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MyStrands has secured $24 million in its Series B2 round of funding. Spanish bank BBVA led the funding along with existing investor Debaeque. The last round of funding closed in June at $25 million, bringing the total capital raised to date to $55 million. You can read the full details of the anouncement at MyStrands blog.

In the past four years, MyStrands has developed a scalable Personalized Discovery Platform and a Social Recommender Engine. The Social Recommender Engine provides real-time personalized recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-connected devices; and takes into account that taste is context-sensitive and evolves over time. These developments have already resulted in sales of $12 million during 2007. The company will use the new funds to go to the next level of product development. MyStrands recently launched MyStrands.tv, a personalised music tv channel and MyStrands Social Player was featured in the recent Nokia marketing campaign.

MyStrands recently hired some great new people and is busy building a great global team of developers. The company is headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon, and opened offices in San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Washington DC in the US; Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza in Spain; Helsinki in Finland or Sao Paulo in Brazil.

The future of online TV, music and video content is going to be personalized and recommended, Mystrands just released a personalized online video service called MyStrands.TV. Nothing really mobile just yet but sooOOO cool I had to blog it here.

My teenage daughters and their friends TV viewing patterns changed completely the last year: they just don’t sit and watch TV anymore, they sit in front of the PC with their friends, deciding themselves what to watch, receiving links and recommendations from their IM peers - now I just need to get another free wi-fi connected pc or laptop connected to the plasma screen and they’re all set for the perfect interactive viewing experience

I had the pleasure to discover the new MyStrands service a couple of days ago and it’s really adding value to just watching YouTube video’s - MyStrands.TV is powered by MyStrands APIs and the music videos come from YouTube. Logging to MyStrands.tv proposes you an endless playlist of music videos that are personalized specifically for you…. based on your music listening history and recommendations. The first time you might find that the recommendations are based on existing channels, genres and a-like artists but actually this new recommendation tool is proposing music and concert video’s of my favorite artists based on my existing MyStrands profile, now isn’t that cool?

Richard MacManus researched the Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time a couple of weeks ago at Read/Write Web. He mentioned that “7 of the top 10 are music videos. So music videos are something that people want to watch online and there is a need for an easy way to organize or personalize this.”

Typing some of my favorite artists like Roxy Music, Miles Davis and Serge Gainsbourg for example brings up an excellent choice of all-time music video’s and concerts, a real delight to see some stuff again I hadn’t seen in years and discover some new video’s I didn’t know about.

Watch the recommended video’s on the right, the recommendations are really excellent, you can view more vid’s of the same artist or a similar one - or jump to another artist, view the community people who listen to this artist as well; you can favorite video’s and send them to friends. To me, this has been a great experience with many pleasant surprises and my kids LOVE it!

FYI: If you don’t have a MyStrands account, and you just want to try out MyStrands.TV before deciding whether to sign up, just type in the name of an artist and MyStrands builds a custom music video channel for you.

I believe MyStrands is taking a major step towards how online media is going to be consumed in the future, it’s community-based, personalized and with recommendations from peers and friends.

More links on MyStrands.TV personalized online video service here:

Mashable - MyStrands Launches YouTube-Powered Custom TV
TechCrunch - MyStrands Launches Music Video Discovery Service, MyStrands.tv
Read/Write Web - MyStrands.TV Launched - It’s last.fm For Video

And oh, for mTrends readers and mobile enthusiasts, if you haven’t MyStrands Social Player installed on your mobile yet, click here to download MyStrands for Symbian; you may also want to visit MyStrands labs page to check out their latest beta.

(disclosure note on my MyStrands involvement here)

Webware, one of the interesting resources on web apps, edited by Rafe Needleman, announced their finalists this week of the Webware 100, a new awards program they recently launched. Over 5.000 nominations were received, whittled down to 2,000 de-duplicated and qualifying entries, from there, 250 products were finally selected as finalists, 25 each in these ten categories:

• Browsing: Web browsers, extensions, widgets, and security
• Communications: e-mail, chat, VOIP
• Community: social networks, groups
• Data: search, storage, backup, sharing, and sync
• Entertainment: Games and contests
• Media: audio, video, photo
• Mobile: portable utilities and apps
• Productivity: apps, business tools, commerce
• Publishing: blogging, web content, design tools
• Reference: Mapping, reference works, and education

Check it out, some really good stuff in there! In the Mobile category, some of my favorite applications were selected such as ShoZu, SoonR, Winksite, Yahoo OneSearch and MyStrands with Social Player. Thumbs up for all finalists, my TOP 25 would have looked quite differently but I’ll post that some other time here.

You can only vote once per category, so choose wisely. Voting closes at 9:00 AM Pacific time on June 11, the winners will be announced on June 18.

You can vote here.

MyStrands just got its Social Player signed by Symbian yesterday for general release. It is a music player for mobile devices (Symbian Series 60, 3rd edition) with two main characteristics: it is a music discovery tool and a strong community builder. Watch the video demo here below and try it yourself, it’s great!

The player works over a 3G connection (if you can afford it!) and Wireless LAN, it gives you real-time recommendations of songs, you can stream clips of the recommended songs to your device, and learn more about them on MyStrands mobile website. The MyStrands Social Player helps you discover new people by telling you who else in the community is currently listening to the same song and view that person’s profile (unless it has been set as private). Check what I’m listening to here.

It is probably the most advanced music and community mobile app around - I haven’t seen anything like it, a real social community and music discovery tool, you can even build playlists on the go and tag your music, dig?

Check out all details at MyStrands blog.