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Cruxle
Contact Cruxle
Location: 601 Baltic Circle, Redwood City, California 94065, United States United States
Founded in: 2009
Stage: Beta (public testing)
Number of employees: 1-5
Short URL: vator.co/cruxle
Admins (1)
  • 90_70_default_profile_pic
    Balaji Krishnan
    Founder and CEO, http://www.boilingpage.com, http://www.cruxle.com
Followers (5)
 
 
 
 

Cruxle

We'll help you find what to watch on TV today
Startup/business
California, United States United States United States
http://www.cruxle.com
Follow
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About
Company description
Cruxle is a personalized recommendation company that has created a revolutionary next-generation media guide.Cruxle's goal is to help users to find and discover their favorite movies and TV shows that are available on TV or online in a totally automated fashion. Cruxle automatically creates 'personalized TV guide' and 'personalized online media guide' for any user just with very little information about the user.
Team
We are first-time entrepreneurs who are passionate, self-driven and committed to make this much-needed service successful. We all are technologists with different background and experience.

· Balaji received his BS from India and worked with companies like Sun
Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. He has extensive experience in
operating systems development and database kernel development. He is the cofounder and CEO of Cruxle.
 
· Byron received his MS from Stanford University and worked with IBM and
Oracle. He has extensive experience in database kernel development. He is the cofounder and Consultant of Cruxle.
 
· Varun received his MS from Stanford University and BS from IIT Delhi and
worked with Oracle. He has extensive experience in database kernel development. He is the architect of Cruxle.
 
· Venky Harinarayan received his PhD from Stanford and he is a successful
entrepreneur. He co-founded “Junglee”, a database search engine that was sold
successfully to Amazon in the late 90s. He has co-founded another company
called www.kosmix.com, a vertical search engine. He is the chief advisor for
Cruxle.
Business model
Cruxle works with set-top box companies, IPTV companies, content distributors, service providers, content providers and any other digital media companies that want to use our recommendation engine. In brief, we want to work with companies to make TVs and connected-boxes much smarter and personalized for users. We work on different business models like license fee, pay-per-use etc.
Competitive advantage

Problem
Consumers love entertainment and television is the king of entertainment with 100's of channels and 1000's of shows. Needless to say, online streaming websites (like Hulu, Netflix, Fancast, Cinemanow etc) are becoming the next attractive destination for entertainment with 1000's of full-length shows and movies. So, people live in a world of never-ending choices and they definitely need a sophisticated, fast and intuitive way to find those shows they'll love to watch both on TV and online. Today, we have an antiquated TV guide that is extremely difficult to use and is totally not personalized. On the other hand, there are many video search websites that do nothing more than bringing results for the search queries. This leaves users with struggle, disappointment and missed opportunity. One requires a mechanism that'll learn user's taste and automatically suggest what to watch on TV and online.

Solution
Cruxle has created the next-generation media guide in order to solve this problem. Cruxle takes very little information from the user (like their age, gender and a couple of favorite movies or TV shows or music or books) and automatically shows what's on TV and online the user will love to watch. Perhaps, it will eventually learn about the user better based on user's viewing behavior. Cruxle has pre-built a huge database of user-likes and user-dislikes by actively mining conversations that happen in social networks like MySpace, Twitter, Facebook etc where users voluntarily express themselves. By combining user's taste with the pre-built database and with several other factors, Cruxle creates recommendations that are totally personalized. On top of it, one can also search for a movie or a TV show and find details like it's availabilty on TV and online. Cruxle will then recommend more movies or TV shows based on the search results.

Cruxle also breaks the old fashioned way of presenting results in a grid, simply because it's hard to use and navigate a grid. At Cruxle, the recommendations are presented in a very simple and intuitive way.