Imeem talks Android, iPhone and location-based music
As part of the feature in this week’s Music Ally Report on location-based mobile services, we posed some questions to Imeem’s CMO and head of business development Steve Jang.
See his answers below – the company was one of the first mobile music services to include location-based features, in its Android app, so they’re well worth a read.
How important is location to a service like Imeem? Is it just a fun value add or is there a way in which location-finding can be part of the business model?
At imeem, we are excited about creating a powerful service that enables the user to discover new music and friends through a variety of social music streaming experiences, one of which includes location-based recommendations. Accurate information around the popularity of a song in different places has long been tough to come by as a music fan, let alone by a record label or artist, resulting in a patchwork quilt of retail, radio, top 40 shows, and poll-based stats.
Since the phone has geo-IP capabilities and our technology platform allows us to track the location of a music stream at the user- and city-level, we are able to create a detailed and illuminating picture for our community about what is popular in their city or town.
Currently, imeem Mobile features a station that uses the phone’s location to stream what’s popular on imeem in your region. As you go to a new city or town on, for example, a vacation or a trip with family, you’ll be able to see a station recommending popular songs from your new location.
This is not only a fun new feature for imeem mobile users, but also creates interesting targeting opportunities in our advertising revenue model. Location-based streaming on imeem Mobile also enables us to offer geo-targeted mobile advertising to brand sponsors very similar to the geo-targeting we are able to do for advertisers on our web-based service.
In November 2008, imeem launched a mobile advertising platform that gives brand the ability to reach people on the go in the targeted and personalized fashion, with a number of successful campaigns on the mobile application with companies such as Kia and W Hotels.
How do you imagine location-based services developing in future?
In the future, we’ll take advantage of location-based information for both social discovery and mobile commerce offerings through our web and mobile service. For instance, a person may be to get local concert alerts and recommendations through their mobile app, based upon their cumulative imeem music listening and viewing history.
In addition to receiving notification, they can then use imeem mobile to find out which friends may also be in the local vicinity at the time and have similar tastes, and invite them to join and purchase tickets by direct messaging or using a beacon-like status message update.
What complexities are posed by the different mobile platforms? Is it hard to get a version of an app onto lots of different types of cellphone or mobile device? Is there an iPhone app coming?
Historically, it’s been a difficult process to get an application on a mobile platform, involving a large investment of developers, complex business relations, and time. Now, open platforms such as Android and iPhone allow us to create powerful mobile applications that work as well as web applications, and, in the case of Android, mobile apps that can be leveraged and distributed across multiple mobile handsets that use the standardized Android operating system.
We decided to build the imeem Mobile app on Google’s Android platform first, because we think it has the potential to scale very quickly. The key here is that the Android operating system has both open development APIs, but is also agnostic to handsets. Many different companies can use the same Android operating system on their different handsets, allowing developers, large and small, to develop once and distribute everywhere. An interesting indicator of our success on this platform is the fact that 1 out of 3 people who have bought Android phones have installed imeem Mobile. As the Android footprint grows with multiple handset companies, both inside and beyond the U.S., we think there’s the potential for us to reach millions of new imeem users through just the nascent but rapidly growing Android platform.
We plan to bring imeem Mobile to other platforms and other devices like the iPhone later this year. We work with Apple on many product and marketing levels and are also the #1 iTunes download partner, so we are excited about bring the imeem experience to the iPhone. We’re also seeing a high degree of interest from other global handset companies preparing to launch app platforms or dedicated music phones this year.
