A Conversation with the CEO of Loomia
July 30th, 2006
When I first met David Marks at the STIRR mixer, I didn’t think he looked anything like Hunter S. Thompson. When I saw his picture on the Loomia website, I immediately saw a resemblance–if only in dress.
David, a pilot in his spare time, co-founded Loomia two years ago. As a big fan of underground music, he created a crawler to find good (and I mean good to him personally) music on blogs. Unfortunately, what he found is that he only enjoyed about 1/10 of the music he was finding. He decided there had to be a better way to find stuff he liked, so he created an RSS-based program that gathered data about what he was already listening to (implicit data), and allowed him to rate the stuff he liked the most (explicit data). Eventually, the program would know him so well that it would be able to bring the music that he liked most directly to him.
Loomia’s product is an updated version of that program which helps users find the most personally relevant content on media sites, and the best products on Etailer sites. If you’ve read my blog entry on Ed Batista, you might notice several similarities between the two concepts. The difference is that AttentionTrust helps you learn more about yourself by tracking and giving you your own data to store, while Loomia helps specific sites provide you with the best content or products anonymously by IP address. And while AttentionTrust is non-profit, and Loomia is for profit, they both have the personalization of user content as an underlying theme for their products.
Since Loomia started as a way to find music David liked, I was interested to find out what he was listening to the most lately. One of his current favorites is an African congo band called Konono 1. They have a very interesting sound; you should check them out.
In addition to being a pilot, David is also a trained acrobat who has played the Cello since childhood. Some of his past work experience includes helping run an online political campaign for Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and helping his friend, David McMurtry, set up a blog to raise money and awareness for Colombians who’ve lost thier houses to civil war. It’s no surprise that David’s startup would be one that aimed to help people!
When I first met David Marks at the STIRR mixer, I didn’t think he looked anything like Hunter S. Thompson. When I saw his picture on the Loomia website, I immediately saw a resemblance–if only in dress.
David, a pilot in his spare time, co-founded Loomia two years ago. As a big fan of underground music, he created a crawler to find good (and I mean good to him personally) music on blogs. Unfortunately, what he found is that he only enjoyed about 1/10 of the music he was finding. He decided there had to be a better way to find stuff he liked, so he created an RSS-based program that gathered data about what he was already listening to (implicit data), and allowed him to rate the stuff he liked the most (explicit data). Eventually, the program would know him so well that it would be able to bring the music that he liked most directly to him.
Loomia’s product is an updated version of that program which helps users find the most personally relevant content on media sites, and the best products on Etailer sites. If you’ve read my blog entry on Ed Batista, you might notice several similarities between the two concepts. The difference is that AttentionTrust helps you learn more about yourself by tracking and giving you your own data to store, while Loomia helps specific sites provide you with the best content or products anonymously by IP address. And while AttentionTrust is non-profit, and Loomia is for profit, they both have the personalization of user content as an underlying theme for their products.
Since Loomia started as a way to find music David liked, I was interested to find out what he was listening to the most lately. One of his current favorites is an African congo band called Konono 1. They have a very interesting sound; you should check them out.
In addition to being a pilot, David is also a trained acrobat who has played the Cello since childhood. Some of his past work experience includes helping run an online political campaign for Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and helping his friend, David McMurtry, set up a blog to raise money and awareness for Colombians who’ve lost thier houses to civil war. It’s no surprise that David’s startup would be one that aimed to help people!
