CandidCapital

Every Web 2.0 start-up needs to get user traction - after all building a website built on user generated content, needs users who want to contribute.

Chris Anderson, in his seminal piece on Web 2.0 - The Long Tail - identified user-driven innovation as a critical factor of the new breed of businesses. In the article he cites Amazon reader recommendations as responsible for the unexpected second life of Joe Simpson's legendary mountaineering book Touching the Void.

More than just re-invigorating the sales of a previously forgotten (if brilliant) book, user-generated content has been the engine of growth behind MySpace, Facebook and Twitter (albeit that YouTube's success has mostly been driven by users hijacking other people's content).

But I wonder whether Twitter will still be the phenomenon it is today in three or four years time. Surely really successful businesses, even Web 2.0 ones, need to be useful first and compelling second - Facebook's messaging service has started to be the social alternative to email and no-one today launches a new music act without a profile and sample music on MySpace Music.

At Psonar we've designed a service that, first, let's people manage their music - storing their entire collection in the Cloud and allowing them to put music onto any of their personal music devices (PC, mp3 players, iPods/iPhones or other mobile phones) so they can listen to their music whenever and wherever they want.

Secondly, once we have lots of people exploiting the usefulness of the service, we aim to give them the tools and opportunity to enthuse and share their passion for music. I guess the opportunity for self-advertisment is easy to deliver (let users build profiles and create playlists to share with friends). More difficult is to help people discover the rich variety of music that there'll be in the Psonar Cloud. Luckily the development team, led by Richard Urwin (CTO), has an impressive pedigree including more than a dozen man years spent at Autonomy plc and other leading edge Cambridge search technology businesses. The vision we're pursuing is to enable our users to find any music by any kind of theme or characteristic: of the music itself, the artists who wrote or performed it or the fans who listen to it.

Thirdly, when there are millions of tracks and millions of users discovering and enthusing about music, Psonar will be the obvious way for any artist or label to share or sell the music they've created - determining for themselves the price, if any, that they charge and allowing the Psonar Community to discover their talent. Sow the seed, as the Amazon recommendation engine did for Touching the Void, and let the users take care of the rest.

24 July 2009