The appeal of the iPhone, and by association the new iPod
touch, is growing as developers come up with more native application
icons to add to its screen.
There is everything from the ability to play the original
Pong, to Doom, Blackjack, an eBook reader, Etch-a-Sketch and an aquarium.
But, despite Steve Jobs’ enthusiasm for the Safari browser,
viewing full-featured web pages is still an unsatisfying experience given the
size of the screen.
However, the number of sites that are offering iPhone versions
with an app-like feel and format is growing – Facebook’s was shown off by Jobs
at the recent iPod touch launch.
The latest site to get the iPhone treatment comes from
Seeqpod, a music search engine that will allow you to listen to your favourite
music for free rather than have to buy it from the new wireless iTunes store.
Seeqpod is impressive in its full-sized web iteration. I was
given a demonstration by co-founders of the East Bay company, Kasian Franks and
Shekhar Lodha.
Type in any favourite artist or track in the simple search
box and Seeqpod compiles a list of complete songs it has found on the web,
showing them on the left side of the screen. Clicking on them transfers them to
the right side to form a playlist, where an audio player begins caching and
playing the top track. Clicking on a TV-screen icon, opens up a player for the
music video found for the song.
Seeqpod calls itself “playable search” but its algorithms
originate in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where they matched genes
with other genes in life sciences.
Kasian Franks worked there and got permission to take it out
of the lab to try to commercialise the idea in 2005. He sees a number of
possible verticals – from health and finance to zoology – but hit on music and
video first.
The technology goes beyond keyword search to also tap into
user recommendations. It has crawled 10m songs on the Web. The founders say
they do not host any of them, so should escape scrutiny from the record
companies.
BroadClip used a similar argument at the TechCrunch40
conference this week and earned a putdown from former Napster executive Don Dodge.
Seeqpod lacks Apple’s cover art, but the company thinks it
could find and add that through its search techniques eventually.
“We’re like an iPod with 10m songs, so we’re bigger than
Apple,” jokes Mr Franks.
It plans to make money through its own contextual
advertising and will license the product – WFMU, a popular radio station is
already using it to index its content and create another iPhone destination.
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