DailyPerfect - A Predictive Technology To Personalize The News
A new Estonian startup, Daily Perfect, founded by Skype co-founder Ahti Heinla hopes to filter the noise from the web with their new innovation. They call it “predictive content personalization technology”, which should solve one of the most pressing issues for the Internet users that's threatening to explode in the near future, namely finding relevant content in the web and filter out garbage and content that is not relevant to the user. DailyPerfect is currently in closed-beta.
The founders tell us that the company will debut this technology on a news site that "predicts users' interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web."
ArcticStartup Contributor Toivo Tänavsuu of Tigerprises, An Estonian blog, reports that Asko Seeba ,DailyPerfect CEO, explains that "the technology will create telepathic effect, because having done an analysis on you, it knows what you want to read without you having to define it. Well, of course, if you want, you can define your topics of interest, like people do in Google Reader, for example. But it’s not a must, and that’s the uniqueness of DailyPerfect."
DailyPerfect is trying to do what for example Twitter, FriendFeed, Twine and RSS Readers have increasingly tried to do, which is to filter out only what is relevant content to the user from the wast amount of information that is daily created in the web. Where FriendFeed and Twitter, among others, are trying to do this by aggregating content from the people close to you or pulling interesting feeds from the people or sites that you're interested in, DailyPerfect functions based on semantic analysis and is likely to use advanced microformats-like method to filter the data.
The DailyPerfect project has its roots at Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) and at Curonia Research. ASI is naturally also an investor and the service is currently being developed at the ASI Incubator in Tallinn.
The team is led by Co-Founder and CEO Asko Seeba, the former Engineering Manager at Skype; and Co-Founder and CTO Ahti Heinla -- a partner at Ambient Sound Investments, and the former Lead Architect at Skype.
The witty guys at DailyPerfect have also figured out rather innovative way to filter out those who don't quite have what it takes to work at the company by using ROT 13 substitution cipher. The chars (ascii codes of them) are increased by the hitchhiker’s number 42, which let's you to encrypt their jobs section and be able to make sense of it (here).
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Their job section is not really encoded in ROT-13. The chars (ascii codes of them) are not increased by 13 as ROT13 would literally require, but by the hitchhiker's number 42. So say password 42 and you will get the job. I have not told you this :-)
"the technology will create telepathic effect, because having done an analysis on you..." do you already know how this will work? what does
"based on semantic analysis and is likely to use advanced microformats-like method to filter the data" mean? from my pov there is a big privacy issue.
as well I am wondering how they will compete against google personalized search (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007384.html).
I am wondering how this will look like. but with Ahti´s experience I am sure they have thought it through and come up with a smart solution. please keep us updated Toivo!
Jaak,
Thanks. I didn't actually encode the text, but was lazy and only looked on it briefly and took my clue from the beginning. Thanks again. Did not hear it from you ;)
daniel,
I wrote to the company and asked for a beta account to get a better look at the service. DailyPerfect CEO, Asko Seeba, replied by saying they don't want to let press to take a look at the site at this point (quite understandably). Here's Asko's answer:
"The current web site we have is kind of first steps of beta version, aimed at small set of technology experts close to us. We plan to improve the technical setup a bit before sending out invitations more widely (including people who requested invitation, including you). Right now we keep the number of testers optimal, so, we'd be able to talk to all invitees personally for qualitative feedback"
Thus, I do not know beyond what the quote itself says. I agree that there is a potential privacy issue here as there always is when we start to talk about tracking behavior or usage, assuming this is how the service operates. That said, I know as little as you do on how they plan to do the semantic analysis.
I'm sure the guys over at Tallinn has thought about all these issues, so we'll see how they will address them. ArcticStartup will be first to report on how the actually service looks like when DailyPerfect opens up.
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too - keep up the great work!
Find Niches Online,
Thanks! We do our best. Always nice to supportive words :)
We've had predictive technology to personalise news and other content based on very detailed semantic content analysis in production since 2001.. First for mobile services and for the last two years for the web, with much of the leading media sites in Finland as customers (look for e.g. widgets which link to Leiki.com servers).
The analysis is done with an ontology which has these days more than 100k topics with a typical user interest profile containing 1000 weighted topics.
Good to see that others are realising the importance of automatic content discovery, it would be interesting to discuss the privacy aspects in more detail.
Your site and posts are very interesting ! Thanks for providing such a great resource. With so many junk sites out there it's refreshing to find one with valuable, useful information ! I'll be back to read regularly !
Thanks,
Jeanine
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