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Scouta.com closing to focus on recommendation web services
Posted on April 14th, 2009 No commentsOver two years ago we were very excited to launch scouta.com, a social web site dedicated to providing free media recommendations to the masses. However, the underlying business model was always to license the core recommendation web service that powered scouta.com. Over time we have made it as simple as adding a few lines of JavaScript to an existing site to provide very meaningful recommendations, and we began speaking with a range of commerce, media, and social sites about using our engine.
Over that time, we’ve seen a rapid growth in these sites and at the same time the usage of the scouta.com social recommender has dropped off. So, the time has come to complete the transition, and as of today we are closing the scouta.com social recommender website.
We’d like to take the time to thank everyone who participated in the scouta.com site. Your usage, feedback, and encouragement was warmly welcomed, and we do look to continue interacting with you across the Net. We also hope to relaunch scouta.com one day in the future, and welcome you all back.
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what we do now, and in the future, please feel free to keep an eye on this blog and the Recommendation Ventures website for more information.
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Scouta Wins Australian Startups Carnival 2008
Posted on March 16th, 2008 3 comments
It is with great pleasure that we announce today that we’ve won the Australian Startups Carnival 2008, run by Vishal Sharma.
We entered a few weeks ago, and have been watching with great pleasure as each new company was profiled. It’s really great when someone like Vishal raises the profile of startups in Australia. Without the ingrained culture of tech startups like that in the Valley, we need to push and prod a little.
To win is a great honour. Especially with the line up of judges: Duncan Riley, Ross Dawson, and Justin Davies. Knowing that they did the due diligence on us, and we received the score we did, makes us proud.
Thanks to everyone, especially everyone that’s used Scouta over the last year and especially those who have offered feedback. We’re now entering a new amazing stretch for Scouta, with out new recommendation engine web service (you can find more at Recommendation Ventures), and this just gives us a great launch into that space.
Happy Birthday Scouta
Today is Scouta’s first birthday.
One year ago today we launched the Scouta web site, and started saving people time by providing recommendations for great video and podcasts.
It’s a very proud day, because the team has made some amazing things happen over the year. The site has grown in some awe inspiring ways, and not only that, but we’re just heading into even better days.
Stay tuned, but over the coming weeks we’ll announce a few exciting things:
- A flash audio player that saves you time by updating your favorites automatically.
- An API that will allow others to take full advantage of Scouta’s recommendations.
- Some partnerships and customers who are using the Scouta Recommendation Engine web service, to provide their own recommendations.
In the mean time, grab the Scouta Agent if you haven’t already, which provides you recommendations on your iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV library.
Migration complete
Migration done. We’ve moved the scouta.com site and associated dbs and spidering and processing servers from a couple of ‘big’ real servers into a much more flexible set of virtualized of servers that we can turn up and down for load and specialize for various tasks as we need to. More on why this is important to us will be revelaled one day soon.
It was a nice smooth changeover as far as we can see. If you seen anything broken that we’ve missed, please sing out… email us a feedback [at] scouta [dot] com.
Server migration
Over the next 24 hours or so .. that is from Fri 15 Feb to Sat 16 Feb .. we are migrating the core scouta services onto a brace of fancy new servers. So, we might have a little downtime during the transfer, but if we do, we’ll be back really soon.
New Version of Scouta Agent
We have just released a new version of Scouta agent for Windows and Mac. This version of Scouta Agent improves performance when syncing by only sending modified information to Scouta. Caching of RSS feeds between syncs has also been improved reducing network usage where possible.
Windows users can download Scouta Agent here and Mac users can download from here.
Existing Mac users can upgrade from Scouta Agent by clicking ‘Check for a new version of the Scouta Agent’ in the menu. Existing Windows users can upgrade from Scouta Agent by clicking ‘Check for Updates’ in the menu.
Download issues
You might have noticed… our Agent download server is broken at the moment due to a really annoying server/host outage.
We’re working around that and will have it all back to life shortly.
[Update: All well now. As of Sat evening GMT all was back alive.]
How Many People Listen To Podcasts
Just over a month ago I ran a quick analysis over Scouta’s data, and found that a small sample showed that possibly only 10% of downloaded podcasts are consumed to any degree, and only 50% of those are consumed over 50%: Are Only 10% of Podcast Downloads Consumed?
We mentioned then that we’d do another analysis after a few more weeks with some more data. Today was that day, and we did another quick analysis: the numbers look smaller over a larger data-set.
A sample of 17,821 podcasts and video podcasts, with 166 members subscribing with iTunes, showed that only 4.5% of the shows are consumed more than 50%, and only 7.5% are consumed more than 10%.
If you’re a podcaster, and would like to know more about how people consume your podcasts or video podcasts, then let us know. We can help you do an analysis based on your content.
Scouta TV Episode 0
After several days of post production, which I hope to blog about, Scouta TV Episode 0 has been released.
The aim of Scouta TV is to bring great video and podcasts directly to you via a video podcast. Each fortnight Grum, Say and I plan to release a new episode that focuses on the latest and greatest videos that Scouta discovers online. If a video is watched a lot or rated highly then we’re likely to find it and highlight it on the show. So if there is something you’d like us to see and talk about, then make sure you bookmark it at Scouta.
Podcamp Perth A Huge Success
This weekend Perth held Australia’s first Podcamp. It was a roaring success, with a huge turn out, great sessions, great feedback, and much fun had by all.
We had a number of people come across to share the event, including Cameron Reilly (The Podcast Network), Nick Hodge (Microsoft), Stilgherrian (Internet and Media Consultant), and Duncan Riley (Techcrunch etc.) made a trip up from the south.
Personally I’d like to thank EVERYONE who helped and attended. The event wouldn’t have happened without everybody voting for the event to happen in Perth, and also it a *camp literally needs everyones involvement to be a success. So well done all.
Check the Flickr tag podcampperth07 for a good collection of photos of the two days.
