I interviewed with Redux in July and from what I gathered, they had a pretty good team together.

It's a python shop running either on a custom DB or on Berkeley DB. Their core business asset is the collaborative filtering mechanism that drives the Redux.com site.

I got the impression that the site itself is very much a proof-of-concept application of the underlying technology. They have a BHAG to become the default collaborative filtering mechanism for the internet. If they are successful, I consider it very likely that they will do so by licensing this technology to other companies.

It should also be noted that, as a company, they did not start out in the direction that they're going now. They've gone through several products and switched directions multiple times, eventually settling upon what they're developing now as a result of that process.

If I remember correctly, they are 11 employees, 8 of which are engineers and the CEO is a definite techy.

Smells like win to me.

Netflix can do collaborative filtering successfully because they have years of data. Amazon can also make recommendations because they know everyone's buying habits. Sounds like Redux is trying to abstract this to social media? It reeks of "technology in search of a problem".

Exactly. The collaborative filtering technology & algorithms is the easy part. The hard part is getting mountains of good data to apply it to. And by good, I mean monetizeable.

That's what Amazon and Netflix have done. They should solve the data problem first, and being yet another "interactive social media mashup web 2.0 social networking thingy" may not be the best way to get lots of data. The companies that have done this best have monetizeable data - Amazon can actually SELL you the book it recommends.

As for being a collaborative filtering platform: "1. If your idea starts with 'We’re building a platform to ...' and you don’t have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now." (http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/2008/06/postmortem.html)

No. Vastly more input data does generally allow for better output by these algorithms. BUT this in no way means that todays recommendation algorithms are good AT ALL.

In fact, they completely suck. And in reply to GP, netflix's recommendations suck very much too, to be frank.

Why don't companies care? Simply because it's hard to figure out how to make a lot of money even with very good recommendations.

For the record, more than 20% of Amazon's sales are a result of recommendations -- so just in the one case of Amazon, their recommendation system accounts for $3.4 billion in sales a year ... which incidentally is 22 times Facebook's revenue last year. Recommendations do suck, and VCs are throwing money at the problem because there's a market there that actually makes money.

"Welcome to Redux, our humble endeavor to change the world. Admittedly that does sound a bit cliché, and truth be told, we don't actually think that the world is such a bad place as it is, yet there are a few areas that we have chosen to improve. Namely, allowing you to discover entertainment, people, and products that actually mean something to you."

OW MY BRAIN.

I think I just died a little bit inside by reading that.

Didn't you read the warning labels that came with your internets?

WARNING: Exposure to large numbers of other people may cause cynicism.

"Are we in a bubble? This Company got $8 million in funding"

I dont think this tells us anything about bubbles, this just tells us there are stupid investors out there. Really stupid investors.

...and that's one of the hallmarks of bubbles.

These start-ups aren't being acquired and almost no one is IPOing, which means the only ones who will take a hit for any of these weak businesses will be the investors.

There may still be a VC bubble and its about time the kool-aid wore off, but from what I've seen the experianced and high quality VC's are not investing in these types of companies.

*correction, I just read the Crunchbase profile, and there are some good names behind this company. Hopefully the team is strong.

The whole US economy was in a bubble. Because of profitable investments in the housing market, made on faulty assumptions, and cash the mortgage owners had, there was a huge amount of cash circulating. It was profitable to invest in startups because investors knew that consumers were spending a sizable chunk of their cash on frivolities; the startup had a higher likelihood of income. Moreover, an increase in domestic demand means a buoyancy in the stock market; investors knew they could in future sell on these shares at a profit. Simply, investing in startups was a great idea.

Now banks issue fewer mortgages, after their faulty reasoning came back to haunt them, and current mortgage owners can't pay back their mortgages. Not only this, but, because banks have had to write off large swathes of their bad debts, they're less willing to lend money full stop. This hits domestic demand badly. Relates to startups, the profitability of startups has taken a hit at their prima facie and stock market value: a decrease in domestic demand means customers purchase fewer frivolities, and a decrease in demand always badly hits the stock market.

Not only are startups less profitable, but VC have less cash. VCs that invested heavily in the stock market, and particularly the housing market, now have much less cash than they had 4 months ago. Perhaps whoever's bought redux has seen some über filtering mechanism that will change the internet. But my point is that whoever's bought them has very likely far less cash to splash out on potentially rewarding, but less so because of a decrease in domestic demand, filtering mechanisms.

This all indicates that we are either at the bubble's apex or we are seeing its deflation. So, will investment dry up? I'd say not completely, but VC are going to be a hell of a lot more discerning in future, especially if they've invested heavily in the housing market, or stock market in general; they have less money to spend, ergo risk on startups.

I'd argue we're not in a bubble, because this company would have been able to raise 80 million in '99.

Aggregators are the new portals.

Speaking of which, what's up with popurls? Their traffic is down big the last two months.

I am almost certain that this site is merely a demo for their backend. Look at their board... a former managing partner at In-Q-Tel is on it. My guess is the US government is a serious potential buyer based on that. But who knows, they have well connected investors who could also help them land deals with bigger content creators.

We don't know their business plan. It might be so novel an idea that they can post huge profit margins, but at the face of the website it's very hard to grasp what they could do.

Exactly. It is extremely easy to toss a low blow at many companies that are kicking some serious ass on the revenue side of things.

If what they are doing is simple and you better deserve that 8 million to pursue the idea - go after it.

Yes, we're in a bubble. More precisely, what's going on is that the majority of startups, numerically, do not need a lot of money; that is, most of the good ideas out there are best pursued with a small company with few employees, since there is little benefit they could gain from loads of extra cash. That, of course, is the idea behind YC.

But the VCs have loads of money, and they want to be able to use it. And when you have this situation where there are tons of small startups that need a little cash, they get overexcited, and throw too much money at them.

And you get stupidity like this.

It's actually a little ironic. The Venture industry exists because big opportunities can be pursued with fraction (maybe 1/10) of their potential worth.

But now opportunities of the same size can be pursued with a much smaller fraction (say 1/100). As an investor, you're still willing to pay the 10th. Economics goes a little fuzzy around the edges.

Wait, what? When I heard about Redux way back when (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/redux-discovers-friends...), it was for discovering new friends, which seemed like a good idea. But now it's this? Why the change [in the wrong direction]?

The valuation of social networks went down. People out! Charm bracelets in!

Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/redux

It's cool how their unique visitors peaked the month they closed their Series A, and looks to hit zero within a month.

That's very typical of early startups who are still ramping up. I wouldn't read too much into it.

Except that they're a year and a half old. Quite the ramp-up. I think most of the people on this site would agree that a year and a half-old startup with traffic approaching zero and $8 million raised is looking like a failure.

Just for reference, Youtube went from founding to acquisition in the exact same amount of time.

Not every site has to be youtube to be successful. Lots of small sites pay for themselves, make their owners money, and handle all their traffic. This isn't bad.

As an example, I've heard my former employer mog.com managed to get a pretty darn sweet deal and continued funding out of the Sony-Gracenote-acquisition. We definitely had a slow ramp-up, and several setbacks during development (before I got there) that made the total dev time for the site startlingly long.

You're right, of course, from your perspective. I tend to be a pessimist, and like bootstrapping and sweat equity. Changes of directions, big funding rounds, the assertion that "good names" (a commenter above) mean a lot, those things I'm not really a fan of.

Create playlists. Buh. Just use an activity aggregator like friendfeed. I guess something like this would be useful if the actual content is kind of vacuous and you want to wrap it in something more interesting. I try to only show my friends interesting content though.

Clicking on their mystery link enough times almost gave me a seizure. Don't even try it.

I think it's kind of cute. Not enough sites do whimsical easter eggs anymore. It's one of those goofy things people do on a saturday afternoon that improve team morale.

Seriously, I bet "seizure" goes into their nickname for it too. :)

i'd wager at least $2 mil went to fully developing that feature

5M, if you read the sources linked from crunchbase.

Does seem pretty derivative, but might be a useful idea. Perhaps the website is mostly intended as a demo for their backend, which some bigger-viewer site could buy them for.

I was having so much trouble finding entertaining things on the internet; Thank god these guys have come along to solve that problem.

/sarcasm

Anyone else think having 30 include files is a bad thing?

This is truly one of the worst startups I have ever seen.

Everyone in this forum is stupider for having seen it.

I award its founders no points, and may God have mercy on their miserable souls.