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.
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.
Douglas said,
“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.
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.
