With the growing amount of information that is flowing into our lives, there is also a growing need for tools that help focus our attention on what should be the most relevant information for us. my6sense is developing artificial intelligence that does just that—it separates the signal from the noise and helps users shift their attention to the content they care about most. my6sense is calling this type of assistance “Digital Intuition” and in the simplest sense it’s a recommendation technology that automatically ranks and serves information that match user preferences at any given time.

my6sense is providing 500 TechCrunch readers Alpha invites. You can sign-up here.

In order to achieve effective information ranking my6sense goes about creating user preference models. my6sense’s magic sauce is in translating user actions, for example Web navigation, into semantically-sensible, rich, implicit feedback. So if a user picks the fifth headline in a ranked list, for example, the system would learn from that preference and present like items up top in the future.

The company makes a point in distinguishing what it does—ranking—to performing filtering. This can be best understood by the old adage: To find a needle in a haystack, one doesn’t have to burn the haystack, just make sure the needle lies on top of it. The beauty is that you don’t need to give the product feedback, it infers what your feedback is all on its own.

The “learning machinery” that makes sure the needle is on top of said haystack is rooted upon a multi-dimensional set of features comprising of:

• Content Components: Capturing textual content and classification, information sources and authorship as well as the structural properties of the messages.
• User Environment: Capturing when, where and in what context the information is being consumed.
• Social Connections: Capturing both preferences and instant feedback within various social and taste-based neighborhoods of the user.
• Interactions between the three.

Once filtering is achieved, my6sense then attaches context-relevant actions to the content. This is an important aspect of the service that is at the heart of the company’s future business model. The actions will be tied to rev-share deals struck with content and service providers, as well as mobile carriers. For example, music related content would trigger premium content and service actions such as ticket or ringtone purchasing.

The company is working on releasing a full blown API to this end during the coming year. In the meantime, they’ve developed a couple actions themselves, for example writing comments on posts based on Wordpress, TypePad, Blogsmith and Movable Type.

The company is initially targeting the technology at the mobile space rather than the Web. It has several reasons for doing so. First, the Web is a very crowded space to push such an offering into and there’s always the concern of becoming “just another cool application”. Second, the technology’s benefits are far clearer when applied to a mobile device and its inherent limitations when it comes to screen size and supplemental user control. Also, discovering content and information through a mobile device requires a different level of attention and consequently a different toolset than doing the same on the Web—my6sense is perfectly suited to this context.

For the past 10 days I’ve been testing the Alpha version of my6sense which is available only as an iPhone web app. I wasn’t ready to ditch my information consuming habits quite yet and was therefore concurrently reading RSS feeds through Google Reader. The methodology I applied was to click into the same posts on both apps to see what would happen on my6sense. The “A-ha moment” took a couple of days of interacting with the product, but it came. Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main “TOP MESSAGES” pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so.

It’s not nearly perfect—there’s a certain level of content noisiness the company purposefully put in for testing purposes—but for an Alpha product claiming to provide “digital intuition” it delivered. From my usage so far, the top most item is almost always from Hacker News. It is often followed in various orders by TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Lifehacker. The items themselves usually relate to Google, Facebook, and the iPhone which didn’t entirely surprise me, but that doesn’t mean I typically read every post I come across having to do with them. In the case of the items floated by my6sense, I felt compelled to read them all. Remember, this was all done without providing implicit feedback such as thumbs up, down, or rating of any sort. The screenshot below shows the top items my6sense analyzed as most relevant for me today.

Is “digital intuition” really important? Here’s one example that leads me to believe that it is: I engage with Facebook in three ways. Directly with Facebook.com, using the iPhone Web App and finally using Facebook’s native iPhone App. Here’s the curious part. My News Feed is not symmetric across the three—meaning, I get different News Feeds for each one. While they may not be radically different, they still float different items. I can’t explain this, but it certainly leads me to believe that Facebook is putting an effort into this realm as well.

(Disclosure: Nearly a year ago, on a Sangria-laden evening in Barcelona, I struck a friendship with two of my6sense’s co-founders, Barak Hachamov (Visionary Geek & Chairman) and Avinoam Rubinstain (CEO). I’ve been following their company’s progress since then).

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Having kids is clearly impacting my assessment of applications… And there is no greater proof for this than a new product by IncrediMail called PhotoJoy, an application I would never have given a second thought were I not a father of two.

PhotoJoy is a free downloadable application that uses your photos to produce neat desktop widgets, 3D photo screensavers and wallpaper collages. You can either use photos located on your computer, or ones uploaded to your Flickr account. PhotoJoy can also use your Flickr stream to keep your photos fresh. Notably missing is the ability to import photos from your Facebook account, which is where I for example keep all my online photos on.

The application should run on most Windows XP setups. Sorry, no Mac support at the moment. I’ve been running it on my machine for a week and have noticed no negative performance impacts.

To see PhotoJoy in action check out the video embedded on the bottom of this post for a demo the company whipped up using some photos of my kids.

In many respects the product is similar to long gone Filmloop (remember them?) which both had a hard time dealing with increasing competition courtesy of Slide and RockYou and a blatant lack of support from one of its VC’s. Filmloop was also a one-trick-pony, whereas PhotoJoy is just one of several IncrediMail products—HiYo is another one.

Seeing no immediate business model and with the company’s history in mind, I requested a clarification on PhotoJoy’s ad-ware practices and its business model strategy. IncrediMail’s CEO, Ofer Adler, addressed my concerns:

“We are never going to push any other installation with this product.

We are going to use an advertising through search business model similar in concept to the one of picasa / yahoo messenger / now even AVG antivirus and that to have a free version that will suggest the user during the installation to accept our Google / other partner search properties such as homepage / toolbar / default search provider, assuming a certain % of the installations will accept them. (of course any one who doesn’t want will be able not to accept them). In addition there will be probably a premium version with some more features / content.”

So go ahead and call me a sap, but PhotoJoy puts a smile on my face and sometimes that’s not only good enough, it’s plenty!

Remember Metacafe? That’s right, the video entertainment site which got overshadowed by YouTube’s phenomenal rise? Well, it’s now making a huge gamble on a new product direction and doing so with zero guarantees. The gamble is WikiCafe, a collaborative editing approach for video metadata. To appreciate how important WikiCafe is to Metacafe just take a look at the company’s official R&D resource usage: 60% WikiCafe, 30% revenue generating opportunities, 10% everything else. That says it all.I spent a few hours with Eyal Hertzog, the company’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer who walked me through the company’s new product vision and the rationale for its big bet on the wiki approach to organizing videos. Hertzog was frustrated that users (he being among them) couldn’t just locate “THE” result when searching for a video. His definition of “THE” being a single video result that encompasses all the relevant (and preferably accurate) info, along with multiple language versions, captioning, and so on. The current reality, of course, is that when we perform a search for a video we get back multiple results—sometimes even in the hundreds—from multiple sources, in various languages, with different view counts, fake versions . . .. You all know the drill.

Hertzog explains:

“We actually believe that quality metadata is as important – if not more important – than the videos themselves. We’re focused on delivering a great entertainment experience through short-form video, which means we have to make it easy for people to find and discover great videos every time they come to Metacafe. The only way to do that is to have accurate and complete information about what the videos on our site are about. And we believe the only way to get that information is to enlist our community’s help. WikiCafe is absolutely essential to our strategy going forward, and we believe it gives us an unprecedented competitive advantage over other sites.”

Put simply, WikiCafe is everything you’ve come to learn to love about Wikipedia but attuned to video. It is a collaborative video metadata editing tool built on top of WikiMedia, the Wiki platform originally written for Wikipedia. Its purpose is to foster collaboration and aggregation of standardized, categorized knowledge on a single “document”—in this case a video.

The collaborative taxonomy used by WikiCafe is created and maintained by the community, so just like Wikipedia, it has the potential to become more comprehensive and accurate over time. Of course another major benefit is that the community polices the edits the data so the amount of false-positives and spammy results could dramatically decrease—not all at once, but Rome too wasn’t built in a single day.

The backbone of the system is an advanced tagging system that supports:

• Redirects: Tags such as ‘PS3?, ‘PSIII’, ‘PlayStationIII’ are all redirected to ‘PlayStation 3?.
• Disambiguation: ‘Apple’ as a tag would offer as options ‘Apple (Computers)’, ‘Apple (Record Label)’, ‘Apple’ (Fruit).
• Tag Hierarchies: The tag ‘iPhone’ is a child to ‘Apple Computers’ and ‘Smartphones’. ‘Apple Computers’ is a child to ‘Technology’ and ‘Smartphones’ is a child to ‘Cellular Phones’ which is a child to ‘Phones’ which is a child to “Communication Devices”.
• Tag Translations: Videos that are tagged with one language tag are automatically ‘tagged’ in all the other languages as well, thereby providing language-transparent search. This means that users using non-Germanic languages such as Hebrew or Japanese for example would be able to search for say ‘Britney Spears’ in their native character-set and get results as if they used English.

Editable metadata information includes Title, Description, Rating Properties (sexy, violence), Language, Country of Relevance, and more. There are also metadata templates such as “Music Info” that includes Album, Artist, Genre, and Label. There are also flags such as “Suspected Duplicate” and “Misleading Thumbnail”.

While Hertzog gave me a walk through we edited this video’s tags from ‘TechBrunch’ to ‘TechCrunch, and added ‘Michael Arrington’ to the already existing tags ‘Michael’ and ‘Arringon’. You can see the revision history here.

So far WikiCafe is exceeding the company’s expectations. The system is currently logging 14,000 user Edit Actions per day, up from 4000 in September. In my book Metacafe deserves kudos in this respect as well because forming a collaborative community is in many respects far more difficult than delivering the collaborative technology.

ComScore’s September numbers position Metacafe as the web’s largest independent video site with 38M unique users worldwide, led only by YouTube and MSN (it passed DailyMotion and AOL Video in the summer). Time will tell whether Metacafe’s gamble on WikiCafe will pay off, but you have to admire the company’s vision and courage. Instead of sitting still it’s pushing the envelope in delivering its audience the most accurate video results. Speaking for myself, I’ve begun developing a habit of searching Metacafe before trying my luck on YouTube.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Attention all Israeli entrepreneurs:

After a long break in the activities the validation panel is back!

If you have a venture and believe that the assistance of the panelists might help, feel free to send me an E-mail describing your venture to Doron Habshush. I promise a follow up.

For all of you who don’t know what the validation panel is, here’s  the short version:

A panel of industry experts gather in order to assist young ventures in different fields. In a nutshell, the entrepreneur showcases the idea in front of the panel, followed by an intense Q&A session. The entire meeting lasts about an hour, after which the entrepreneur receives a document that holds the opinions and recommendations of the panelists, each in his own field of expertise.

For more info, go here.

Something is definitely stirring over at video recommendation/discovery provider Taboola . I’ve had multiple sources in the Israeli VC community insist that the company has closed a multi-million round of financing, with Evergreen Ventures Partners being the primary investor. Additionally, while following the US Elections in its final month I also happened to spot Taboola recommendations on CNN.com’s videos. Both the company and Evergreen are keeping tightlipped on any funding round or a CNN deal.Taboola has kept a low profile since its founding in 2006. I am told that the gross majority of the employees are technologists with strong mathematical and Israeli military backgrounds.

Taboola’s flagship product ViDiscovery is described as follows on the company’s site:

Taboola ViDiscovery™ moves beyond “one-size fits all” answers and matches videos one viewer at a time. Utilizing it’s breakthrough patent pending mathematical technologies that was built from the grounds up to deal with online videos, Taboola predicts what are the best subsequent videos for each viewer to watch on your site . Taboola’s proprietary patent pending technology works in three steps:

1. Video Context - Analysis of video context independent of any associated text.
2. Viewer Dynamics – Anonymously studying the viewing patterns of viewers while they view videos on your site.
3. Personalized Matching – Using the aggregated knowledge from the analysis of your videos and your viewers’ viewing pattern to match every viewer with personalized video recommendations.

To see it in action on CNN.com, go here and press the “Videos Like This Tab” on the video window.

If there indeed a deal with CNN it would serve as a major indicator that the company’s video recommendation/discovery technology packs a real punch. CNN would then join the company’s growing client list which includes the likes of aniBoom, 5Min and Sclipo.

We’ll keep a close eye on Taboola and update on any official funding announcement.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Halit Lichtenson, of MyWay, in cooperation with Giza VC, LabOne and Termiks, is offering a startup fundraising workshop designed for a small group of entrepreneurs and combines information and real-life practice.

The workshop will:

1. Provide basic understanding of the fundraising process from investors and VCs. Expose entrepreneurs to investors’ viewpoint and interests.
2. Offer some coaching techniques that allow tailoring the fundraising advice to entrepreneurs’ particular strengths and challenges
3. Give entrepreneurs the opportunity to present their ventures in front of investors and experts panel

For more info go, here.