Proceedings of the Workshop on the Practical Use of Recommender Systems , Algorithms and Technologies ( PRSAT 2010 ) held at the 4 th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems ( RecSys 2010 ) 30 September 2010 Barcelona , Spain

Strands develops products that help people find information online that they want and need. Strands offers production recommendation services for eCommerce, interactive tools for personal finance management, and personal interest and lifestyle-oriented social discovery solutions. Strands also operates moneystrands.com, a personal finance management platform, and strands.com, a training log and information source for active people. In this talk, Strands Chief Innovation Officer, Marc Torrens, PhD, will discuss Strands‟ “Top 10 Lessons Learned” from our experience building recommender systems and interactions with customers deploying our systems. The lessons learned will range from customer relations and marketing (“It must make „strategic‟ sense”), to business planning (“Don't wait too long to get ready to scale”), to technical (“Cold start? Be Creative”). As recommender technology becomes ubiquitous online, and even overshadows search in many commercials settings, Strands has found these “Top 10 Lessons Learned” continue to be valuable