Thursday, February 19, 2009

The Echo Nest Hires Paul Lamere to Run Music Application Developer Community

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company powering advanced digital music applications, hired Paul Lamere as Director of Developer Community. Lamere will build on the momentum of The Echo Nest's developer community site, developer.echonest.com. Developer.echonest.com is like a virtual hardware store for application developers, opening up access to a diverse suite of web APIs, including music search, recommendation and remix/mashup applications. Lamere will manage developer outreach and delivery of new music application development utilities for non-commercial use at developer.echonest.com.

Paul Lamere was previously a Principal Investigator at Sun Microsystems, where he ran Sun's Search Inside the Music program. Lamere is the Industrial co-chair for ACM RecSys'09, the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, and serves on the program committees for ISMIR, the International Society for Music Information Retrieval and UMAP'09, the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization.

He is also the author of the popular music technology blog, www.musicmachinery.com.

"Paul is not only a respected music information retrieval engineer, he's a trusted peer in the music application developer community. With Paul at the controls of our developer platform, I'm confident he'll put even more amazing tools into developers' hands. We're all excited to see what happens next."

Paul Lamere added, "I'm convinced that the music intelligence platform that The Echo Nest is making available to developers will be the key enabler of the next generation of online music applications."

About The Echo Nest

The Echo Nest powers more intelligent digital music applications using a patented machine-learning platform that automatically:

  • Reads about music, crawling the web and analyzing the text on millions of web pages to understand what the entire online world is saying about every artist, album and song.
  • Listens to music, analyzing every song on the web to extract key, tempo, rhythm and timbre and other attributes -- understanding every song in the same way a musician would describe it.
  • Learns music trends, analyzing online music behavior (social networks, p2p, blogs, online forums, playlists) to understand online buzz and identify music trends.

The Echo Nest is a three-time National Science Foundation SBIR grant winner. Private investors include Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and a series of angel investors, including a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab.

[Via http://www.prnewswire.com]