The Filter: Team Blog

Featuring the television debut of recommendations algorithm expert/wizard Jon Hobley:

Techcrunch recently announced that The Filter will be one of the twenty UK based start-ups selected to visit San Francisco as part of the Webmission 08 event. Which is fantastic!

The event aims to raise the visibility of the UK’s most innovative tech start-ups and generally meet and greet the elite of Silicon Valley. It will be another great opportunity for us to show off our new product (oh, so nearly ready) and get more people excited about what we’re doing here.

We’re also looking forward to hanging out with the team from SliceThePie who were also named among the twenty companies to visit SF. If you haven’t checked out Slice The Pie you should go and have a look - it’s a great way to discover and financially support unsigned artists and another innovative UK based music company that I’m sure will be attracting massive interest by the end of the year.

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.