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Stuart Corner
Thursday, 05 June 2008 10:38

Your IT - Entertainment

At The Filter's core is claimed to be a recommendation and discovery engine derived from a branch of artificial intelligence, called Bayesian mathematics and invented by Martin Hopkins, a physicist who was struggling to manage his growing digital music collection.

Its functioning is explained as follows: "When The Filter's engine is supplied with one or more items of interest, such as a song, actor, movie or web video, it delivers a pick-list of items that are statistically relevant by order of probability. The Filter is unlike most tools, however, that simply render a raw pick-list of recommendations. Instead, the pick-list is fed through a number of filters to deliver the customised recommendations. The Filter then incorporates simple filters to bias results by personal taste, popularity, era, or genre. More complex filters can also be applied to capture mood, the influence of friends, third party experts or reviewers."

The Filter claims to have been accessed from 164 countries and to have a database of more than five million songs, 330,000 movies and more than 50m individual purchases and playlists. It was a recipient of the Red Herring 100 Europe 2008 - awarded to the best European tech start-ups, and were also selected to partake in Webmission08, a UK initiative backed by Techcrunch, Bebo, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and others that aims to bring the 20 most innovative tech companies that are "ready to do business in the US or potentially attract a US investor".

The Filter has also been awarded the OnHollywood '100 Most Disruptive Companies award,' and is the only European start-up to receive this prize.