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Web 2.0 - Thursday, May 17, 2007

NE Patriots Owners Go Web 2.0. Invest In Stealth Co. Matchmine

The Krafts - Robert and Jonathan - have gained fame for the New England Patriots team that they own and which has become a perennial favorite to win the SuperBowl. Matchmine got underway in 2005, when Jonathan Kraft of the New England Patriots asked Trent Adams, the team's Chief Innovator, to build a Wi-Fi radio station for Patriot Nation. Adams built it but didn't know how to promote it, and started noodling on a system to alert Internet users about sites that fit their passions. Matchmine says that Kraft invested $1M during the R&D phase. The technology foundation involves a "combination of dynamic programming and n-space mathematics."

Matchmine says that it is developing a personalized media discovery platform with "a very cool consumer-facing front-end. Our product will get to know what you like, and then find the video, music, news, film and other content you'd love to find yourself, if only you had the time. It’s like having a best friend whose full time gig is to send you great stuff." It appears that the company doesn't plan to be a destination site but rather to partner with others like Digg, Finetune, LibraryThing, and Flixster.

One red flag is that Matchmine doesn't acknowledge anywhere that preference matching and personalization are relatively mature disciplines. This isn't to say that no more innovation can be achieved but Matchmine had better be much better than technology developed by companies that have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into this. We get the bad feeling that perhaps they are over-reaching here. We gained access to the beta program and didn't like it that we had to download both Adobe Apollo and a Matchmine application.

View - Matchmine site
View - MyMovieMatch.com