Movie Recommendation Engine Jinwankansha in Funding Talks
TechWeb, 6/20/12
Online video search and recommendation site Jinwankansha.com (literally "What to watch tonight?") has recently obtained angel funding from ZhenFund founder Xu Xiaoping and is currently in negotiations for a new round of funding.
Jinwankansha's movie recommendation search engine not only displays search results for online streaming videos, but also includes search categories for movie theater showings and hard disc movie copies.
According to Jinwankansha founder Wang Junchun, "We hope to add a personalized recommendation feature to the site's movie theater listings search function in order to recommend popular movie releases to users. We will also be integrating the company's movie search function with AhGan.cn to provide users with Blu-ray disc rental options, meeting the demands of users who want to watch films with higher picture quality."
AhGan.cn, the first business founded by Wang and his business partner Hu Yichuan upon their return from the US, is an online video rental website similar to Netflix. Due to China's limited market size and high marketing costs, the business has yet to gain significant traction.
Wang noted that, "Jinwankansha can bring more traffic to AhGan.cn and increase its number of paying users."
In order to improve results for its personal recommendation feature, Jinwankansha encourages users to rate films. On average, each Jinwankansha user has rated 50-60 films. The company plans to use Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) Weibo microblogging accounts to further integrate social networking features into the site. Jinwankansha currently allows users to sign in to the site using their Sina Weibo accounts.
According to Wang, "Currently, the social networking aspect of online video websites is still lacking, more people need to be talking with other online users about the films they are watching."
Wang Junchun also revealed that Jinwankansha has had success with its semantic parsing. For instance, the site's search engine can recognize a natural language phrase such as "I want to watch a romance film" and provide search results.
In addition to its web client, Jinwankansha is also developing an iPad app.
Keywords: Wang Junchun AhGan film Internet funding online video video search Xu Xiaoping ZhenFund Jinwankansha
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