Welcome Echo Nest!

In case you missed it, we just acquired a company called Echo Nest in Boston. These people have been obsessed with understanding music for the past 8 years since it was founded by Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan out of MIT Medialab.

We think this is such a great fit in a lot of ways. In particular, they have focused on very complementary things to what we have. While we have spent a lot of time on things like collaborative filtering, A/B testing, learning from user feedback, and scalability, they have spent time on audio analysis, cultural understanding through web scraping, playlisting, and building a kick ass API.

For some info about what Echo Nest has been up to, check out Paul Lamere's Music Machinery blog as well as Brian Whitman's blog.

We're super excited on starting to incorporate Echo Nest's technology into our own product and we already have a couple of things in the pipe we might launch shortly. Stay tuned!