Hossein Eslambolchi, a former top exec at At&t, will be launching his media personalization startup Divvio on March 13. Divvio plans to index audio, video, and, eventually, text based content and match it up to user interests to deliver personalized content. Till date Hossein has raised more than $3 million in angel funding for his startup from investors including former executives of Yahoo and eBay.
Divvio’s initial plans are to crawl about 750K multimedia links for media content, and than filter, sort, and categorize the content to get it ready to be delivered in a personalized fashion to the end-users. Users will be able to subscribe to these channels and served with fresh content everytime they visit the site. Sounds good to me in theory, but will need a smart personalization engine to back it up in practical.
Divvio joins the growing list of startups that are taking on personalization at varying levels. Last.fm has been well set leader in the music personalization space, while Google is working on web search personalization, TouchstoneLive on RSS personalization, CozmoTV has been making attempts to do the same in the video space, and Scanscout is trying to find relevancy through the spoken words in videos to deliver ads. But none of them have tried taking on music, video, and text at the same time, which just shows the enormity of task at hand.
Even otherwise I am not sure how exactly Divvio will go about delivering personalization for video content. Will they work with the audio content of the files like Scanscout or just go with the meta information to determine relevancy. Whatever the solution is, it will be up for everyone to play with next week.
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Divvio
March 13, 2007 at 2:28 am |
[...] Divvio, the media personalization startup about which I had written last week, today launched the platform in preview mode. Yesterday I had a talk with Divvio founder Hossein Eslambolchi regarding the plans around the product. Hossein summed up Divvio platform into 4 parts – Content Discovery, Content Delivery, Muti-app-device Support, and and finally the Personalized Content Delivery. [...]
May 30, 2007 at 5:32 am |
[...] Core of Last.fm’s success is the concept of recommending music to others and in turn providing links to buy the songs. This simple idea has given rise of number of startups looking to apply the concept across video sharing(read Divvio), p2p music(read rVibe, Grooveshark), books(read Shelfari), widgets(read iGoogle)…..pretty much most of the newer startups try to integrate the concept. [...]