Online dating sites ought to have nearer the success rate as a search engine, says John Myles White.

“When you compare the people that big dating sites suggest to you with the pages that Google gives you in response to a search, the difference is staggering,” says Myles White, a Ph.D candidate in Princeton’s psychology department.

John Myles White

Last week, Myles, 28, and partner Jim Keller, 29, the founder and CEO of Willow Grove-based web development and strategy company Context, announced the launch of Junebug, what they call their answer to “the lack of innovation in online dating.”

The duo is entering the crowded online dating scene because they say their competition isn’t leveraging contemporary statistical techniques to their fullest extent. Now all they need are the users and data to prove it.

So on July 4, they threw Junebug open to the public, focusing on bringing on users from the crowded Philadelphia and New York City markets. With enough users ranking other profiles, in time they say their algorithms will make Junebug among the most successful online matchmaking services out.

Jim Keller

“I’ve become increasingly convinced that the big players in the online dating market are either unaware of or simply indifferent to the tools that computer scientists can offer them,” says Myles White, a native of Hoboken, N.J..

Keller’s hand comes in developing Junebug with a level of user-friendliness that has become expected throughout the web but that the pair says most online dating sites haven’t met.

The pair says a short-term goal is to establish advertising as a revenue model for the self-funded project, but the focus is on bringing on users to make sure their product is everything they hope it to be. Which is a good goal because they’re making a big swing — not only railing against free dating competitors, sites like PlentyoFish and OKCupid, but also the paid giants like eHarmony and Match.com, though Keller says he doesn’t see free sites being in direct competition with paid versions.

“Perhaps the paid sites are doing something clever, but it’s hard to believe that given the experiences that anyone I’ve known has had with those sites,” says Keller who is charged with the heavy development of the site. “Reading through their patents suggests that they’ve played around with things like neural nets, but never invested much work into using more contemporary techniques like SVMs, Bayes Nets or NMFs.”

Deep math aside, the pair seems to be saying they can do to online dating what sabermetricians have done to baseball. That’s not to say, the web isn’t nearly a decade deep into concerted efforts to harvest data to improve online matchmaking. Of late, prominent movement has been made to focus on data elsewhere online. Fellow free service OKCupid has created something of a following around its popular blog known for crunching the data it collects.

But that, too, Keller says, shows a weakness.

“[The OKCupid blog] suggests that they’ve not begun working with developers who have a real mastery of modern statistical techniques. I’ve been surprised by how many of their analyses … are conducted using the most basic statistical techniques,” says Keller, a native of the Northeast who now lives in Hatboro.

Keller says that contrasts with what he and Myles White are doing.

“Junebug is built on a totally automated backend that only needs normal end-user inputs to provide the data for our algorithms. We’re asking users to rate the profiles they read on a scale from one to 100, which, amazingly enough, seems to be something that other dating sites have never pushed, even though it’s precisely explicit rating that makes the algorithms that won the Netflix prize so powerful,” Keller says. “In fact, those algorithms were so fascinating because they were able to extract semantic information about genres and other structure in the data set that were implicit in the ratings.”

Keller says they’re using a similar set of algorithms, in addition to other approaches like automated text and image analysis.

Though user acquisition is the next step, Keller speaks surely: “I’m confident that these tools have not been used by existing free dating sites and that they can provide substantially better matches than existing dating sites.”

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

At least two Ivy League kids graduated in 2006, took fat-salaried jobs at the same New York City equity firm and returned to Philadelphia to reach fame and fortune by mining data for the nation’s small businesses.

The story continues still.

Today is the public opening of RJMetrics, a business intelligence dashboard and brainchild of a pair of 25-year-olds with regional ties: Robert J. Moore and Jake Stein. They want to help small and medium-sized businesses that collect data about their customers better use that information to chart user behavior.

And like any good idea, it came to them while they should have been doing something else.

Back at that New York equity firm, they’d spend hundreds of hours hand perfecting data from a company’s database, deciding just what might be likely revenue projections and user-action based on available information. Their research was valuable, time-consuming and costly.

It’s been done that way for years, almost always in one of two ways, Moore says.

The real detailed work would be done by either an in-house database administrator paid a six-figure salary or a high-end business intelligence agent that has its own consultants to cobble it all together.

That personalized work is still valuable for larger, older and more established companies with multiple legacy databases. but many smaller, newer e-commerce companies driving less than $100 million a year in profits don’t have a cost-effective alternative — until RJMetrics, our Ivy League boys say.

They’ll focus their business on e-commerce and subscription-based clients. Their software, developed by Moore, segments a company’s customer set to find user behavior trends for things like likelihood of repeat visit or purchase, preferences and future actions. The company’s focus, Moore says, is any business with an e-commerce division, online subscriptions or any other business that collects user data, from social media sites to online newsletters. RJMetrics will be able to offered detailed assessments of trending user behaviors and likely preferences.

“This is valuable stuff at a far cheaper rate for people who really need it,” Moore says.

Watch their product demo below.

Last summer, Moore left the equity firm and began refining the software that could do those tasks more reliably and far faster. Stein followed suit in October — focusing on the user interface side of things. The team founded RJMetrics and began testing reliability and efficiency on the businesses of friends and known clients.

Turns out, the thing actually works, and they want to base their operations here, where it’s called a hoagie.

Moore grew up in Glassboro, N.J. and followed the local high school with four years at Princeton University. Though he spent two years in New York, his family and his high school sweetheart – to whom he is now engaged  - are decidedly Philly regional entities.

Stein grew up in North Jersey’s Morris County but got an education at the University of Pennsylvania. His girlfriend got a gig in Philly and has an affinity to the city.

Now, Moore is the primary programmer and Stein the primary hawker. Moore lives in Collingswood and Stein in Rittenhouse.

With those ties, cheap real estate, a certain uniqueness and a valuable urban hub, Philadelphia seemed like a simple choice.

“There were a lot of reasons pointing us this way. A lot of the best portfolio companies I’ve seen are not in Silicon Valley — they’re doing something special somewhere different,” Stein says.” We’d also like to play a significant role in the growing up of a tech scene, and we can do that here.”

“I like that.”

Princeton researchers test their system for speeding Web access with low-cost, low-power laptops being targeted for use in developing regions. The researchers are, from left: Anirudh Badam, Larry Peterson, Vivek Pai and Marc Fiuczynski. Another collaborator, KyoungSoo Park, is not shown. (Photo: Frank Wojciechowski)

Two research projects were listed among the nation’s top 10 emerging innovations by Technology Review magazine.

The 2009 version of the annual list from the MIT-published magazine, considered the oldest technology publication in existence, recognized a technique for improving Web access for people in developing nations and a method for more cheaply and quickly sequencing DNA.

The first was the product of Princeton University researchers and the second by a group from BioNanomatrix, a University City biotech firm.

See more about the projects after the jump.

Princeton computer scientists Vivek Pai, Anirudh Badam and colleagues developed HashCache, which aims to greatly speed access to Web pages while reducing the need for computer memory and electricity by 90 percent, according to a university press release.

The HashCache system, like a standard Web browser, stores (or caches) information from sites that have already been visited to speed up access the next time. The innovation, however, is to store the information much more efficiently so that even an outdated PC could retrieve the equivalent of the entire contents of Wikipedia quickly and with little computing power.

“Instead of pulling down information from the Web once per person, you pull it down once per school or once per business,” said Pai, an associate professor of computer science. Very large computer storage disks have become very cheap, but the standard technology for sorting through all that information requires significant computing power. With HashCache, “you can drive this system off really cheap machines, any desktop you have lying around or these $200 laptops for kids” [Source].

The second invention housed in the region came from the labs of BioNanomatrix, which has recently received tweeted:

The biotech start up is pursuing what some say may be the future of personalized medicine: technology advanced enough to read an entire human genome in eight hours for $100 or less. Such a tool, researchers say, would allow medical treatment to be tailored to a patient’s distinct genetic profile, according to Technology Review.

Despite many experts’ doubt that whole-genome sequencing could be done for $1,000, let alone a 10th that much, BioNanomatrix believes it can reach the $100 target in five years. The reason for its optimism: company founder Han Cao has created a chip that uses nanofluidics and a series of branching, ever-narrowin�g channels to allow researchers, for the first time, to isolate and image very long strands of individual DNA molecules [Source].