Movie And TV Recommendation Startup Inveni Closes $483K Funding Round

Minnesota-based startup Inveni announced today that it has closed a $483,333 seed funding round led by a group of Silicon Valley investors, who asked to have their identities remain confidential. Be that as it may, the latest round of funding brings Inveni’s total to $1.7 million.

Inveni is a free web service that serves up movie and TV recommendations based on a user’s unique tastes. How does it work? Think of it as technology akin to that which drives Netflix’s personalization and recommendation features. Inveni’s software assists you in creating a customized “Taste Profile” by enabling you to share the preferences you’ve already established on sites like Amazon or Hulu. Speaking of Amazon, Inveni founder Aaron Weber told me that the startup is being advised by former NetPerceptions executives, the makers of the collaborative filtering software that drives Amazon’s recommendation engine.

Though Inveni’s technology draws obvious parallels with Netflix and Amazon, Weber said that the two services essentially rely on an algorithm to aggregate taste preferences and serve recommendations, and Inveni differs from this — sort of. The service has used a bot to crawl other sites on the web that offer user-generated content recommendations (i.e. sites that let users recommend movies and TV shows to each other) and it’s incorporated this data into its own database. Which doesn’t really sound Kosher, but we’ll let it slide. Just this once. And unlike the fully automated algorithms, Inveni users can publish the TV shows and movies they’ve watched, which leads the site to ask their friends and other Inveni members what they should check out next.

Update: Weber says that this crawling is one component of the recommendations and explains that staff, contractors, and the site’s users establish the majority of connections. The crawling is intended to help Inveni staff make recommendations faster.

The startup will initially remain focused on movies and TV, but says plans are in the works to expand beyond Hollywood — potentially to books and music.

Founded in 2008, Inveni debuted its service at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September 2010. Since then, it has remained in beta, but Weber told me that he hopes to launch officially this spring.

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Yahoo Livestand: A ‘Personalized Newsstand’ For iPad, Android Tablets

Yahoo this morning unveiled Livestand, a tablet-friendly personalized ‘digital newsstand’.

Yahoo Livestand is slated to be available to consumers as iPad and Android tablet apps in the first half of 2011. No word on pricing, however.

For publishers, Yahoo promises that they can use Livestand to develop their publication once and easily deploy it on most popular tablet devices, but in a highly personalized fashion.

Advertisers, on the other hand, will be able to “create personalized brand experiences with ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and combine the interactivity of a tablet with a brand building, TV-like, ad experience.”

From the sound of it, the Livestand platform will not remain tablet-only long, but should be getting a version that’s fit for modern smartphones and mobile browsers in the near future.

Yahoo content – which includes Sports, News, Finance but also services like Flickr as well as the Yahoo Contributor Network – will initially power Livestand. Content from other publishers will evidently join the line-up, although who and when remains to be seen.

We’ll be looking for a demo and hopefully more information at next week’s Mobile World Congress, where Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is scheduled to speak.

Truth to be told, there’s a lot of room for improvements in personalized content delivery on smartphones and tablets, so I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing how Yahoo thinks it cracked that nut.

Blake Irving, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo, sure sets the bar high:

With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day. Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.

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Nissan’s Electric Sports Car of the Future Debuts Next Month [PICS]

Three months after Nissan rolled out its Leaf electric car, it’ll be showing off ESFLOW, a more-powerful electric sports car that can travel 150 miles before it needs recharging.

Propelled by a separate electric motor on each of its rear wheels, the Nissan ESFLOW is a two-seater that can zip from 0 to 60 MPH in less than 5 seconds. It debuts next month at the International Motorshow in Geneva, the same venue where that spectacular Pagani C9 Huayra car we showed you last weekend will roll out.

Even though the ESFLOW is designed from scratch according to GizMag, it’ll use key components from the Nissan Leaf, such as its lithium-ion battery packs. Price wasn’t mentioned, however, the Nissan Leaf lists for $32,780, and this sportier Nissan will have a lighter and more expensive body made of aluminum and composite materials, driving its price higher.

There’s more exotica, including brake and gas pedals that adjust electronically to fit each driver, fly-by-wire steering and video cameras and screens instead of rear-view mirrors. Add up all these features, and the result is not going to be a cheap car. Like most concept cars, the ESFLOW is an ambitious design, but Nissan says it’s a “production-ready” vehicle.

We’re thinking it looks a lot like the Chevy Volt when it was a concept car, which became much more conventional by the time it reached an actual assembly line.

How do you like ESFLOW, readers? Does its styling beat a Tesla Roadster? Would you be willing to put up with a range of 150 miles so you could drive this little pocket electro-rocket?

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Rob Glaser: Silicon Valley’s Bright Future

I have a lot of respect for Scott McNealy. Scott did a terrific job running Sun for many years. Sun is one of the 25 greatest companies started over the past 30 years, and the company had a hell of a run by almost any measure.

But I don’t buy Scott’s concerns about the future of Silicon Valley. Indeed, I think he got it 95% wrong. While I live in Seattle, over the past year I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — helping to start one Valley company, investing in 2 others, and looking closely at a couple dozen more. My take is that Silicon Valley, and the U.S. tech scene in general, is more vibrant, exciting, and laden with big opportunities than at any time in my 30 years in the business.

First, the 5% where Scott’s right: When he says the valley “ain’t what it used to be,” he’s absolutely right. Nowadays, everything in the Valley — and in U.S. InfoTech in general — is software-driven. That doesn’t mean that hardware is dead – there’s plenty of Valley innovation in chips (e.g. Arm and Apple A4), Computers (e.g. the iPad), and other physical products. It’s just that winning products nowadays are fundamentally great software wrapped in either great hardware, or good & cheap hardware. In the past, it was possible to win big in hardware in the U.S., without being great at software, but no more. So yes, that’s a big change that has lots of implications.

But the 95% that’s wrong is when Scott seems to suggest that all of the opportunity in the Valley is focused around Social Networking (or unsustainable Government-funded Greentech). This is wrong in 2 fundamental ways:

First, it ignores many *huge* sectors where the Valley is thriving and indeed taking the lead in value creation away from other territories. Take operating systems for mobile phones: The #1 and #2 worldwide products – Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS – both come out of the valley. Their leadership has driven a massive shift in the geography of value creation in the mobile industry. In the 2000s most value creation in mobile phones happened in Europe or Asia – think Nokia, Ericcson, and Samsung. North American giants like Motorola and Nortel got left behind and struggled mightily. Now it’s just the opposite – Nokia is famously reeling, for instance, while Apple, Google, RIM, and other North American companies are thriving.

And because the OS is at the core of mobile platforms, the success of iOS and Android is creating a massive ecosystem of value creation in the valley – mobile advertising business like Admob; mobile applications like Flipboard; mobile chips like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, etc. While it’s possible to start great mobile companies anywhere in the world, Silicon Valley has become the single best place in the world to start most kinds of mobile software and services company.

Mobile Phone leadership is just one example where the U.S. is taking the lead globally. For another example, look at social ecommerce, where new companies like GroupOn, Living Social, and Etsy are taking off and creating a huge amount of value.

Scott’s second misguided thought about Social Networking is his dismissive attitude: “I’m not sure it’s really going to change the quality of life in a positive way,” implying that Social Networking is just some frilly consumer fad like a hula hoop. I couldn’t disagree more. Social Platforms are enriching and redefining how hundreds of millions of people work, navigate through information, and communicate. Yes Social Platforms are also great for playing games. But to imply, as Scott does, that the essence of Social Networking is gaming is as misguided as saying that PCs are just toys simply because they’re great for playing video games. (Of course, back in Scott’s day Sun used to take this position, but that’s a different matter…)

Look, the Valley’s not in perfect shape by any means. Regional unemployment is way too high, as it is across the Country. The new software-driven Valley is not as labor intensive as a manufacturing industry like cars. But that’s nothing new — IT manufacturing has been moving out of the U.S. for at least two decades.

Scott’s also right that the cost of doing business in Silicon Valley is high. But it’s been high for many years and that hasn’t stopped four generations of entrepreneurs from thriving and building great businesses for 40 years. And it’s not holding back the next generation of great entrepreneurs and great businesses.

Rob Glaser (Twitter: @RobGlaser) is Founder and Chairman of RealNetworks, and a Venture Partner at Accel Partners.

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Sonos Android App Controls Wireless Music Systems [PICS]

This free Android control software for Sonos wireless multi-room music systems includes unique features that aren’t available on the iPhone version.

If you’re not familiar with Sonos S5 wireless speakers, you can place them in any room in your house, or pair two of them together. They use Wi-Fi to tap into your network and find all of your digital music for instant playback, and can also play almost any Internet music service.

You can control Sonos wireless speakers ($400 apiece) from a Mac or PC, but it’s a lot easier to use an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android phone to do the controlling. The iPhone/Touch and iPad apps for Sonos has been available for months, but until this Android app is released next month, the only choices for Android have been third-party apps that in my opinion are sluggish and don’t work as well as the Sonos control app I’ve been using on iPhone.

I’m hoping the Android version will match the quality of the iOS versions. Sonos reps told me today the Android version will be better, able to do some things the iOS version can’t. For instance, the physical volume controls on Android phones will be capable of raising and lowering the volume of the Sonos speakers, which must be done using the touchscreen on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Another unique feature of this Android version is speech recognition, where in addition to typing the name of the song, you can speak the name of the tune you’re looking for. Sonos and said this works when the music is playing loudly, which I’d like to verify with my own testing. This could be a significant convenience over the iPhone version, which can be cumbersome if you want to find a single track in a large collection.

Mashable‘s Brenna Ehrlich used Sonos’s multi-room system, controlled with iOS devices, recently in a demo of music subscription service Rdio. You can view some of the Android app screenshots and products stills in the gallery below.

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Internet Explorer 9 RC now available to download, tracking protection in tow (update)

By Sean Hollister posted Feb 10th 2011 1:20PM The Internet Explorer 9 beta pleasantly surprised us with Microsoft's renewed competitiveness in the web browser wars, and the pinnable, hardware-accelerated experience is getting even better today -- you can download the IE9 release candidate right now, which streamlines and beautifies the tabbed browsing layout considerably, adds those previously promised, fully customizable tracking protection lists for privacy and freely toggled ActiveX filters, as well as an updated Javascript engine, geolocation support via HTML5, the ability to pin web apps to the taskbar, and a host of assorted speed and functionality improvements. Find the files you need at our source link below, and let us know if the Beauty of the Web captivates you this time around.

Update: We spoke to Microsoft IE9 privacy guru Andy Ziegler, and learned to our dismay that tracking protection lists won't actually be included in the browser per se; rather, the company's created a feature where you can generate your own lists or download ready-made one from providers like TRUSTe. The thing is, IE9 won't suggest one for you, or even curate a group of them when you install -- you'll need to put on your power user hat and do the legwork there yourself.

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