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Congratulations to the winning companies of the Summer 2008 iVENTURES10 program. Information on last year's teams can be found here Class of 2008: Athena Advertising: Athena Advertising is building a platform that leverages both social and contextual information to provide more relevant advertising across various social networking platforms. Leveraging the team's skills in designing highly scalable advertising systems and applications for Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Google, the platform will give social network users the means to monetize their pages, as well as give social networks as a whole better tools to monetize their traffic. Fusion.IM: Fusion.IM is instant messaging that makes sense. The company is designing a global messaging platform which will keep contacts synchronized with and between different social networks, e-mail and IM platforms. This means that there will be no need to manage your buddy list with contacts that have real names and information. A lightweight version of the fusion client on these social networks will be made available for both browsers and mobile devices. Vision Assisted Fashion Search (Real name TBA): Online shopping currently provides the advantage of quicker querying over multiple catalogs as compared to conventional means of shopping. For some items (e.g. electronics), a text query is appropriate, whereas for clothing a visual description is more suitable. The company will use its expertise in machine learning and computer vision to design better visual search for fashion. Ticker Gram: The company is designing a service that aggregates news articles and blog posts and classifies them based on various factors such as referenced companies, article type, and target audience. The team will use a proprietary algorithm that is able to extract the general sentiment of the article based on a variety of features. The news feeds can be accessed and searched quickly through both a browser interface as well as through subscribed e-mail and RSS alerts. The Next Big Sound: The Next Big Sound is empowering unsigned artists to clear their biggest hurdles – gaining listeners, creating a following, and making money. While online music has transformed music, it is still difficult for unsigned artists to be discovered and break through. The company is creating a clutter free environment and innovative way for listeners to discover and show their support for artists, while empowering those artists with tools they need to help them become successful.
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