History and Name

A little bit of History

Strands founder Francisco J Martin early addiction to iTunes Store in 2003, led him to two findings:
- There was already too much content available, and it was not easy to decide what to buy or what to listen to.
- He saw iTunes "Play Count" column, which was measuring people's listening behavior.

Francisco realized that both findings, content overload and the fact that behavior could be measured, were the start of two new trends, which led him to the belief that a new generation of recommender systems would be needed.

There was a need for a recommender engine that would understand people's behavior and would recommend based on that understanding, as opposed to existing approaches that recommended items based on user's purchases or ratings, or experts' advise. Being an expert on sequence analysis, he understood that recommender engines should take into account how taste evolves, as opposed to recommending items based just on a user's entire history.

This is how Strands started, with the mission of helping people discover things they might like. Years after, we stay committed to our vision: to lead the personalized world.

Our name, Strands

The word "strands" has a particular meaning for us: it represents the sequences of digital events that connect our lives. Strands' mission is to help people discover new things. We do this by analyzing and understanding people's tastes based on strands of sequences (links between digital items such as the songs found in a playlist, events in an activity stream or transactional data such as monthly purchases).

Strands also represent life, nature, diversity, color, people, and a lot of other different things relevant to people. Strands are everywhere, see it for yourself in images tagged as "Strands" in Flickr.

Here are some of Strands_Inc.'s favorites from other Flickr members.