About The Filter
Martin Hopkins, Peter Gabriel and David Maher Roberts
About The Filter
The Filter, the vision of Peter Gabriel, the Grammy award-winning artist and digital media pioneer is an online discovery experience that filters the world of online entertainment and information and personalizes it for each individual user.
The Filter is powered by an engine that provides a holistic approach to recommendations – filtering out irrelevant content and only filtering in content that reflects an individual’s tastes and moods through unique algorithms.
In addition to the consumer entertainment experience here at TheFilter.com, The Filter can also provide white label and co-branded solutions for content partners seeking to better match their inventory of content to their visitors tastes.
About the recommendation engine
The Filter’s core is a recommendation and discovery engine derived from a branch of Artificial Intelligence, called Bayesian mathematics. Simplistically, the engine uses an evidence model (which includes purchase, consumption and browsing data) to derive the similarity of items. When The Filter’s engine is supplied with one or more items of interest it delivers a pick-list of items that are statistically relevant by order of probability.
Unlike most tools the pick-list is fed through a number of filters to deliver the customized and fully personalized recommendations.
“The Filter aims to be the best possible blend of man and machine – a hybrid engine that filters all entertainment content to one’s own personal taste”, says Martin Hopkins, a co-founder and CSO of The Filter.
“The Filter’s engine doesn’t push people choices based on what they bought years ago. It slowly forgets what it learned because peoples’ tastes change. Don’t you wish Amazon’s service did the same?”
Silicon Valley Insider
Recognition
The buzz growing around The Filter has been strong and encouraging. The Filter were recently awarded with the Red Herring 100 Europe 2008 – which is given to the 100 best European tech start-ups and we were also selected to partake in Webmission08. Webmission is a UK initiative backed by Techcrunch, Michael Birch – founder of Bebo, Sun Microsystems and Oracle (among others) that aims to bring the 20 most innovative tech companies to California to meet the movers and shakers of the Silicon Valley scene and attend the Web2.0 conference. The Filter was selected from a list of over 100 companies that are “ready to do business in the US or potentially attract a US investor”.
“Some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley” says Doug Richard, one of the judges for the event.
18 Comments, Comment or Ping
Curt Mathies
I’d love to be a beta tester, any chance?
Hopefully,
clm
Curt Mathies
soundinsight
curtmathies@gmail.com
Apr 15th, 2008
Mark Quade
Great idea, like Pandora.com, for music and video, but please, please take this beyond entertainment into areas like economics, politics, archetecture, sports, etc. We need a filter system for all the catagories existing under the old library system !!!! And, yes, there should be some advertising $ in it somewhere to bring in some profits, keep it cash flow positive.
4/15/08
Apr 15th, 2008
Troy Mathisen
Splendid work all!
If I may be of assistance in any way, please do not hesitate to call on me.
In the meantime, all my very best to you!
Sincerely,
Troy Mathisen,
Internet & Multimedia Specialist
troy@troymathisen.com
Apr 16th, 2008
Goons_with_Guns
How effective your business model is–not the ubiquity of your content discovery platform–will determine the success of the product.
Best wishes.
Anonymous Potential Investor
Apr 16th, 2008
FiveDotAwesome
I have high hopes for this. Hopefully it will be something like Amazon.com but, not in a retail context.
Apr 18th, 2008
Bernie
Hi Fivedotawesome,
At this stage – a non-retail comparison to Amazon is probably fair. We’re hoping to be the best place on the Internet to discover new entertainment. Amazon does a good job of recommendations (for me, I know others don’t like it) but it never feels like discovery and certainly isn’t somewhere I go for daily entertainment – which is what we hope to achieve.
Over the coming few months we’ll be adding some exciting new tools (which we’ll talk about soon) which will really make us unique – but also add a whole bunch of social features, so The Filter will help you discover entertainment through our recommendation engine, but the community will also help turn you onto new stuff you might like.
Apr 19th, 2008
Caleb
What happened to the old “The Filter?” I would still like to use it.
Apr 19th, 2008
Bernie
Hi Caleb,
The original Filter still works, but we’ve decided to move towards a web-based system for discovery and recommendations.
Over the next few months we’ll be working at ways of incorporating the playlist-creation features into the website and apps.
At launch the Mac client will support playlist creation (hit apple + 1) but the Windows one has got some catching up to do.
Apr 19th, 2008
Intruder
Reading the above about The Engine makes it sound more like the Google engine- where information is accumulated (stored) and “could be” used or targeted with individuals and somewhere along the way this potentially private information is compromised. I’m a fan of Mr. Gabriel’s and I’m hoping this won’t end up being a privacy and freedom issue.
Apr 21st, 2008
zzoott
I’m familiar with Pandora – so, how does The Filter plan to do something better, more, or unique? Is The Filter just a high-tech frequent shopper card – that really will simply filter everything about me to those who want to pitch their wares my way?
Apr 23rd, 2008
Bernie
Hi Zzoott,
We’re big fans of Pandora, although sadly the service is blocked for us now in the UK.
As I understand it (having not been on the service for six months) Pandora does an excellent job of online radio, delivering personalized radio stations that help you discover new artists based on whatever you decided to start your station with.
We’re going to be offering a start page (for you to use daily) which is packed full of music, movie and web-video recommendations, along with supporting information such as personalized music and movie news and reviews. We’ll be adding lots of new things and supporting new media such as TV (for definite) and then possibly moving to other media such as podcasts, books etc depending on user feedback.
When we launch The Filter we won’t have full tracks, which isn’t ideal, so we won’t be offering personalized radio stations at all – instead focussing on discovery and giving you lots of ideas for entertainment to check out. It’s not necessarily a “high-tech store card” either – the idea isn’t to get you to buy loads of stuff – its more about turning you on to all the stuff that you might have missed or haven’t come across yet.
Of course you’ll be able to create playlists with our Mac application and we are also working hard at doing the necessary business deals to get full, legal tracks on the website – but first and foremost we’ll be about discovery and recommendations rather than online radio.
Apr 23rd, 2008
Ed
People still seem to be waiting for beta invites. How are you guys doing with the backlog?
Apr 27th, 2008
Juliana Koranteng
URGENT!!
Press Interview Request
Hello,
I am writing an article about music recommendation tools for IMPACT magazine, the official publication for the UK’s Music Publishers Association.
Whom should I contact for information and an interview.
My telephone number is 020 8891 3893 in London.
All the best…Juliana Koranteng
Mar 2nd, 2009
Gustavo Daball
Hola somos una pequeña productora de musica en ARGENTINA soutth America, nos gustaria saber más sobre el alcance de THE FILTER, y como hacer llegar nuestras producciones. Somos musicos independientes y seleccionamos, producimos y editamos nuevas propuestas de diferentes musicos y composiciones propias bajo nuestro pequeño sello LUMENAN. Next time I will writte in inglish¡¡ Best for you.
PD: on march 22th we will enjoy Master Peter Gabriel in Buenos Aires really it wil be a give for us. Best Regards GUSTAVO – La Plata – BS AS Argentina
Mar 16th, 2009
Bernie
Hello, sorry I can’t write in Spanish. We are working on a way to get unsigned music into The Filter, and we will let you know when this happens.
Hope you enjoy the Peter Gabriel show on the 22nd!
Bernie
Mar 16th, 2009
Gustavo Daball
Berny many thanks for your answer ¡¡ if any time you think we can colaborated with this proyect in some way from South America- Argentina -just let we know.
Any way we would like to get a contac to send some music productions we made in our level LUMENAN. If you think it is posible, please give us a contact data. Its very hard to produce independent music in our country, but we are still working…so “never give up”¡¡
Thanks Again- Gustavo La Plata – BS AS Argentina-
PD sorry My Inglish is not good enough- next time I hope in spanish¡¡
BEST FOR YOU
Mar 16th, 2009
john
you have a site for slades with joyce harris and no info about her record career if you go to colorradio .com or ace records the domino record story there is some info
Jun 27th, 2009
johnny
dave marsh book greatest r&r songs 1001 is the song ” no way out” sung by joyce harris
Jul 31st, 2009
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