Moodagent Hits New Milestones & Syntonetic Talks Business

OviPublisherSuccesses | 23 June, 2011 19:17

Syntonetic has many reasons to celebrate since their app, Moodagent (formerly Playlist DJ), hit over 1 million downloads in Ovi Store back in June 2010. By way of background, Moodagent is an app that automatically profiles an individual's music collection and instantly creates playlists that perfectly matches the listener's mood.

Within less than 12 months, Moodagent has experienced a tremendous amount of success and exponential growth in Ovi Store - garnering an additional one million downloads in less than a year - now standing at over two million downloads across 190 markets. Moodagent has also rapidly grown its user base, reaching more than two million active users via the preloaded app available on Nokia Symbian phones.

Ovi Store Logo - pink

Not stopping short of download numbers, Syntonetic has made significant achievements throughout the year, further proving that the company is a leading innovator within the developer community. Since June 2010, Moodagent's recent milestones also include:

  • Nokia Moodagent users have reached more than four million - two million from Ovi Store downloads, and an additional two million through the preloaded app available on Nokia phones. The total number of Nokia user tracks in the Moodagent cloud is over four billion
  • In April 2011, Syntonetic released Nokia Moodagent for Series 40 phones, reaching more Nokia users worldwide
  • Created and released an app, using Qt, to support future Nokia phones
  • Directly increased Nokia user base by 400 percent

Based on the advent of MP3, friends Peter Berg Steffensen and Mikael Henderson saw a future in music together. These gentlemen are the two founders behind Syntonetic, a Danish based company established in 2000. Peter and Mikael have worked hard, together with their 20 member team, to provide users with a better way to play and discover music. They have invented and patented a solution that draws upon the lines of emotional logic between diverse artists and their music.

Syntonetic's Smart Business Strategies Pay-off
One of the strategies that have contributed to Syntonetic's business success is the use of cloud technology. From a business perspective, cloud solutions have enabled the company to lower the total cost of ownership for Moodagent as a service provider - especially when delivering a worldwide service to Nokia in heavy trafficked regions, like China, India, Mexico, Russia, etc....

On the services side, cloud solutions are appealing because they offer easy integration between service providers (i.e. Moodagent with Ovi Music) and Moodagent users don't feel the burden that often comes with loading all of the data themselves.


On the marketing side, Syntonetic has taken full advantage of in-market visibility and implemented a number of campaigns together with Ovi Publish and Ovi Music. To date, the company's most successful effort was through a crossover campaign and competition, in collaboration with Ovi Music, Ovi Store and record labels. Over a period of 11 days - from January 24th through February 3, 2011 - the Ovi crossover Campaign generated tremendous awareness. Users were invited to download Moodagent and then create a playlist based on their mood and share it with their friends on Facebook. To kick things off, Ovi Music provided 10 hot tracks for every user to download for free. Users were also encouraged to post their playlist on Moodagent's Facebook profile for the chance to win a brand new Nokia N8.

"The Nokia Developer team allowed Syntonetic to gain more exposure and downloads in Ovi Store through promotional campaigns and in-app advertising opportunities," said Mikael Henderson, co-founder of Syntonetic."Not only is the Nokia Developer team easy to work with, but they have keen insight from a marketing perspective and genuinely care about our success as a developer."
 

To support this campaign, Syntonetic used various social media channels including their own (Facebook and Twitter). In addition, the campaign was mentioned on the Ovi blog, Ovi Daily App site and in the Ovi Newsletter. A banner was also placed in Ovi Store and ran for a period of seven days. Overall, the promotion was a huge success, resulting in an astounding 60,000 new downloads of Moodagent for Nokia - a 4x increase in the same period of the previous month. With the help of the Nokia Developer team, Syntonetic's competition received recognition from outside influencers, resulting in coverage across several app reviews and in a number of blogs.

Syntonetic Sees Success with Qt
This past year, Syntonetic released a Qt version of Moodagent to support some current future Nokia phones. With the Qt framework, Syntonetic can now easily add or create any updates to their app by using the more advanced tools that are provided. Through the use of Qt, Syntonetic's development time has decreased by half from six months to three months.

"We have seen a tremendous improvement with the Qt platform, since porting from Symbian to the newer Qt," said Peter Berg Steffensen, CEO of Syntonetic. "Working with Qt, we have noticed more compact, robust and efficient code and in some cases it is up to 10 times faster to write. For Moodagent 3.0, we chose to adopt the QML technology for a much more elegant and responsive user experience, which is turning out to be a positive experience for us."

Steffensen continues, "Thanks to Nokia Developer's team strong engineering team, developer support, tools and the promotional opportunities provided, we have developed an app that receives immense user feedback, great press reviews and generates a number of good ideas from our partners. We look forward to an ongoing relationship with the Nokia Developer team."

Future Plans for Moodagent - Moodagent 3.0 with NFC Support
In the coming days, Moodagent will announce the global rollout of the company's most significant feature update to the app since its inception in 2009, coined Moodagent 3.0. Essentially this update delivers all the popular features that Moodagent users have grown to love including the following new feature updates:

  • New technology that allows the app to automatically synch with consumers online music service and present recommendations that exactly match a users mood
  • A cool user interface
  • Easier file and music sharing through online social channels, such as Twitter and Facebook

Additionally, the Moodagent 3.0 version will also be made available for the NFC-enabled Nokia C7 and eventually available on all Nokia NFC supported phone models. Syntonetic is building in an NFC layer that makes it possible for users to send the mood, style and tempo of the track to another user's phone as a means to explore the music on that particular phone. Simply tap two Nokia phones together to link them and Moodagent exchanges the music data, allowing person to discover the other individual's music tracks. Users can sample these music tracks in Ovi Store. Eventually, through the NFC capability, consumers will be able to purchase music and tickets from a bus station billboard or buy content from a friend's phone directly, perhaps at a Groupon discount.

Steffensen adds, "NFC affords new opportunities for inspirational music shopping - it would be great for mobile phone users to be able to sell a track from a live concert, for example. NFC has the power to turn every mobile phone into a branch of a digital store, making consumers' daily lives easier and better."

Moodagent 3.0 takes music discovery, play and share to a whole new level. Based on user feedback, Syntonetic created Moodagent 3.0 to act as an independent music player with social and playlist features, including the ability to re-generate the playlist with a fresh set of tracks based on the same mood, the option to lock tracks and artists from playlists - catering to seasonal and/or occasional music such as Christmas carols or nursery rhymes.

In the next six to 12 months a host of new features are expected to roll out and will be made available on Nokia Series 40 phones and eventually Nokia Symbian and Nokia Windows Phones. Next in store for Syntonetic are company plans to develop a Moodagent for MeeGo phones to focus on the new generation of Nokia touch and type mobile phones. 

To check out how Moodagent got its start with Nokia Developer team, you can read their story here.

Europe , EMEA | Next | Previous | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

RSSComments

You must login to post comments. Login
 
Featured links
Develop
Distribution
Blogs
Community
Resources
Site Map
Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
Nokia Developer aims to help you create apps and publish them so you can connect with users around the world.

京ICP备05048969号  © Copyright Nokia 2012 All rights reserved