CableLabs is holding its Winter Conference this week featuring, among other activities, an Innovation Showcase. To bring a little buzz to the event, CableLabs hosted a short media teleconference yesterday announcing the winner of Best Product Idea among the Showcase participants. Jinni got the nod from conference attendees for its “next-gen guide” including personalization features and an emotion-driven recommendation engine. (Test out the concept yourself at the Jinni.com website.) According to the Jinni execs on the teleconference, the company combines Web crawling with natural language processing and filters for more than 2,000 emotional attributes (witty, funny, etc.). The idea is to create a better VOD experience, and Jinni says it expects to announce operator deployments of an EBIF version of the app later this year. For back story, check out Davis’ post on the company back in January of 2009.
Beyond Jinni, Engadget HD also reported yesterday about RCDb’s Innovation entry, a technology solution that culls information from databases like IMDB and Gracenote and delivers it via tru2way to set-tops. Tru2way still hasn’t hit the retail market in any major way, but it is on the roadmap for, if not already deployed by, many of the major US cable systems.
Other companies in this year’s Innovation Showcase included Wowza Media Systems, SeaChange, Clearleap, and FourthWall Media (formerly BIAP). Separately, CableLabs also announced this week that it has completed the new EBIF I06 spec in conjunction with Canoe Ventures to support 3D technology development.
Side note- Teleconference was a bit stilted, but the outreach was still appreciated. And a number of notables chimed in for the Q&A, including CED’s Brian Santo, long-time analyst Patti Reali, and favorite cable reporter @thebauminator.