It claims to guess your mood

Umm! The claim by Instinctiv is Bullsh1t. This is the sort of claim that seduces VCs.

…and know exactly what you’ll want to listen to.

Unless it is a content-based music recommendation, then yes (very highly likely), but if it is collaborative filtering recommendation (which relies heavily on past preferences/data of oneself or others), then it is highly unlikely, ie, one should not place much confidence in their claim at all.

How should it knows how I feel? By the aggressiveness how I touch the screen or the buttons??

Or he looks at what songs I play and then tries to find similar? But this approach is not good at all, because I do not want to have the same type of songs all the type.

What I am trying to say is, that you can not predict the mood - by looking at the past! On the other hand, you can potentially analyze my taste, but for that it will take 1 months to learn it - and this month should be representative!

—
http://www.speed.io - Worldwide DSL speedtest (original since 2003)

This is a very interesting idea. Im not too sure how it would guess your mood though. But im guessing we will see more and more iPhone specific companies coming up and getting funding now.

Steve - http://crenk.com

thanks for the link

@Mike - Thanks for sharing a cool iPhone related startup!

I was just wondering if Pandora does something big just for the iPhone, that will really make headlines! At least for music lovers

Disclosure: I am a really big Pandora fan! And a sucker for Apple products

Best regards,

Darren Lee
http://www.adexcel.com

So basically, it’s a sort of Musicovery/Pandora mix for the iPhone?

This is a very nice idea. I like the fact that it modifies and existing app on the iPhone.

That actually is more interesting to me than the app itself

Basti.

yeah but will this ever work on a NON-jailbroken iPhone? Since this app (I assume) currently runs in the background to monitor what you are playing in iPOD.. which can’t be done in a non-jailbroken iphones.. so …?

So it’s essentially Last.FM but without providing the music for us? Thanks but I’ll stick to my Last.FM Scrobbler on my iPhone!

Been using it for the past 24 hours with probably 5 hours of total play (got to beta it early cause I know the guy).

It’s worked pretty brilliantly. You realize it when you’ve been listening on shuffle for an hour and haven’t skipped a song once.

COngrats Justin on a great product.

MA says jailbreak only, “for now”. try forever (at least in product cycle terms). there are series of SDK rules which will make it impossible for this app to work officially unless apple changes how they sandbox. I wish Instinctiv luck, but they will be asking their customers to make a tough choice in a few weeks: this app or 2.0 firmware?

I’m sure the 25 people who have jail broken their iphone will appreciate this product

So it’s for people who have a broken shuffle function on their iPod?

Wow, I wish I conned some VCs into giving me money for an app that we all know can never be in the App Store because it uses private APIs that the SDK prohibits using. How do you know it will be in the App Store Mike? You can’t claim that. No one can claim that… yet.

Thanks for the write-up, Michael!

Hi everyone,

This is one of the developers behind the Instinctiv Shuffle. Thanks a lot for all of the feedback and interest! We wanted to clarify some questions and comments that have been posted just to explain how our app works and what it means for the future of iPhone/Touch apps in our minds.

Our technology may have some “magical” qualities from the outside looking in, but our approach is relatively straight forward. When you download our app, we group all of the music in your library in different groups (or moods, or whatever else you want to call it) based on a combination of machine learning from our millions+ song database, and also the aggregate of all of the anonymous user data we’ve collected. The result is that every time you skip a song we “narrow the playing field” until we know exactly which group of songs you want to listen to. Of course this changes with time and based on skips but at a high level that’s how our technology works.

The second major component is that we’ve made our app to be flexible enough to account for user eccentricities. That means based on YOUR particular skipping behavior, the localized Instinctiv Shuffle on your iPhone/Touch will modify its groupings to make sure it’s just right for you.

So the bottom line is that the longer you use Instinctiv Shuffle the more accurate it becomes to understand your musical tastes and become even more in tune with your “moods”.

It’s pretty “instinctiv” really. J

To the other questions on the usefulness of the app and its inclusion in the Apple SDK, this was actually a major decision for us. We fully intended to be a part of the App Store months ago, but when we got down to the nitty gritty, we realized that the Instinctiv Shuffle would have to be significantly limited to go down to the SDK level. As perfectionists, we really couldn’t stand the idea of taking out both the intuitive UI and blunting the core functionality, so we went against the grain and made a jail-broken app.

I think as people use our Instinctiv Shuffle and other jail broken apps that are coming out and FEEL the difference between the power/complexity/awesomeness of native jailbroken apps vs. SDK apps, we hope Apple may ease some of the restrictions. The fact is, more than 1.5 million people (this was way back in February) already had jail broken their iPhones and many more people have done so for the Touch. So we know there’s a market for this. Judging by the overwhelming response we’ve gotten in the last 12 hours, there is certainly pent up demand. If not with Apple, then perhaps on some other platform.

Thanks for listening,

-Peter

Let’s just hope I never start my playlist with Wilson Phillips.

While is can predict songs you would probably listen to based off habits, there’s no way it can really predict mood. The only way would be to look at your past 3 songs that were listened to within a short time frame. It could analyze the harmonics of the song and then choose a song that matches these similar criteria… how is this monetized?… http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2

Its probably based upon an algorithm, which is third party and placed inside the iphone by the app, i can’t wait to try this out, i remember similar programs trying this before but nothing based upon the last songs… lets wait and see on this one.

I hope that the user has the ability to add/buy a song to her favorites/playlist/etc. 90% of the time that I listen to the radio, I’ll like a song and then forget the name or never hear the name and then I’ll never buy it. Think of all the lost profits. Hope someone can capture the possible affiliate revenue….

Heather L said…
I’ll like a song and then forget the name or never hear the name and then I’ll never buy it

This is the advantage of having a music recommender system that is based on the content of the music itself (digital file), since if you forgot the name of the song, at least you can try and hum the song (the bit that you remember) into a recorded device and then submit that sample as a query so that the system will try and match/retrieve songs with similar tunes (and hopefully your queried target song is on that short list). These services are already available commercially and the technology will get better & better over time.

wow.. didn’t know such thing exists

Has this company done any patent research? Digital music has been with us for over 10 years now and it’s pretty difficult to come with an idea that hasn’t been previously thought of and patented.

I just did a quick web search and found this:
http://www.freepatentsonline.c.....88727.html

Looks like there’s already a patent filed for music selection based on skipping.

LOL, I think Id rather choose my own song thank you very much!

JT
http://www.FireMe.to/udi

I’d much rather have JukeFly (.com) on my iPhone than this. I guess there may be many services coming to iPhone like it though.

This is pretty cool tool. I would of never thought of using something like this, but now that you bring it up I just may try it, thanks.

This is a clever idea. I always wondered if there’d be a semi-intelligent shuffle feature, for those days when the ipod keeps on chucking out sad songs and I keep skipping them, only to hear another. Stupid ipod, trying to make me sad. Stupid.

absolute crap.

it reminds me of ray kurzweil claiming to have algorithms write poems. well somewhat similar.

i cant seem to fathom how stupid some VCs can get sometimes. really. moods? wow… how in the world do you know that i am dancing or jumping about while listening to a song… or just on the phone or composing a business plan?

sheeesh.

vishywashi: what surprises me is that you appear to run a tech website. I’m surprised because you seem to know nothing about tech whatsoever. When you run a website purporting to disseminate any kind of information you have a responsibility not to mislead — a responsibility you can’t possibly live up to. While I don’t know exactly how Instinctiv tech works, a second rate CS 101 student could begin to imagine how such a system could be possible. Making it work well is no small feat, but possible nonetheless. Given that this is an iPhone app even your silly example of detecting dancing or jumping vs sitting and working is trivial: the iPhone has a 3D accelerometer. Sheesh, indeed!

I have been using this since yesterday and it works flawlessly. My iPod is eclectic, and Instinctiv takes care of that perfectly picking a general mood and creating a mix of songs that fit.

As far as Jailbreaking goes, I wasn’t going to do it until I found this app. I have been patiently waiting for Apple to release its SDK, but when I found out that it’s is so restricted that something as useful, and simple, as Instinctiv won’t work I changed my mind.

Restricting their platform was the mistake Apple made back in the 90’s when Windows was killing them. They are making the same mistake again, but we are lucky enough to have smart people that have provided dead simple tools for us to use our device as we please. Even more impressive, we have companies and VCs that are brave enough to take a stand and provide the highest level of software despite Apples restrictions. I’m surprised that an audience as progressive as Techcrunch’s wouldn’t be more supportive.

You have to be a retarded VC firm to invest in this. Why? Because the iPhone SDK doesn’t allow you access to iTunes PERIOD.

So this app will NEVER EVER show up in the App Store. So it will only EVER WORK with jail broken ipods which will start to go away more and more when july 11th hits.

Great research there VCs.

ขอโทษที่คิดถึง ก็อต

Cool. I will have to try this.