Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta.

Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.

MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:

• Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
• Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
• Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
• Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
• Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
• Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.

MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.

I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.

In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.

Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today saying that they will be discontinuing the service in Israel for now due to licensing issues (Thanks Orli):

Tel-Aviv based MeeMix launches its beta program today. Like Pandora, MeeMix is a community music/Internet radio service for the 15-35 demographic. The idea being that any user can create a highly personalized, taste-based music channel with minimum fuss. The major differentiation between MeeMix and Pandora or Last.fm is the way it goes about forecasting personal taste.

Typically, there are two ways to perform such predictions:

1. “Nature” (Pandora) – Decision making is based upon on the compatibility between one song and another—personal taste not being part of the equation.
2. “Nurture” (Last.fm) – Decision making is based upon a environmental factors—song compatibility not being part of the equation

Steve Krause wrote a great post about Nature vs. Nurture in the music space.

Like Pandora, MeeMix breaks down each song, artist and user down to an elemental level. Then its recommendation engine analyzes the combination of a user’s profile, music selection and behavior to create a customized radio station. In my personal tests, MeeMix’s music selection was near perfect.

MeeMix has a rich social networking feature set, including reviews, thoughts (public user postings), secrets (private user postings), etc. The most important of these features in my opinion is being able to listen to the same song as other channel subscribers in real time. And for the egomaniacs in our audience, you can even print off a t-shirt with your channel name and number of subscribers (courtesy of the Zazzle API).

MeeMix was founded in mid-2006 by CEO Gilad Shlang, formerly the User Experience Manager at 888.com, and Dr. Ricardo Tarrasch (Chief Scientist), also formerly of 888.com with a doctorate degree in Biopsychology. The two possess in-depth experience in creating and leveraging user experience and communities based upon algorithmic forecasting. The company is funded by angels and currently employs a team of 9, including the former lead developer of ICQ, musicologists, and a community/SEO specialist.

The business model is currently based on album sales and will expand to songs, ringtones, and ads. Seeing as there’s so much algorithmic magic under the hood, I won’t be surprised if in a year or two licensing its engine will become MeeMix’s core business.

In the mean time, the team is focusing on learning its community and expanding its service both in scale and in application range (embeddable web widgets and a Facebook app).

Try MeeMix

We have 1000 invitations available to the MeeMix private beta here.

This guest post is written by Roi Carthy, an Israeli-based startup consultant. Roi will be covering the Israeli startup scene for TechCrunch.