TuneWiki
Locations: Centerville, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, Israel
Featured services: Social music player, largest legally-licensed lyrics database in the world, Lyric Legend (a mobile lyrics game)
Employees: 20 (Centerville location)
Source: Chad Kouse, TuneWiki co-founder, and vice president of research and development
A new cutting-edge social networking feature is propelling a local mobile music company into the international spotlight, business leaders said this week.
TuneWiki opened its first offices in Bellbrook in January 2008 and moved to its Centerville location at 4 W. Franklin St. in 2010. The company also opened an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, in mid-2009, and in Los Angeles — the site of its business headquarters — in January 2010.
TuneWiki’s newest development is its social music player, launched on May 17, for iPhones, according to life-long Dayton area resident Chad Kouse, 31, TuneWiki co-founder and vice president of research and development. The service should launch for Android phones soon, he said.
Through the player, TuneWiki’s two million monthly active users can listen to their stored music library, register a screen name and access real-time maps showing what other users are listening to around the world for free on their mobile devices. Like Facebook and Twitter, TuneWiki’s users can “follow” each other to get frequent updates on what other users are listening to. They also can preview songs they don’t have yet, and purchase them through providers like iTunes or listen for free through YouTube.
“It’s basically to have people discover and share music in a way that up to this point hasn’t been possible,” said Adam Silber, TuneWiki spokesman. “In essence we have an application that allows people to discover music, share music and listen to music in a way that’s very social.”
Almost all of the technological maintenance and development for the company’s newest feature is carried out in Centerville, according to Kouse.
“The Centerville office is the backbone of the company, for sure,” he said. “It’s the office that’s providing all of the new features and new functionality.”
Kouse was approached by Rani Cohen from Tel Aviv and Amnon Sarig from Los Angeles, two self-proclaimed “serial hi-tech entrepreneurs,” near the end of 2007 about becoming the company’s first developer. Kouse gained notoriety in the technology community after he developed one of the first music applications for iPhones before Apple provided an application store for its customers, he said.
“I didn’t feel like moving to LA, so I said, ‘I’ll just start an office here,’ and they said, ‘Go for it,’” Kouse said.
Kouse said his company soon outgrew its first Bellbrook space and wanted a more central location.
“Our office in Bellbrook was too small,” he said. “We really wanted somewhere that was a fun location with restaurants and things in walking distance that would give us visibility. The office that we opened in Centerville is a really cool environment. I like that it is a historic building.”
Currently, the Centerville office employs 20 people, primarily developers, he said. The team also includes testers and a support group, including office and project managers. Only one of these 20 employees is from out of the state, according to Klouse. Employees’ ages vary, ranging from 20 years old to mid-40s, he said.
“It’s an emerging technology, so obviously you have a younger group of people doing it,” Kouse said.
The Centerville office is looking to hire one iPhone, one Android and one hypertext preprocessor developer, with potential for more openings in the future, according to Kouse. He said the office’s close proximity to University of Dayton, Sinclair Community College and Wright State University will make recruiting new developers easy. The company’s preference is to hire locally, but they will look outside of the area if necessary, he said.
“But I have a good feeling we’ll be able to find someone from Dayton,” Kouse said.
According to Kouse, the Centerville office’s developers spend about 10 percent of their time on maintenance, and 90 percent on building new features, changing the look and feel of the application and responding to users’ comments. He said he can’t talk specifically about any new developments before they are released.
“We hope to be releasing especially updates and new features to our social media player ongoing,” he said. “We don’t expect to slow down on that at all.”
In addition to the social network component, TuneWiki also boasts access to more than 3 million lyrics in more than 40 languages, which scroll across users phones karaoke-style for free while they listen to their music. Other application products include Lyric Legend, a mobile game in which users can listen to their favorite songs and tap on the lyrics as they scan across the phone screen.
Free TuneWiki application downloads are available for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian V5 and desktop applications.
“There’s people doing a lot of what we do but not all together,” Silber said. “We’re the first company that does it all.”
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