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 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.

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.

It’s been a crazy start to the autumn for The Filter team. We have kicked off a number of exciting new projects with existing customers and have some new partnerships in the pipeline – some of which we can talk about and others we can’t (yet). 

The most recent company to sign up for The Filter’s recommendation & relevance service is Evolver.net – a very exciting start up that has developed a social network for conscious collaboration. We are of course delighted that the team at Evolver has selected The Filter to power it’s article-to-article recommendations. 

Here’s some info about what we’re doing with Evolver: we’re employing our sophisticated & adaptable consumer evidence system to gain a deep understanding of how Evolver users are engaging with world-changing content, covering everything from sustainability movements to new meditation techniques. Whilst collecting valuable real-time data about Evolver.net users, our world leading recommendation and relevance system is optimizing the social platform’s content offering, providing  an easy way for individuals, communities and organisations to discover more about the issues that really matter to them. 

Ken Jordan, Co-founder of Evolver.net has been highly supportive of using The Filter: 

“The intention behind the Evolver.net social network is to connect people who want to make change in the world to the ideas and information most relevant to them. We’re using The Filter’s recommendation service as a smart way to link our members to the content they really care about, as well as one another.” 

Delivering the most relevant content recommendations, we’re sure that Evolver will see measurable increases in engagement during the coming months and we’ll look forward to sharing the results with you very soon.

We’re very excited to hear today that our new iPhone application BandStalker is now available to download in the Apple App Store. BandStalker gives you instant access to the latest news, information, concerts and videos of your favourite bands and artists, on the go, as it happens. 

You can download the application from the store right now or read more about the application’s lovely shiny features here

We’ve just slapped up a bit of a refresh to TheFilter.com, and we’d like to run you through why we’ve decided to do this.

When we launched last year, our aim was to be the home of recommendations on the web - so we recommended music and movies to you on your homepage. However, the world/Internet is moving on and there’s lots more content out there than just albums and movies. So, we’ve tweaked our goalposts a bit and now want to filter the whole of the web for you - to find the entertainment (and relevant bits of information related to the entertainment) that you’ll love.

The very first iteration of this process is up now on The Filter. If you log-in you’ll see a feed which contains news stories, reviews and recommendations - all based on your tastes (the items in your taste cloud).

In the coming months we’ll be adding lots and lots of great content to this feed, such as Tweets from your favourite artists/movie stars, the best videos, gig recommendations, concerts from photos - you name it, it will go into your feed. We’ll also be tidying up the design considerably (there’s even rumours that those floor tiles will go soon!)

Anyway, that’s the premise behind the updates to the site today. Please let us know any feedback you may have in the comments.

Hope you enjoy discovering new content in your feed.

Our CEO (or “boss” as the BBC likes to call him) is still at SXSW, and tweeting every five seconds about it. Sample tweets: “Shall I go to the Google or Facebook party tonight?”. He’s even got into the habit of saying “Goodnight” on Twitter, which I think is the invisible line between being a normal person and being a complete geek. He’s crossed it, and there’s no coming back. He’ll probably come back to the office with about ten sickening new buzz words and make us work while perched on space hoppers with a GPS chip built into them.

Despite going to Facebook parties (he thought the band were brilliant, while I noticed that Mike Butcher from Techcrunch thought they were awful) it does appear that he has been doing some work - having a nice chat with the BBC.

Hopefully the video won’t shatter your illusion of SXSW like it did mine, you can take a look here. I expected the whole thing to be super-cool and trendy, with drunk rock stars walking around, but it looks like they are conducting the interview in a school library.

You can read the full BBC article here, featuring David and a host of other British start-ups that joined forces to take on SXSW with the folks at Digital Mission.

We’ve hit the Beeb today, Darren Waters has caught up with our Texas-bound CEO about The Filter’s digital mission at SXSW. We mentioned a while back that we’ve been selected from more than 100 technology enterprises to represent the best of the UK startup community at the interactive conference. Well, it finally starts tomorrow and we’re sure our CEO will be knocking back a few double espressos in preparation for really long days showcasing what The Filter can do. Anyway here’s the BBC blurb on The Filter’s interactive trip:

One of the British firms travelling as part of the Digital Mission is TheFilter.com,  a recommendation engine and website whose backers include musician Peter Gabriel.

David Maher-Roberts, Chief Executive of TheFilter, said small companies were feeling the downturn.

He said “We had to work harder to raise the round of investment we closed last month than it would have been a year ago. And we have to be incredibly careful on costs.”

Mr Maher-Roberts said being part of the Digital Mission would help raise his company’s profile out in the US.

“When you deal with digital entertainment companies in the US they are fairly West Coast-centric and if you are not there you have to stand out from the crowd if they are going to take any notice of you whatsoever.”

The Filter has two sides to its business - a recommendation engine which it licenses to partners, such as Nokia, and a destination website that it uses to showcase its technology and acts as a playground for new features.

“A lot of people are doing music recommendations, it’s a very busy space. A lot fewer doing video and very,very few are doing recommendations across any form of digital entertainment - it’s what makes us unique.”

More than 20 million people use The Filter’s technology every month.

“I’ve seen an absolute change in the last six months when talking to executives in e-commerce or media. They used to think recommendation engines were a nice thing to have for users, now they see it as absolutely essential.”

TheFilter is optimistic about the future, despite the recession.

“Our priorities are to further increase our number of partnerships - we currently have really partners in music and video

“Our main priority is that we will break even in the next six to 12 months so we can put our future in our own hands.”

Don’t forget, if you want to see what The Filter’s doing in Austin, you can follow twitter updates by our CEO at @thefilter or @davidpmr

We’ve news just in, which is helping us get over the fact that Coldplay did not (grr, they were robbed) win Mastercard British Album of the Year at the Brit Awards last night.  Anyway, I won’t bore you with how disappointed I am and get to the point, we’ve formally closed an investment round, which means The Filter’s $1.2 million in the bank.

As well as securing the continued support of current investors Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures, the business has managed to attract new angel investors, such as Roderick Banner, Chairman of WPP-owned agency, Banner Corp, former CEO of LoudEye Michael Brochu (through EMM Investments) as well as John Taysom, founder of  We7.com and a former investor in, among others, Yahoo and Infoseek.

Our CEO David Maher Roberts comments,

“We are delighted to have closed this investment round - especially as it comes off the back of a successful 2008 for The Filter which saw the launch of TheFilter.com as well as growing revenues from existing and new licensing partnerships. We plan to use the funds to further develop our content filtering service for consumers and to increase the number of businesses that will benefit from our services and expertise in Europe and the US. We have had decent success with partnerships both sides of the Atlantic because our technology works for all media types, delivers measurable results, and is dead easy to implement. The team and I are proud of what has been achieved to date and we are especially proud of having attracted new investors whilst enjoying the continued support of long term investors Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures. We are in a good position to have a big 2009.”