The second round's first closing came in June when Corvallis, Ore.-based MyStrands received $25 million in a deal led by individual investor Antonio Asensio, the CEO of Spanish media group Grupo Zeta, joined by existing investors Debaeque and Sequel R&D SL, both of Barcelona.

The four-year-old company's sales in 2007 are at $12 million, but the company had no comment on when it expects to reach profitability.

Founded in 2003, MyStrands has developed a social recommender engine designed to provide personalized recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices. Underlying its basic strategy is use of the "wisdom of crowds" to develop content recommendations, much in the same way Amazon.com Inc. or Netflix Inc. recommends books, movies, etc. based on the user's past preferences and on what a user's peers bought.

Its service is primarily centered on music recommendations, but the company recently expanded to include video as the first step toward being a service that recommends many different types of media.

"Our recommender is content agnostic; the music application is just one of many," said Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, MyStrands' vice president of communications. "The recommender can be applied to a lot of different items ranging from media to auto pricing. The value is not the music recommender, the value is in the agnostic recommender."

Aldamiz-echevarria would only say the company would earmark its new capital for product development and business expansion.

"The future of the Web is personalization," Aldamiz-echevarria said. "These new funds will allow us to go one step further, enabling us to grow to the next level of product development, always respecting our core proposition: help people discover new things."

With its money, MyStrands is gearing for what it expects to be the next big thing in online shopping. "Currently online retailers aren't personalizing their products and services to you," Aldamiz-echevarria said. "We believe that's going to change dramatically in the future; people will go to Web sites and receive personalized information. There's no way it will remain as it is now."

"We are starting to reach the tipping point; discovery [technology] is going to start to be everywhere, on PCs, on your mobile phone, everywhere," he added.

He said MyStrands will concentrate on mobile, among other areas. Already this year MyStrands announced that its technology supports the mobile operating standards Symbian OS and Windows Mobile devices, and it launched a mobile Web portal to help users network and discover music.

As the company expands the offerings of its recommender, it will likely attract the notice of large Internet and media companies that have been scooping up startups with popular technologies in the space where the Web and media converge.

In May CBS Corp. bought Last.fm Ltd. for $280 million in cash. Backed by Index Ventures and angel investors, Last.fm offers a music recommendation engine based on a user's most frequently played songs.

MyStrands received legal counsel from Stoel Rives LLP.