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EQuala Launches On iOS And Android To Bring More Context And Control To Social Music Discovery

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Over the last decade, the rise of mobile technology and the maturation of the Web as distribution and consumption channels has had a devastating effect on the music industry, among others. Yet, on the bright side, more recently these technologies have produced a litany of new ways to discover great music, empowering both fans and musicians in the process. While it seems that each day brings a new music app or product — a net positive for music fans — there’s also a lot of noise.

Many of these apps and music services are exploring the social side of music discovery, allowing users to find, download and listen to their friends’ favorite music fare. Spotify, Rdio, MOG and others have capitalized on the launch of Facebook Music, for example, which introduced millions of Facebook users to the experience of viewing their friend’s listening activity (and sharing their own) in realtime.

While music discovery via your friends and social graph has a lot of appeal conceptually, initially, it just added to the noise problem rather than channeling it. Social music experiences were exciting more as a novelty, seeming to provide more value as a feature or a layer, than as the core around which a successful music service could be built. Luckily, EQuala wants change that by giving users more control over the social music discovery experience — and the noise.

ListnPlay’s free Android and iOS app looks to go that extra distance toward creating a social radio station on the Web that you’ll actually want to use by giving users with their own social “equalizer,” and allowing them to create (and more importantly) curate and customize their social music streams. Launching today in the U.S. with over 23 million tunes in its catalog (and growing), EQuala allows music fans wants to help evolve the Facebook-integrated music experience, letting users create personalized streams from songs their friends are listening to and from those with similar music tastes.

After logging in through Facebook, EQuala developers comprehensive taste profiles based on the music you’ve listened to (and shared) through third-party services like Spotify, YouTube and Songza, among others. To decide whether or not your friends’ playlist is worthy of your standards, users can click on any friend in their search results to see what they’ve been listening to on these services and populate their social radio stream accordingly, listening to and sharing these friend-approved songs as they go.

While the experience itself is different from other familiar services, that’s still fairly standard to the social music discovery experience. The real key (and its ace in the hole) is what EQuala does after that. Using its “Friends EQualizer,” users can then customize and control their music stream, managing whose music plays more frequently, for example. The app allows you to see each selected friend on a sliding scale (or equalizer), adjusting those controls based on how much influence you want a particular friend to have in your stream.

Once customized, users can then click play to enjoy or at any time, delete friends from the list if and when they decide to go through a Creed phase. The app also enables users to communicate with one another through “love,” “shout,” and “re-shout” buttons, which send push notifications to alert you via your phone and allow you to quickly share tracks on social media.

Not unlike Pandora (and Echo Nest), EQuala’s tech gives each users his or her own “Music DNA,” which is essentially a breakdown of the genres and types of music you listen to the most — along with data integrated from your “shouts” and “loves,” etc. The more you listen, EQuala personalizes your music DNA and is able to more accurately match users with those in their network who share similar tastes. The app also shows a percentage match between one user and another to give users a sense of the degree of similarity.

The other selling point is that EQuala allows you to consume your friends’ music selections even if they’re not using the platform. As long as music is being shared (through Facebook), EQuala will let you tailor your social radio stream.

Based on early testing, EQuala stands up pretty well, giving much more social context to your daily music consumption. It also does a pretty good job of removing friction that stands in the way of getting music playing instantly, offers a sizable catalog at launch (which is impressive in and of itself) and by allowing you to add, delete and curate your friend-informed playlist and adjust influence, wins some value points.

If you’re open to the idea of social music discovery but haven’t found the right experience yet, EQuala may be what you’re looking for, giving you control over your social stream and finally putting the power to curate and customize social back into your hands.

For more, find EQuala at home here and on the App Store here.


Mashape, The Etsy Of Cloud Services, Goes Beta; Lets You Monetize Your APIs In A Click

Mashape has a somewhat unusual backstory: The Italian startup spent two years looking for funding in its home country, only to be rebuffed at every turn. So, in 2009, it moved operations to Silicon Valley. The team found funding in less than three weeks. Granted, it was $100K, but it was enough to begin building a real service. Persistence, it seems, is key. (It also helps to have a great idea and position your business in a market that’s on the rise.)

As you may have noticed, APIs are all the rage these days. Twitter attracts 15 billion API calls per day, Google and Facebook were pulling in 5 billion per day as of last year, Amazon currently stores over 260 billion objects in S3, and Saleforce.com receives 50 percent of its traffic through its API. You get the picture. Mashape, which is going into private beta today, hopes to ride this API surge to victory through a marketplace makes it simple for developers to discover, distribute, and consume all things API.

Mashape, which was founded in November by Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Mike Zonca, aims to be a little bit Etsy, a little bit Github by building a unified, all-in-one marketplace where users can find, sell, distribute, and hack on APIs. The platform makes it easy to list any JSON API using its simple wizard and provide it to a community of developers just waiting to get hackin’. Plus, there are 5 auto-generated client libraries, including PHP, Ruby, Python, Object C and Java.

API consumers can use any API listed on Mashape via a single Developer Key and a standard interface, so that once you’ve learned how to consume an API on Mashape, you know how to consume then all. Developers can even test their APIs by using Mashape’s online Test Console.

At this point, Mashape is supplying more than 110 APIs, both published and private, and has tallied more than 22K API searches. The APIs in stock range from stuff that helps you get your homework done to music services and photo filters — and even more obscure APIs like “DNA manipulation” or a “Nitro accelerator”.

“We believe that APIs have no limits”, said Mashape Co-founder Augusto Marietti, “though I still have to figure out exactly what kind of API a ‘Nitro Accelerator’ is”. The APIs listed on Mashape are both free and for charge, and today the startup is launching a simple (and free) tool that enables users to monetize JSON APIs. Once a user has listed an API, they can set up billing with a single click. Users can choose monthly charges, give API call limits, and give a price per additional call. Pretty cool.

For a market consisting mainly of enterprise solutions, the startup’s addition of social layers to its marketplace will strengthen its API community and come in handy for startups and independent developers. By building a social layer on top of APIs, Mashape also hopes to address the discoverability and trust issue through the ability to see what your friends are using.

For all TechCrunch readers looking for a few coupons, go to Mashape signup on the homepage and insert your email address. You will be asked a question to which the answer is “var x”. Add the TC coupon, and voila!

For more on Mashape, check out the video below:

Information provided by CrunchBase

AdGenesis Aims To Be The Match.com of Video Advertising, Pair Brands With The Right Viewer

As online video advertising continues to grow, and expands to mobile, brands are looking for ways to get more bang for their advertising buck, and viewers continue to yearn for and expect video advertising that is more personalized, targeted, and relevant. And obviously the same is true for brands and advertisers — they, too, want to be able to customize their ad experience to reach consumers that they know will care about their products. So, as technology and the web tools we use on a daily basis continue to get smarter, so should advertising, right?

AdGenesis, a New York-based video advertising startup, wants use the dating, or match-making game, to make the serving of video advertising a more intelligent arrangement. It hopes that its service will bring consumers and brands together for a rewarding, lifetime relationship of loyalty and happiness — not just in a marriage of convenience. In other words, the startup is a white label video advertising platform that partners with publishers to match branded content to a large network of eager, opt-in customers.

And, today, the startup today announced that it is launching a new API that will enable Web and mobile publishers to deliver stand-alone video advertising service to their perfect user. As we all want to be rewarded for having to sit through advertising, the service naturally incorporates a points, badges, and rewards into a program that gives viewers incentive to watch the video, and, in turn, giving advertisers the satisfaction of knowing that they are reaching their target consumer — and that those consumers are actually watching their videos.

So, how does this all work? In the case of publishers, they tell AdGenesis what type of consumer they want to view their video, based on demographics, future purchase intentions, interests, hobbies, and so on prompted by AdGenesis once a publisher joins the service. They then provide AdGenesis with a video, be it 15 seconds to 10 minutes-long, which then loads the video into their system. Based on the data AdGenesis has gathered from its 4 million registered users, it then notifies consumers with corresponding interests via SMS or email that they’ve been “matched”.

Let the swooning begin. These viewers then watch the video, on-demand on mobile or desktop, and confirm that they’ve watched the video in its entirety by entering 2 digits that are overlaid in the video’s content. If the viewer doesn’t enter those digits, the advertiser doesn’t pay. If they do, then the brand pays once for that unique view, but only once, even if the viewer watches the video 80 times.

The advertisers are then asked to present some kind of reward to the viewer for watching the video. This can be credits on AdGenesis, which viewers can later redeem for gift cards, etc, or the brand can enter the viewer in a contest to win a trip to Hawaii, or offer discounted coupons, and so on.

For the consumer, AdGenesis is totally free to join, it’s opt-in, so you’re not forced to do or see anything you don’t want to, and the more you tell AdGenesis about yourself, the more targeted the ads it serves you become, and the more videos you watch, the more rewards you earn.

It sounds a bit like being in a focus group or being paid to do medical testing on a new line of shaving cream, but AdGenesis has become very popular among coupon clippers and aggressive savers. Four months from its launch, AdGenesis has served 1.6 million viewed-videos and generated more than 150K click-throughs to advertiser websites, Facebook pages, etc.

Online video has not been a particularly successful source of click-through rates, and many advertisers have become wary of it, because it’s hard to measure the ROI of video advertising. (Same as it ever was.) AdGenesis, on the other hand, has been demonstrating a fairly impressive click-through rate (an average of 11 percent), which is much higher than the average of about 1 or 2 percent, according to AdGenesis CEO Richard Smullen.

AdGenesis has also announced a partnership with PARADE Magazine, the first publisher to launch with the full array of AdGenesis’ functionality, and Smullen tells me the startup has several big partnerships in the pipeline, both on the publishing side and the rewards/points side.

With many, many advertisers struggling to come to terms with significant spend on advertising campaigns without tried-and-true measures of customer retention, click-through, etc., advertising loyalty solutions are popping up across the Web. AdGenesis is an interesting take, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the match-making, brand-dating game proves to have some traction. After all, I’ve always wanted to date Nike.

Check it out.

Mobile App Users Are Both Fickle And Loyal: Study

A study released by Massachusetts-based application analytics firm Localytics today confirms my suspicion that we both love — and are quickly bored by — our mobile applications. And, perhaps, that studies will confirm just about anything.

In part 1 of its study, Localytics analyzed thousands of Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 apps. Using its realtime app analytics service, they found that, while most smartphone users are willing to try new apps (as evidenced by the 10 billion downloads from the iTunes store), 26 percent of the time they download an app, use it once, never to use it again.

With 400,000 iPhone/iPad apps and 200,000 Android apps and the total number of smartphone users growing to 61.5 million in the fourth quarter, the appification of our mobile experience continues at a breakneck pace. And, as a result, it seems that many are hitting what fellow TechCruncher MG Siegler described as the “app wall”.

On the flip side of the coin, in part 2 of the study that was released today, Localytics found that 26 percent of app users become loyal, repeat customers, using a new application more than 10 times. Yup, the exact same percentage as the number of quitters. And many of those loyal users then go on to use the application hundreds of times.

While high download numbers always feel great to app developers, they can be misleading. If customers abandon an app after a single use, those high download numbers are really part of a high churn rate. Measuring user engagement, then, seems equally — if not more — important, especially as the number of mobile apps continues to grow exponentially.

What’s more, loyalty is precious, so encouraging user retention and getting users to return more than once has become (or should become) the top priority for developers. Many try to encourage repeat visits by using in-app purchases, subscriptions that deliver new content, notifications and updates. These methods are especially important considering how many developers make their money from in-app purchases and mobile advertising.

So, is the glass 26 percent empty, or 26 percent full? The good news is that it seems that there are as many potential loyal customers for app developers as there are those that are fickle. And here’s to developers finding them, wherever they may be.

Information provided by CrunchBase

DIY Music Management Platform Nimbit Raises $1.25 million

Nimbit, a direct-to-fan marketing, sales and distribution platform for musicians, announced today that it has closed a $1.25 million series A investment round. The round was led by Common Angels and Hub Angels and, according to VP of Marketing Carl Jacobson, will be used to ramp up the company’s hiring efforts.

Nimbit adds to the cumulative $3.5 million of seed funding it raised during three prior seed rounds beginning in May of 2006. The seed rounds were also led by Common Angels and Hub Angels, with LaunchCapital and Rose Tech Ventures contributing.

Founded in 2002, the Massachusetts-based Nimbit is a one-stop shop for musicians looking to manage their own direct-to-fan marketing and commercial music efforts. And though Jacobson said that Nimbit may have been “a little early to the party”, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the last few years concerning shifts in music marketing and distribution — like the success of Radiohead’s releasing “In Rainbows” direct to fans via their website, for example — and it now seems that the market may be ready to adopt the direct-to-fan model.

Certainly, the Web has changed the complexion of the music industry, having made it easier for bands and musicians to distribute their music and gain an audience. Yet, while YouTube and MySpace provide channels for free digital music distribution, and Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts offer platforms for marketing efforts, these networks are broad in terms of scope and limited in terms of the tools and solutions they provide to small business and musical entrepreneurs.

Starting a band is as intrinsically entrepreneurial as it is creative, yet most bands tend to hire managers and marketers to handle the business-side of operations, because they can’t or won’t deal with that side of the game. Nimbit removes the time-consuming (and total buzz-killing) commercial aspects of musical enterprise by providing musicians with the tools to market their music directly to fans by email, SMS, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as browse marketing analytics and receive realtime sales reports. Musicians can add a custom store to their site to sell MP3s, CDs, and merchandise, or create a customized dashboard to manage catalogs and fan lists.

Quite a few musicians that I know dislike the business side of music and, as seems true of many creative-types, they end up either refusing to participate or do so grudgingly, which makes me think that Nimbit’s services could be very useful to the troubadours and crooners among us — whether they deal in death metal, dub step, or heady acoustic stylings. Plus, the Web is killing (or has killed) traditional music labels, so why not just automate and digitally outsource the process? I know I will.

Jacobson told me that Nimbit understands that, above all, musicians should be focusing on making music, so Nimbit will be putting its Series A funding towards building additional customer support and optimizing fan engagement tools. To do so, they will be aggressively expanding their team and are currently looking for a web apps developer, so you web apps experts out there, check ‘em out.

Information provided by CrunchBase

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