21
July
2010
|
15:24 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Genieo + My6Sense: The Media Tsunami And The Need For Self Organizing Filters...

It was great to catch up with Sol Tzvi, co-founder and CEO of a fascinating startup called Genieo. She's in town this week for meetings with several large companies interested in her company's technology.

Genieo installs on a PC and it helps you find all the news and information that is relevant to you from all your sources. It does this without needing any keywords or any specific settings from the user, and it works across all your computers and smartphones so it never duplicates content already seen.

I first met Ms. Tzvi earlier this year: Genieo's Sol Tzvi: Why Doesn't My PC Know Me?

Genieo is one solution to the media tsunami that is building into towering proportions.

The media is not dying, we now have more media, in more forms, at more times of the day and night than at anytime in our history -- and there's more to come as individuals and companies learn how to use inexpensive media technologies to produce and share masses of content (87 Old Spice videos in one day...). (Every company is a media company.)

Using old style filters to try and manage all this content won't work: it requires sophisticated algorithms that can manage all of this for us, transparently and in the background. These algorithms must also bring to us serendipitous content - the stuff we didn't know was there and thus can;t search for - another reason why traditional keyword filters are of little use.

Last week I met with another favorite entrepreneur, Barak Hachamov, co-founder of My6Sense - an iPhone application that seeks to do the same as Genieo but takes a different approach.

Mr Hachamov says that there is tremendous interest in the My6Sense API. Many companies are very eager to add My6sense capabilities to their online services. I can't reveal the names of the interested parties but they are household names.

There are other companies that have similar capabilities but different approaches. One of these is Sidebar, which offers technology for e-commerce sites serving mobile users.

These are all part of a very important trend because without such solutions we will drown in the media tsunami, and we won't be able to find the content that we want to see. Without such solutions the Internet is a giant mess where search doesn't help much: search only works if you know what to look for.

We need systems that know us and work for us.