23 February 2006

Taking a look at the Future of Mobile Music
MUSIC GURU

Music Guru is a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe.

Music Guru demonstrates how music could be enjoyed and organized intelligently and automatically both from PCs and mobile phones in the future. Music Guru helps people discover new music and share tastes in music with others, demonstrating the potential of mobile communities based around music.

Music Guru combines a PC and mobile website, a desktop application, and the mobile application, all 3 synchronized. Music Guru is today available in English, German, and Spanish.

Leveraging the unique MusicStrands Recommender, the prototype Music Guru enables automatic synchronization of music tastes across both PC and mobile phones, offering individually tailored music recommendations. Personal preferences can be set to explicitly guide the recommendations, with listening behaviors automatically teaching the system to adapt dynamically to personal music tastes.

With the mobile application designed and rendered using Macromedia® Flash® mobile technology from Adobe, the user will experience an exciting, intuitive UI for interaction with their personal and recommended music.

Music Guru consists of four elements:

1. Automatic synchronization between PC music libraries and mobile phones. Music Guru enables mobile customers to listen remotely to a huge remote music library on their PC, as well as enjoying the music stored on their phone.
2. Real-time intelligent music discovery. Music Guru offers simple ways to discover new music. Recommendations are real-time, delivered automatically as people use their player. Recommendations are tailored according to each individual’s preferences (time line, popularity, decade and genre) but also to a virtually unlimited set of channels that are defined by users through tags such as “Driving at Night” or “Fiesta Loca”.
3. Automatic organization of personal libraries. The music player would intelligently fill out mobile phones with the music people most liked; preferred playlists would be created automatically and quickly from their own library, based on their personal music listening habits.
4. Creation of mobile communities around music. Music Guru demonstrates how individuals could communicate with others to share tastes in music, and create mobile communities around music. People can tag songs, play tags, share playlists, and know real-time what their friends are listening to, and many other things.

Please help us improve the Music Guru by providing feedback to
guru-feedback@musicstrands.com.