Backed By $1.4M From Celebrity Investors, Qloo Launches A Netflix-Style Discovery Engine For Culture

Screen shot 2012-11-08 at 12.54.42 AMAs the Web evolves and hundreds of sites collect data every day on who we are and what we love to do, personalization has become fundamental to user experience to help users find signal amidst the noise. Some companies utilize our social graph to provide recommendations from the people we trust, while others mine Big Data, incoming data from APIs and more. The problem, however, is that most recommendation engines focus on verticals — we go to Netflix for recommendations on movies, Pandora and Spotify for music, Yelp for food, GoodReads for books and so on — leading to fragmentation and a disappointing user experience.

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Tipflare: Two MIT Seniors Build A One-Stop Shop For Recommendations On Anything

big_logoWith so much information, content and so many services now living online, there’s a lot of choice — even for something as simple as where to go to buy a new pair of socks. Oh, and there’s a lot of data. As it’s evolved and gotten better at making sense of its new Big Data, the Web has become an extraordinary engine for discovering new stuff: News, cat videos, porn, you name it. Naturally, scores of sites are becoming (or are building) recommendation engines to help users wade through the noise, and, dining on Big Data, they get smarter every day.

However, as it stands today, the discovery process is pretty fragmented, as recommendation engines tend to be domain-specific. Want to find a good movie? Try Netflix. Want to find a good book? Go to GoodReads, etc. And this fragmentation makes for a crappy user experience. So, frustrated with the fact that there’s no one-stop shop for great recommendations on, well, everything, a couple of seniors at MIT have developed, and quietly launched, Tipflare to be that general solution.

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