The Filter: Team Blog

The Filter team will be on the road over the next few months shouting about the power of relevance at some of the best techmedia conferences in Europe and the US. Below is a full list of the conferences we are confirmed for and some that are still pending. If you are planning to go to any of these and would like to meet us, please let us know on twitter (@thefilter) or on the comments here on our blog.

• a2n / Berlin Music Week (7th September): keynote and panel [David confirmed]
• Seedcamp / London (13th September): mentoring [David confirmed]
• Nokia World / London (14-15th September): demo [David & team confirmed]
• e-merce day / Rotterdam (16th September): keynote [David confirmed]
• Streaming Media Global / London: panel [Rhett confirmed]
• Digital Hollywood / Santa Monica: panel [David confirmed]
• New Tee Vee Live / San Francisco: attending [pending]
• Streamin Media West / LA: attending [pending]
• Digital Hollywood / New York: panel [David confirmed]
• CES / Vegas (January 2011): panel [David confirmed]
• SxSW / Austin (March 2011): panel [pending]

I’ll update this post with the links to the agenda and any new conferences we decide to go to.

I’ve been far too quiet over the last 3 months. Sorry. Things have been manic… but in a good way.

Since we announced our deals with NBC.com and Dailymotion, we have been running trials and building prototypes for other sites and digital content services. We expect to be able to announce some major deals over the coming weeks that will bring our reach via our customers to over 100m Unique Users per month. That’s a 10x growth from where we were this time last year! And it is only the start.

Thanks to this growth and success, the company is expanding fast. In our Bath HQ, we have recently hired five new people bringing us to 17 people and we are planning to double the size of our office (basically annexing the other half of the floor). We won’t fill it straight away, so any suggestions on what we should fill the space with are very welcome.

In the US, we incorporated The Filter Corp back in early July, and we fully intend to set up our offices in the coming weeks in New York and California. As we grow, we are constantly on the look out for the most talented, passionate and ambitious engineers and sales folk – in the UK and in the US. Get in touch if you think you have something to offer.

After such a big turnout at our  SxSW panel: Making Content Relevant, The Filter’s CEO and newest board member Douglas Merrill are back for round two, this time at Digital Hollywood. They’ll be taking questions on the theme “Content -Relevance – Recommendations – From Broadband & Mobile to TV.”

The session will approach why relevance is so important today. The panellists will discuss from their own experiences, the problems relevance has presented to consumers and content providers, then delve deeper into the tools that help match users to relevant content, as well as address whether there is a business justification for such solutions.

All the panellists we’ve got on board have wide ranging experience of content relevance. David and Douglas will be joined by Geoff Roberts (Head of Relevance at Nokia Music), Jim Lanzone (Founder and CEO, Clicker.com) and David Marks (Founder of Loomia.) We’re also very lucky to have Alex Pham, Technology reporter for The LA Times moderating the panel, who recently wrote about The Filter and the area of recommendation and relevance.

A great line up coupled with the success of the last Making Content Relevant panel (see here) should make this event even more enjoyable. If you can’t be in Santa Monica, California you will be able to follow the event live on Twitter (Hashtag: #DH2010) on Tuesday May 4^th at 10:45 (18:45 UK).

If you have any others questions for the panel or would like to leave some feedback, you can tweet them @TheFilter

Full details of the event can be found on DigitalHollywood.com

We’ve been involved in a bit of a PR whirlwind over the last 2 weeks. Ever since we announced our video recommendations deal with NBC, The Filter has had some incredible coverage from the US media. What has been especially pleasing is that the media have dug deeper into what we do and there has been increased interest in finding out about relevance, data and recommendations. Which can only be a good thing for all companies involved in this space.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes:

“…Companies such as The Filter, Mood Agent and others are taking these algorithms a step or two further to make more nuanced recommendations that are more likely to hit their marks,” says Alex Pham in the LA Times.

“Finding the next piece of content that you’re going to like is the single most important problem on the Internet today,” said Douglas Merrill, (board member at The Filter and former Vice President of Engineering at Google Inc) quoted in the same LA Times article.

“The idea is to go one better than search engines: Rather than merely help people find what they’re looking for, offer them stuff they didn’t know they wanted,” commented Delvin Leonard in his 4 page feature around The Filter and Peter Gabriel in Business Week Magazine.

In Business Week, Stephen Andrade, senior vice-president for digital development for NBC.com, says the company tested The Filter against other recommendation services and found there was no comparison. “The Filter did better than a lot of its competitors,” he says. “That’s why we are moving forward with them.”

And later on in the same article Andrade is quoted saying: “I mean, Google has made billions of dollars being really good at guessing what people are looking for. This is just the next level.”

The Filter’s CEO was also recently selected for an interview with Drake Martinet as part of a series called Almost Famous run by AllThingsD (a Wall Street Journal).  Aside from finding out facts you wouldn’t find on David’s Facebook profile, the interview touches upon what The Filter is currently offering current customers. To end the interview, David nicely summaries the over-riding business goal of The Filter,

“I think my goal with The Filter is to grow it to be so large that it is the glue that connects people to their content.”

Making Content Relevant: with Geoff Roberts (Nokia), Hugo Liu (Hunch), Douglas Merrill (ex Googler), David Maher Roberts (The Filter) and Liz Gannes (GigaOM) - sadly off camera!

Back in the Autumn, The Filter successfully pitched a panel on Making Content relevant to SxSW interactive. We managed to attract the likes of Hugo Liu (Chief Scientist at Hunch.com), Geoff Roberts (Head of Relevance and Nokia Music) and Douglas Merrill (ex Googler and now Board member at The Filter) to join me on the panel and a great moderator in Liz Gannes from GigaOM.

The discussion took place in front of a packed audience in one of the biggest panel rooms – there must have been 400-500 people in there. If you want to read up on what was said, here is a great synopsis thanks to Patty Ryan.

This panel certainly confirmed to me that content relevance and recommendations is one of the hottest topics of 2010.

I am now looking forward to another Making Content Relevant panel at this Spring’s Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica. Hope to see you there.

As we continue to expand our US customer base, we are pleased to announce that The Filter has signed a new commercial partnership with NBC.com to power short-form video recommendations for the Emmy Award-winning broadcast network website.

The new deal will mean that The Filter will bring relevant video selections from NBC’s catalog to the forefront, providing easy discovery for users.  The NBC video catalog includes clips from popular shows such as “Chuck”, “30 Rock”, “The Office” and “Saturday Night Live”.

Our premium partnership announcement comes after an initial trial conducted with The Filter’s recommendation and relevance platform and NBC.com’s video content. The trial resulted in uplifts in video streams per session within the entertainment website, helping increase video consumption and user engagement.

Commenting on the benefits of The Filter to key business goals, Stephen Andrade, SVP Digital Development & GM, NBC.com at NBC Universal said: “The Filter’s highly effective algorithm has clearly demonstrated that it can deliver relevant video recommendations within NBC.com, helping our users find new and compelling content, and as a result, drive video consumption,”

Following an agreement with Dailymotion, which proved the effectiveness of our technology at any scale, capturing over 5 billion video views and delivering over 1 billion recommendations globally, this new deal with NBC.com clearly underlines that The Filter’s systems are capable of significantly increasing user engagement and consumption.  

This morning we announced a new commercial deal with Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video entertainment websites. This major new European partnership will see The Filter deliver video-to-video recommendation services to Dailymotion’s 66 million monthly users (comScore) to further Dailymotion’s goal of significantly increasing video consumption and user engagement.

This agreement follows a successful trial & optimisation period during which we captured over 5 billion video views and delivered over 1 billion recommendations to Dailymotion users. The test led to Dailymotion seeing substantial uplifts in views per session and time spent.

Commenting on the new deal, CEO of The Filter, David Maher Roberts, said “After achieving significant user engagement results, I am thrilled that Dailymotion has chosen The Filter as its recommendation engine. This new partnership underscores The Filter’s recommendation capabilities beyond the music space and validates the effectiveness of the technology at any scale.”

Dailymotion joins a fast-growing global network of customers, which includes Sony Music Entertainment, thePlatform, We7 and a collaboration with Nokia, among others.

For additional details on today’s announcement, check out our press coverage:

Techcrunch

VentureBeat

The Filter was lucky enough to have its proposed panel approved by SxSW interactive. It is called “Making Content Relevant To Me, Here And Now” and has a great line up of people. Liz Gannes of GigaOM will be moderating and the panel includes Chris Dixon (founder of Hunch), Douglas Merrill (ex Google CIO), Geoff Roberts (heads up Relevance at Nokia Music) and then The Filter CEO, David Maher Roberts.

The panel is scheduled to take place at 11am on Monday 15th March. Join us if you can.

And even if you can’t, it would be great if you could join in the conversation – starting right here! Just use the comments on this page to ask questions of the folk on the panel, or suggest examples of the best places where content is being filtered for relevance, or to comment on your view on content relevance. If you don’t know where to start, you could kick off by answering this one: what’s the difference between recommendations and relevance?

Douglas Merrill, Non Executive Board Director of The Filter

After a few weeks of keeping quiet we’re really pleased to announce that Douglas C.Merrill, ex-Google CIO and author of ‘Getting Organized in the Google Era’ has joined our Board.

Douglas joins us at a time when we’re focussing our attention on our B2B Software As A Service – delivering the best recommendations for major content publishers.

“What I love about the Filter is they’re solving the right problem at the right time… The Filter analyses user data and behaviour to provide measurably better, more relevant recommendations.”

We really value Douglas’s breadth of technical and strategic expertise and his help will also be important in driving forward The Filter’s aggressive plans to expand our platform and increase our global operations during the coming months.

After a hugely successful Digital Mission to SXSW Interactive in March, The Filter is getting ready to head stateside once again. This time we’ll be flying the British digital flag in the Big Apple. Selected by an advisory board made up of top UK digital entrepreneurs, VCs, journalists, UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and regional reps, The Filter are one of twenty innovative digital startups chosen for the prestigious US trade tour.

It’s going to be a great few days during November and we can’t wait to be involved in the New York digital scene. We’ll have a packed itinerary organised by Chinwag and UKTI, with loads of high-profile networking events, master-classes and meetings with leading VCs and US companies. We’re also hoping to swing by the exciting Web 2.0 Expo, which is being held in New York at the same time as our visit.

I am sure we’ll be tweeting from the event, but, if you’re keen to find out more about what we’ll be getting up to during our stay and the other digital companies joining us, check out Chinwag’s Digital Mission page.