When it comes to injecting life in a new idea, Y Combinator is a proven Institution. The latest feather in its cap is anywhere.fm, founded by Sachin Rekhi (Microsoft), Anson Tsai(Microsoft, MIT) and Luxiou Chen(Amazon, MIT).
“WoW”. That’s the first expression upon visiting the website. The user interface is really impressive. Although it has been highly inspired(copied) by iTunes, but that helps in eliminates the learning curve. The UI is common sense driven, and is perfect case study for UI designers. The registration process was super smooth. No need to fill out zillion fields. Probably, it has the sweetest registration flow i have ever seen. It has well thought flows, and added spice of social networking, which is telling. Other user’s Playlist are available in streaming only mode. iTunes uploader is a great addon to migrate your existing song base. Although, Music discovery is a bit on the hind sight.
Entertainment startups have a high viral growth and flying operational costs. As the user base increases, they have to write a exorbitant bandwidth cheques each month. For the time being, it uses Amazon’s S3. Therefore, they need to monetize as soon as possible, before the user explosion. On the other note, it is not tough for apple to build something like this, given their existing user base. Apple is highly respected for various innovation streams it has given to industry. I’m sure those guys must also be thinking to augment iTunes with added features.
I asked myself when to use it. I can iTune at home/office, and iPod on the park bench. I could not come up with an compelling answer to this. But i liked it. One feature request is to provide a sync back to iTunes. If it wishes to be de facto web music player, then features like buying and selling music should be added as well.
ashish
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