Cool site: Strands.com

Strands develops recommendation and personalization technologies to help people discover new things. Strands' patent-pending Social Recommender is capable of automatically learning people's tastes and how their preferences evolve over time. It can be used to generate real-time recommendations in a vast number of domains.

Strands is structured in three main Business Units:

• Strands Business Solutions commercializes Strands Social Recommender as an easy-to-use Strands hosted service. A growing number of retailers are using Strands plug-and-play interfaces to help their end-users discover the long-tail content on their sites. Every week millions of users receive personalized recommendations generated by Strands.


• Strands Personal Finance develops moneyStrands, an end-user oriented personal finance management tool that uses Strands Social Recommender to help people find new ways to save money. Strands Personal Finance also licenses Strands' patent-pending technology to banks in countries where moneyStrands does not operate. Hundreds of thousands of users are now managing their personal finances using Strands' proprietary technology.


• Strands Social Discovery operates Strands, an end-user oriented lifestreaming tool to help people discover new things based on their real-life and on-line activities.

Most of Strands' services are created on top of a common set of APIs that Strands make accessible to developers through openStrands.

Strands Fact Sheet

• Founder and CEO: Francisco J Martin
• Founded: October 2003
• Investors: Sequel; Debaeque; Antonio Ansensio; BBVA.
• Funding raised to date: $55M
• Funding raised in 2007: $49M
• Sales 2007: $12M
• Employees: 100+
• Key Technology: social recommendation and personalization
• Patent Applications: 24
• Locations: United States, Finland, and Spain
• Headquarters: Corvallis, OR
• Blog: http://blog.strands.com