Last week our team presented MovieIt social network-based recommendation application on the Dragon’s Den Pitch panel. We ran 10 minutes presentation that introduced key features of our system outlining technical, social, legal and economic aspects. After presentation ādragonsā addressed to us multiple questions pointing out some āgapsā in our project. We found this critics and notes very useful in terms of future idea and marketing strategy evolvement. Below are presentation slides and a short overview of some asked questions and provided answers.
Questions
What is the novelty of your idea? Why should users choose your system? Why is it better than analogous applications?
Answer: our system is free, flexible, independent from any social networking platform and provides a better user experience in contrast to its rivals. MovieIt supports multidimensional trust-based recommendations exploiting geolocation information and relations between users in social networks. It means that the user gets different types of recommendations, some examples provided below:
- What movies would I like to watch?
- Who suggested this movie to me? If it is Bob/Jane/etc., then probably I would love to see it as we have similar tastes.
- What is the best place/cinema to watch this movie?
- Iām in the movie theatre. What should I watch here?
- Who wants to watch “Avatar” movie with me in the Odeon cinema in the evening?
- What kind of movies my friends prefer?
Secondly, user gets an extra information about made suggestions, e.g. “who suggested it?”, reviews, ratings, friends’ comments. These details provide a better user experience and boost trust toĀ received recommendation. Ā Moreover, we don’t limit the functionality of our system. It is more than just a recommendation tool: users can publish in their social network profiles information about movies and places or suggest movies directly to their friends. The novice of our application is that we turned it in a universal environment that combines different features as a multidimensional recommendation engine, a communication tool and a platform for self-expression (comments, reviews).
What are weak points of your project?
Answer: from the social perspective tagging friend in places and movies is something that it is considered personal information. This potentially will have legal implications and we have to find a way to provide means to protect. On approach is to block a user form tagging you for specific types of movies. Also we proposed to use the policy that should notify users about their liabilities and decided to keep the right to remove any material that provokes a complaint upon the request. Secondly, storing such vital information we have the obligation to protect the data from illegal access. System security is something that we have to consider seriously in the future.