When it rains, it pours. We’ve got yet another announcement today. Microsoft, and the fine fellows of their TV division, announced MediaRoom 2.0 at CES yesterday. From their press release:

Our strategy with Mediaroom is to combine the power of client software and cloud-based services to greatly enhance the way consumers experience digital entertainment,” says Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president for the TV, Video and Music Business at Microsoft. “We want to make it easier for consumers to find and discover great content, to watch, listen and engage in new ways, and to do so anywhere and on any screen. Mediaroom 2.0 is a key milestone in our strategy, providing the software platform to power operators’ service clouds to reach more screens, and more people, with more content than ever before.

We naturally are also big believers in the power of discovery, and we’re excited to say that the recommendations in the demo at CES are being driven by none other than Directed Edge’s recommendations engine. We’re looking forward to further collaboration in the coming months.

Microsoft’s MediaRoom makes it easy for TV and video providers to get up and going with distribution over the internet. If you’re at CES this week, swing by their booth and check it out!

So, VentureBeat yesterday picked up on us “opening up to developers”:

Product-recommendation startup Directed Edge is launching a free API for its recommendations platform so that developers can create new applications for it. Offered as a web service, the platform plugs into your website, collects data and then delivers real-time recommendations, based either on what similar users have done, or on a user’s own past behavior.

We wanted to drop in a wee bit more info for the loyal devotees of our humble blog. Of course we’ve had developers working with our API for aeons now, but what’s new here is that while we were recently firming up our pricing tiers (which are now also up on the site) we decided to serve up a plan for non-commercial mashups, skunkworks and similar goodness. This one’s on the house, fellas.

Getting buy-in from our nerdy brethren has been key to us getting the word out about what we’re doing, and we wanted to make good on that. This gives you all of the features of our “Social Starter” plan, for free. So, without further ado, I give you our:

Free Developer Account

One of the things we’ve had brewing for a bit is our new, shiny, Shopify app. It’s our first time to dip our toes in the world of Stupidly Easy (TM) widget-based stuff. Like, seriously, you click a couple times, agree to give us money, paste two lines of Javascript in your Shopify template, et voilà. Recommendations.

Plus, Tobias, who called our recommendations the “killer app” for the Shopify, and his crew of Rubyists at Shopify have been great to work with. Shopify’s been on the way up for a while, now hosts thousands of shops and has seen tens of millions of dollars in sales in the shops they host.

This got picked up in an article in Venture Beat today; we’ll have another post up on that in a bit.