (their) real relationships'. They might do that, but it's that's a means to an end, not the end itself.

Users are focused on end goals, not means. The end goal for Facebook is to keep in contact with friends, meet new people, organise events, and show off their photos.

Nobody wants to digitize anything. If FB initially told its users they've made a service to digitize their real relationships, they wouldn't be very popular.

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