Profile - Loomia | TechCrunch

Company: Loomia

Launched: June, 2005

Location: San Francisco

What is it?

Loomia provides search, recommendations, and personalization for podcasts, videocasts, and other syndicated media. In a nutshell, their goal is to help you find content that you will enjoy based on how you rate content you’ve already absorbed. The idea is awesome, and their approach is perfect (centralized website, plus distributed services to content providers) .

As with most successful web 2.0 companies, they are leveraging their users to create their core value. Users rate content. Loomia compares a user’s ratings and recommends other content that they should also enjoy.

For instance, if I like Podtech (which I do), and if other people who like Podtech also like Earningscast (an Archimedes Ventures company), Loomia will recommend that I also check out Earningscast.

Netflix takes a similar approach to recommending movies. My experience as the CEO of Zip.ca (a movie renting company in Canada) with similar recommendation features proved to me how powerful these recommendations can be. It is a hugely powerful way of connecting like minded people to like minded content.

Loomia isn’t planning on keeping all of this data to themselves. A core part of their business model will be working with other companies (think odeo as well as podtech) to allow those services to add ratings, recommendations and other features. If Loomia gets in the middle of this data stream, they could have a very bright future ahead of them.

Loomia is just getting started and the site reflects this. However, they have an awesome team (see below) and the core feature set is there. I recommend you give it a try. Mark, Loomia’s CEO, has promised to let me know when new features are added, and we will update their profile here at TechCrunch.

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