In this issue:

„easyrec®“ goes Facebook – New platform for fans of open source recommender software

Website personalization at its best: “easyrec®” v0.92 released

Digital Trips: Your travel guides on the Internet

VitaSmart provides security - for a long life at home

Website personalization for SMEs: "easyrec®" increases turnover

The easyrec® team recently released easyrec® 0.921 on sourceforge with numerous changes and improvements, so we wanted to summarize the most important ones in one place:

API

• recommendations for user: provides personalized recommendations based on a specific users’ actions
• import rule: allows for the import of manually created recommendations
• import/update item: change item details / add items without creating a user action

Admin Tool

• overall refreshed look&feel
• automatic paging of lists
• search function for items and rules
• detailed statistics
• completely redesigned & enhanced administration section for standalone installations

Backend

• caching for community rankings
• backtracking (optional) of recommendation clicks
• various performance tweaks

easyrec® website

source code

download

With the availability of the complete easyrec® recommendation engine source code in the sourceforge SVN repository, easyrec® has now successfully completed the process of going open source. A web application archive for using easyrec® has been available for download for 2 month already. Now also developers can join the project and/or customize and enhance easyrec® to suit their needs. We are working on improving documentation and information in the project wiki. We also provide support to developers through our forum.

easyrec® website source code download

The studio manager of the studio Smart Agent Technologies, DI Erich Grstrein, attained his doctorate at the Vienna University of Technology with honors, completing his thesis: "Adaptive Personalization: A multi view personalization approach incorporating contextual information".

download

The easyrec® team is happy to announce that the first version of the easyrec® recommendation engine – easyrec® beta 0.9 – is released to the public. The release can be downloaded from the files section of the easyrec® project page on sourceforge. We hope that a lot of people appreciate our efforts and download and use our software. The source code for developers interested in joining and enhancing the project will follow shortly.

download

This week flimmit launched its recommendation service powered by easyrec®. Now, when viewing a movie details page, alternative movies based on other user’s viewing habits are suggested to you.

recommendation example

At the annual gala for the Austrian state prize for mulitmedia and e-business 2009 the project easyrec® was awarded a special recognition of the jury in the catogory "Award for Innovations - IT Innovations for an economic upswing". The easyre team highly appreciates the positive recognition of our efforts and continues to enhance and improve easyrec® with a newly refreshed motivation.

national multimedia award

We proudly announce easyrec® to be nominated for the austrian national multimedia award in the category ‘Innovation’. easyrec® managed to prevail in the preliminary rounds against many competing projects and as one of three finalists has a chance to win the award in a ceremony taking place on the September 28th. Read more under

national multimedia award

flimmit, a video on demand platform which enables film lovers to obtain movies legally on the internet is going to include easyrecs technology to enrich user experience with personalized recommendations. Read more under

orf.futurezone

A first set of friendly users are testing easyrec®’s MediaWiki Plugin. The plugin is now integrated in Jelinetz MediaWiki and elib.at.

easyrec® blog

Today the Beta Version of easyrec®, the online recommender service of SAT, was launched for "friendly" user tests. This version is specifically tailored for the integration of the recommender into MediaWiki instances and provides a MediaWiki extension.

Feel free to visit easyrec® for more information.