UNLOCK AUSTIN MAKES RECOMMENDATIONS FOR LOCAL LIVE MUSIC

With more than 3,000 live music shows each month from more than 1,500 unique bands, devoted followers of Austin's vibrant music scene needed an advanced technological tool to Unlock Austin.

Austin locals, including Ryan Pitylak, have teamed to form www.UnlockAustin.com, a website that offers its users personalized recommendations of new bands they should see based on preferences they tell us about. So, if a person tells UnlockAustin.com that they like alternative music but a dash of Latino spices up their life, they'd receive detailed information about all the alternative and Latino bands that are playing that week in a personalized email notification. Think of it as receiving personalized book recommendations from Amazon.com.

To create the site, the founders studied the recommendation technology industry and learned about all of the recommendation success stories in order to find a formula that provides users with the best possible recommendations. Call it recommendations.com 2.0 if you will. Our complicated formula creates effective ratings for tens of thousands of bands. We'll continue to work towards improving our recommendation technology because we are always striving to improve our members' experience.

One unique component of Unlock Austin: Users don't have to rate a lot of bands. Instead, after creating your profile on Unlock Austin, we've made it so that you only need to rate a few bands that you might already know. Today, Ryan has over 200 band ratings because it's fun to rate more bands and find even more live music to see live.

For instance, for Ryan, UnlockAustin.com generates about four band recommendations everyday for him to see that night. For him it's a perfect situation, allowing him to pick which band to see based upon his mood that night.

Unlock Austin is really excited about all the great feedback we've been receiving from our users and from people in the Austin live music scene. We're looking forward to continuing to serve the Austin community!