Bijoy Goswami is a fascinating man. Born in India, the entrepreneurial evangelist lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the U.S. before attending Stanford University. Now, and for the last 15 years or so, he lives in Austin, TX, and we were fortunate to have him speak at the TC Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off.

But even though he went to Stanford, The Human Fabric author doesn’t want Austin to become the next Silicon Valley.

He explained that the DNA of Silicon Valley (and all of California, actually) comes from this notion of becoming an overnight success. It all started with the Gold Rush, in 1849, he explained.

“Silicon Valley is the product of the Gold Rush. In 1849, people came with nothing and if they struck gold they’d become a millionaire. The formation of California started with this, and the whole of the state began to believe in the idea of overnight success,” said Bijoy on stage with John Biggs. “It’s part of their DNA, and they use technology because that’s the biggest lever to achieve that end.”

Goswami believes that Austin entrepreneurialism is quite different, and comes from a place of authenticity and passion.

“In Austin we want to be ourselves, and we’re all on a journey to be ourselves,” said Goswami. “The startup culture here is derived from a personal journey, and from where they’re passion comes from. They don’t care if they’ll be big or small, but they care about being authentic and giving their passion to the world.”

Goswami went on to say that Austinites don’t build the tools, but use them. Whereas new technology comes straight out of Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs in Austin use that technology to leverage their own passion projects and ideas. This explains why our the winners of our pitch-off, a post-production video editing collaboration tool called First Cut Pro, an Expedia for doggy day care called Embarkly, and an children’s camps and activities marketplace called Camperoo, were all focused on niche markets and solutions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has made a number of its apps and services available on multiple devices. Sundar Pichai, Google’s SVP of Android, Chrome, and Apps, announced at the D11 Conference that there’s another service that’ll soon be available on iOS: the Google Play Music service. Google’s answer to iTunes and Spotify was previously only available on the web and Android. According to Pichai, it will launch on Apple’s operating system in “a few weeks.”

At its I/O conference this month, Google announced a pretty major revamp of Play Music, which now includes a Spotify-like subscription service.

Pichai noted that it’s part of Google’s DNA to bring all of its services to as many platforms as possible. “In Google’s fundamental DNA, we want [our services] to be universally accessible… For us, users on iOS who want to use Google services, we want them to be Google users.” Indeed, he argues that Google’s approach to its service is different from that of its competitors.

Talking about Samsung and Android, he noted that “it’s not just the operating system, but the services you deliver on top of it. The thing that makes Android successful, it’s the Google cloud services that are on top of that. We want to reach as many people as possible. For platforms which don’t have that many users at scale — for YouTube, as an example, we have HTML5.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon tweeted something thought-provoking:

What were the last Hollywood movies you saw about technology & the future that were optimistic? They seem to be systematically dystopian.

I happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for Iron Man 3 to start, so I tried to come up with a good counter-example. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Then the pre-movie trailers starting playing. The new Will Smith (and son) flick, After Earth: dystopia. The new Guillermo del Toro flick, Pacific Rim: dystopia. Even the new Superman flick, Man of Steel, could be classified as a technological dystopia (more below).

Sure, there are some films — mainly smaller indies — that in some ways are starting to buck the trend. But overall, Dixon (and Peter Thiel, who Dixon says he got the idea from) are right: Hollywood seems to hate technology. Why?

My initial thought is simply that dystopia sells. It’s the same reason why the mainstream media covering technology tends to harp on the downsides of new tech, sometimes to the point of fear mongering. They are tracking you! They want to know your location! They want to record you going to the bathroom!

Most people are predisposed to fear what they do not understand. Hollywood’s futuristic films are simply playing to this fear in the same way that horror films are packed with moments meant to startle you.

This is nothing new. In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — the very first feature-length science fiction film — told of a 2026 where the lower class workers power the technology for the upper class. In 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still saw aliens bring a giant robot to Earth that would destroy the planet if humans couldn’t get their act together. The 1960 version of The Time Machine (based on the H.G. Wells book) had technology (nuclear weapons) destroying civilization. 2001. A Clockwork Orange.

“FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don’t feel I need to babysit it,” says Antonio Garcia-Martinez, product director of Facebook’s ad exchange who announced he’s leaving the company today. After selling his company AdGrok to Twitter, then defecting to Facebook two years ago, Antonio deserves a vacation.

“‘To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?’ - George Eastman, suicide note” is how Garcia started his customary goodbye post on Facebook today. But I wanted the deeper story, and he agreed to grant me an interview.

For starters, Garcia tells me “I’m still totally long on Facebook as a company. Anyone who bets against Facebook probably deserves to lose their money.” So while many high-ranking Facebookers have departed in the year since the IPO, he doesn’t want his exit perceived as a sign that Facebook is losing steam.

It was the company’s potential to change the world and its hacker culture that attracted him the in the first place. After attending UC Berkeley, Garcia did a stint on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs. His Facebook profile describes his position there as “Pricing quant on the corporate credit-default swap desk. Yes, I was part of that whole mess.” The financial sector implosion led him to Adchemy, where he’d develop the chops to start his own ad tech company, AdGrok.

The startup helped businesses automate Google AdWords selection and bidding, and was accepted to Y Combinator. Eventually, the young CEO accepted a $10 million acquisition bid from Twitter, but it didn’t prove a good fit for Garcia. Facebook jumped at the chance to poach him and he became the social network’s first product manager of ad targeting.

Garcia-Martinez tells me it’s these kinds of talent deals that keep Facebook feisty. “They acqhire or acquire lots of startup CEOs. They want that ‘crazy startup, do whatever-the-fuck it takes to get it done, no fear, maybe slightly abrasive and aggressive DNA. If you’re a small startup considering selling your company, there’s definitely far worse places to work than Facebook,” he tells me. While great people that joined Facebook the startup are leaving, they’re being replaced with great people who know they’re going to work for a big company. Antonio says “at the Facebook engineering level are some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”

Eventually he found the project that would define his time at Facebook: FBX. At the time, Facebook’s ads were firmly stuck in the demand generation part of the purchase funnel. The company knew who you were and what you liked, but not what you wanted to buy next. Facebook Exchange would change that. In his goodbye post, he writes of “building an ad exchange with three engineers in one frenetic month” — a serious feat.

In June 2012, FBX began public testing. It let Facebook advertisers target users based on cookies dropped by websites they’d visited. If you almost booked a flight to Hawaii but didn’t pull the trigger, FBX could hit you with ads for discounted Hawaii flights and hotels the next time you visited Facebook. Facebook finally knew your purchase intent, and could sell it for high rates that companies would pay out of budgets reserved for retargeting.

“It is working very well. No question it’s been a success for Facebook,” Garcia tells me. And ad platform data and interviews back him up. The FBX ads Antonio willed into being delivered big returns and had ad platforms betting their businesses on Facebook.

Yet we’re not seeing Facebook doubling down on FBX as I would have expected, and perhaps that’s the real reason Garcia is heading out. Right now, FBX doesn’t work at all on mobile, which seems like a huge miss considering that’s now where the majority of Facebook’s engagement is. FBX retargeting data can’t be combined with standard Facebook biographical targeting, either. There are privacy concerns with that, but if Facebook was really committed to FBX, I think they would have been hammered out by now.

As is, FBX is immature, and if Facebook isn’t going to apply the resources to help it grow up, I can understand Antonio’s desire not to play nanny.

Regardless of the exact reasons for his departure, it was time for Antonio to go galavanting. If you’ve met him or follow him on social media, you know he’s an adventurer who loves fast cars and tall mountains. He writes, “What comes after? Probably a few months in either forest, ocean, or desert. And then another ride on that startup roller coaster that got me here in the first place.”

As for what kind of problem he’ll tackle, he says it’s “not necessarily going to be in ad tech. It’s been four to 5 years [in that space] which is pretty long by my ADD standards.” He cites Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher’s popular quote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads…That sucks.” Instead, he tells me, “My next thing could be something in hardware. It’s never been easier to turn bits into atoms.”

I’ve covered Facebook ads closely for the last three years and it’s remarkable to see how far it’s come in no small part thanks to Antonio. What was once a fledgling channel has turned into a global powerhouse that’s redefining marketing with friends. And while he’s off to go exploring, he’ll probably miss working on something with the impact of what’s built at 1 Hacker Way. He assures me, “It will be the age of Facebook. It will be the next Google. It will define a generation of technology. “

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

John Frankel, founder and partner at FF Ventures, has a steady hand on the pulse of innovation. He’s invested in companies like 500px, Appy Couple, and Moveline, to name a few, and while he doesn’t see a Series A crunch on the horizon, he does see the pace of innovation rapidly heating up.

After all, his firm as led seven investments in new companies since December 1, most notably in companies who are taking the smartphone and turning it into something truly functional and useful for people.

As our focus begins to shift from pocketable computers to wearable ones, we found it only fitting to see how Mr. Frankel feels about computing headsets and wrist-watches.

“The thing that will make us comfortable with wearables will be the accuracy of the information they provide,” said Frankel. “Letting Siri be not completely accurate is annoying, but since wearables are ever-present, that information needs to be 100 percent correct.”

Quantified self devices and smart wearables are merging into a similar category, and Frankel sees this as part of a larger push “not to electronically measure different things about you, but to understand your DNA.”

He brought up a company called Interaxon which has developed a brain wave-reading headset, called the Muse. Frankel sees huge opportunities with this, as the company has just opened up its API to let developers get a peek into our brains.

“Maybe we can quantify our meditation,” said Frankel. “Or maybe someone will develop a program that tells someone they’re falling asleep at the wheel. I don’t know what people will come up with, and that intrigues me a lot.”

We also took the opportunity to ask Frankel his opinion on Apple pulling 500px (one of his portfolio companies) from the App Store under accusations that it was easy to search for porn within the app. Frankel maintains that the photography on 500px website and app is not pornography, but rather tasteful nudity and that “most people know the difference.”

However, he sees it as a larger move by Apple to tighten the reigns with regards to explicit imagery.

But Frankel is perhaps most interested in companies looking to solve major issues, like what iClearpath is doing with immigration. The company acts a lot like a TurboTax for immigration, allowing people from other companies to have easy, cheaper access to the documents they need in an understandable format.

“These are the kinds of innovations that foster further innovation,” said Frankel. “I wonder how many people from other countries we’ve brought over here, educated, and then sent away.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zynga, the social games company that is now expanding its business into real-money online gambling, is today announcing a new heavyweight on its board of directors: John Doerr, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Doerr also sits on the boards of John a number of other tech companies, including Coursera, Flipboard and Google. Other Zynga board members are William “Bing” Gordon, Reid Hoffman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Stanley J. Meresman, Sunil Paul, Mark Pincus, Ellen F. Siminoff and Owen Van Natta.

KPCB was one of Zynga’s biggest VC backers before it went public in December 2011, with Doerr leading those investments. He always held the company and founder Mark Pincus in very high regard. In 2010, when Zynga was still a private company, he once described it as the “most rapidly growing, most profitable, with the most happy customers that Kleiner Perkins has ever backed.”

Indeed, that is the message that is coming across today, and the impetus for adding him to the board. “John has been a supporter of Zynga since our early days, and truly understands our core values and mission,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder, Zynga, in a statement. “John has worked with some of the most well-known companies in the world at every stage imaginable and his experience helping teams innovate at scale will be a tremendous asset for our leadership team. I’m personally looking forward to working closer with John, a true pioneer in the consumer internet space, and welcoming him to the board as a trusted advisor through this pivotal, transition year. John inspired us all to pursue creating internet treasures. He is a true missionary and will deepen and strengthen our DNA.”

Doerr will bring significant expertise in helping Zynga build itself out in the next stage of its life as a sustainable digital content business, with the emphasis on gaming on more platforms and in more guises.

“In just five years Zynga has connected hundreds of millions of people to their friends for fun. What’s exciting is this is still day zero – just the beginning — of social gaming’s potential,” said Doerr. “With its deep talent and multi-platform technology, and millions of happy customers, Zynga will engage more of us wherever we play – whether on the web, phones or tablets. I’m excited about working with Mark and the Zynga team in its next chapters of growth.”

Zynga blew up in its startup days, riding the wave of social gaming that came with the rapid growth of Facebook. But since going public, the company has fallen on more difficult times. A lot more competition on the social gaming landscape, and changing public tastes, have resulted in a number of games and studio closures for the company amid disappointing revenues and cost-reduction strategies.

That has also driven Zynga to turn to games that might generate better profits, such as real-money gambling. Its first efforts in that area went live this week in the UK, with the plan being to extend that to other markets in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere as regulations and partnerships allow. Those efforts have so far had an immediate boost for the company’s stock price, seeing it jump some $0.40 on the news on Wednesday, although that enthusiasm seemed to have died down a bit by the end of Thursday. Meanwhile, the company is slowly levelling out its wider business. Last quarter it reported flat revenues of $311 million, but that also beat market expectations.

Full release below.

ZYNGA APPOINTS JOHN DOERR TO BOARD OF DIRECTORS

SAN FRANCISCO – April 5, 2013 – Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA), the world’s leading social game developer, announced today that John Doerr, General Partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, joined the company’s board of directors.

“John has been a supporter of Zynga since our early days, and truly understands our core values and mission,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder, Zynga. “John has worked with some of the most well-known companies in the world at every stage imaginable and his experience helping teams innovate at scale will be a tremendous asset for our leadership team. I’m personally looking forward to working closer with John, a true pioneer in the consumer internet space, and welcoming him to the board as a trusted advisor through this pivotal, transition year. John inspired us all to pursue creating internet treasures. He is a true missionary and will deepen and strengthen our DNA.”

“In just five years Zynga has connected hundreds of millions of people to their friends for fun. What’s exciting is this is still day zero – just the beginning — of social gaming’s potential,” said John Doerr, General Partner,Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “With its deep talent and multi-platform technology, and millions of happy customers, Zynga will engage more of us wherever we play – whether on the web, phones or tablets. I’m excited about working with Mark and the Zynga team in its next chapters of growth.”

Doerr joined KPCB in 1980, and has backed some of the world’s most successful companies, including Google Inc. (GOOG),Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Intuit Inc. (INTU). His passion is helping entrepreneurs create the “next big thing.” John currently serves on the boards of several Internet technology companies, including Coursera, Flipboard and Google.

Doerr started his technology career in 1974 at Intel, and later founded Silicon Compilers, a VLSI CAD software company, and co-founded @Home, the nationwide broadband cable Internet service. Outside of KPCB, Doerr supports NewSchools.org,TechNet.org, the Climate Reality Project andONE.org.

Doerr joins Zynga’s distinguished board members: William “Bing” Gordon, Reid Hoffman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Stanley J. Meresman, Sunil Paul, Mark Pincus, Ellen F. Siminoff and Owen Van Natta.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This morning, as it said it would, gaming giant Zynga turned on Zynga Plus Casino and Zynga Plus Poker, its first real-money gaming sites, letting residents, initially only in the UK, deposit money to gamble online.

Anyone who has visited a real-world casino knows that the odds are stacked against you when you gamble. And Zynga’s new sites remind us that the same goes for virtual casinos, too. I’ve been playing Zynga’s games for the last half hour and have yet to win anything with my own hard-earned cash, but I have done a little better playing with Zynga’s play money.

You first need to register to get going on the site. Although Zynga gives you the option to play some games with play money — to test the waters — registering includes a requirement to enter payment information and put some real money on to the table.

Interesting to note that although Zynga is opening this first in the UK, users can already deposit five different currencies — pounds, dollars, euros, yen and Canadian dollars. The company does plan to extend into further markets where online gambling is regulated and Zynga is permitted, so perhaps it makes sense that it would be turning on that facility now.

I grew up in Las Vegas, and at different points both of my parents worked in casinos. But neither of those facts seem to have translated to me being much of a gambler. So, after depositing the absolute minimum of money into my new account — £10 was the requirement — I went straight for the low-hanging fruit: slots. Zynga, whose real-money efforts are being led by online gambling veteran Maytal Olsha, has been doing its research and knows that simple games like slots are the most popular way of bringing people on to the platform.

So for now this is where the bulk of the catalog rests, with 120 slot machine games on launch, many of them extensions of Zynga’s already-popular social gaming brands. You can see also how Zynga could use this in the reverse: popular brands that it might develop on its gambling portals could start to make appearances in its social games, too.

Other games are a bit more anonymous:

To play game you are taken to a little screen where you place your bet. Once you’re logged into the system you don’t need to add any security details for subsequent bets. Bets start at £0.01 per play for some of the slots, to £1.00 for table games like BlackJack. Popular branded games, like Farmville slots, start at a minimum of £0.30 per play.

I’ve so far not been able to play the more sophisticated games with my own money, because Zynga requires you to credit a higher amount to your account than I was prepared to deposit. But what it does offer is an option to play some of these with Zynga’s pretend money. There, I’ve been winning a few hands, but overall still looking at my basic account slowly diminishing.

The Poker site I’ve not gotten to work yet but this is what the welcome screen looks like so far:

Nor have I been able to activate the ehanced version of the site that you get when you add a desktop app. This apparently enhances and improves the experience for users, and Zynga is enticing users to go that extra mile also by adding more jackpots for those who download software, rather than simply opt for “Instant Play” online. This option, however, only appears to be open for Windows users at the moment — and I’m on a Mac.

As Kim noted yesterday, the UK online gambling market is already pretty competitive. But in its favor, Zynga has is some very strong wattage in the form of existing branding with some of its most popular social games leading the way in its online gambling efforts. While a lot of online gambling has been attractive for actual gamblers, what Zynga could bring to the table is a whole new class of people who have been initiated through its virtual-currency and free casual/social games, making it less of a niche activity and more of a recreational one.

The company has been slowly laying the groundwork for the gambling foray and launching now in the UK gives it a good place to test out what is working and what is not for when it extends online, real-money gambling to further countries later this year in Europe and beyond (those supported currencies should be one clue to where Zynga would like to go next, regulators allowing).

Given that Zynga built its business around social gaming, it’s noticeable how absent this is from the real-money experience. That could be because Zynga is testing out how people play its games when they are more anonymous — perhaps even more important for real-money games, where there may be some stigma attached to gambling, and moreso if you are losing horribly. But given how close social is to Zynga’s DNA it’s likely that we will see some walled-garden social elements appear here, too. There may even be some already in the poker rooms — which I have yet to be able to visit.

That’s not to say that Facebook and other platforms won’t be coming soon, given that both Facebook and mobile are already big businesses for Zynga.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is making an announcement this Thursday, and our own Josh Constine reports that at this event we’ll see the company unveil its own slightly tweaked flavor of Android, to power select HTC smartphones. But why would the company do that, and why now? A new report from Reuter provides very good motivation: Facebook sees a potential threat in the growing success of mobile-first messaging platforms that make the social networking experience more about conversation and less about broadcasts.

In the article, Reuters flags a number of successful mobile-first startups and companies that have managed to attract a very sizeable user base, and which it claims are especially popular among a younger demographic, including KakaoTalk, LINE, WeChat, Kik and WhatsApp. These apps mostly seem to succeed by focusing on brief one-to-one or group communication, with provisions that also allow for direct sharing of media like YouTube clips, audio and games, where Facebook and other web-based social networks before it have emphasized one-to-many broadcasts, and a less direct model of social interaction.

Facebook has obviously seen the effect of this shift, and has altered its product to try to anticipate or react to it, with moves like the Beluga purchase in 2011, which led to the launch of Facebook Messenger. It also built a Snapchat clone, over the course of just a few days, in a move that seemed to be little more than a display of power: the big dog saying essentially, ‘if this is what people want, we can do that too, and without breaking a sweat.’

But there’s reason to suggest Facebook is sweating. The Reuters piece cites Kik’s recent introduction of Kik Cards, a means for sharing content on the messaging platform quickly and easily, and most importantly, without cluttering the core experience. I spoke with Kik founder Ted Livingston twice about Kik Cards, once before their launch and once shortly after, and he agreed with me that there’s a huge opportunity out there for someone like Kik or another mobile-native startup to take things further and become a full-fledged mobile-first social network, possibly even one to usurp Facebook’s dominant position.

Kik has 40 million users, however, and event WeChat’s 400 million users is a far cry from Facebook’s more than 1 billion monthly active users, 680 million of which are active on mobile. Others like LINE and KakaoTalk, which have been primarily successful in Asia so far, still only have 120 million and 80 million users respectively. Point being, according to the numbers in black and white, Facebook still has an immense lead on its mobile competitors, and one that isn’t likely to suffer a huge reversal in the immediate future.

But Facebook’s Thursday announcement (which is where it tellingly directed Reuters when the pub sought comment for its story today) suggests that even if its crown isn’t under immediate threat, the company is thinking hard about how to woo mobile users in a meaningful and lasting way. Building Facebook DNA into the very core of the OS could be a good way to do that, and one that others might find hard to replicate owing to Facebook’s stronger influence. The bottom line is that Facebook is looking ahead to anticipate a time when it might not be in a position of power, and a strike at the young, mobile demographic right where they feel most at home could help considerably in avoiding that future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

British Airways today announced the first of its “UnGrounded” innovation lab flights that will assemble 100 Silicon Valley luminaries on a flight to London to devise a platform for connecting tech talent with big problems around the world. A partnership with the UN, the inaugural UnGrounded flight will fly on June 12th with 100 leaders from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, RocketSpace and more on board.

“Great innovation happens when you bring people together face to face, not when you have people sitting alone in rooms” explained EVP of British Airways Simon Talling-Smith today at a press conference about UnGrounded. BA’s plan is to fill the 100 seats on the flight with founders, funders, engineers, academics, and a couple of journalists, and give them ten hours to work on a big problem.

The plan is for the UnGrounded “innovation lab in sky” flights to become a somewhat regular occurrence with different destinations. On the first one, though, the passengers will address the problem of mismatches between where technology innovators live and where the problems they could solve reside.

Upon touch down in London, UnGrounded 1′s assembled team will present their progress to the United Nations’ sponsored Decide Now Act (DNA) Summit and the Secretary General of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union. Todd Lutwak of Andreessen Horowitz, Leor Stern of Google, Celestine Johnson of Innovation Endeavors, Duncan Logan of RocketSpace, Gerald Brady of Silicon Valley Bank, Marguerite Gong Hancock of the Stanford GSB are amongst the passengers, and the rest will be selected based on their potential for contribution.

BA will get help from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund and the RocketSpace startup accelerator, and IDEO will be designing the in-flight experience. That’s a huge challenge, as smart people can be tough to corral, and if the organizational structure for turning ideas into solutions isn’t right, the whole flight could be a waste. There’s also talk of pulling out seats along with the reduced 100-passenger cap to make sure the plane is a decent working environment.

So why is British Airways doing this in the first place? Talling-Smith says that “We’re a premium airline. We exist as a product and service business, which means we’re an innovation company. So innovation has alrways been at the heart of what we do. The spirit of innovation has changed. A lot of the activity is happening in the technology sphere. We asked ‘what could we do to play our part?’ The airline had a eureka moment when it realized its fuselages could become crucibles for progress. Plus, UnGrounded t can’t hurt the company’s image amongst anyone who fancies themselves an ‘innovator’.

Now “Connecting talent to opportunity” might sound vague but it’s a real issue we see at TechCrunch all the time. There are so many techies in Silicon Valley that they’ve started chasing small inconveniences instead of truly changing the world for the better. Forcing great minds into close quarters to focus on a problem could help address this issue, and more in the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the last decade, the rise of mobile technology and the maturation of the Web as distribution and consumption channels has had a devastating effect on the music industry, among others. Yet, on the bright side, more recently these technologies have produced a litany of new ways to discover great music, empowering both fans and musicians in the process. While it seems that each day brings a new music app or product — a net positive for music fans — there’s also a lot of noise.

Many of these apps and music services are exploring the social side of music discovery, allowing users to find, download and listen to their friends’ favorite music fare. Spotify, Rdio, MOG and others have capitalized on the launch of Facebook Music, for example, which introduced millions of Facebook users to the experience of viewing their friend’s listening activity (and sharing their own) in realtime.

While music discovery via your friends and social graph has a lot of appeal conceptually, initially, it just added to the noise problem rather than channeling it. Social music experiences were exciting more as a novelty, seeming to provide more value as a feature or a layer, than as the core around which a successful music service could be built. Luckily, EQuala wants change that by giving users more control over the social music discovery experience — and the noise.

ListnPlay’s free Android and iOS app looks to go that extra distance toward creating a social radio station on the Web that you’ll actually want to use by giving users with their own social “equalizer,” and allowing them to create (and more importantly) curate and customize their social music streams. Launching today in the U.S. with over 23 million tunes in its catalog (and growing), EQuala allows music fans wants to help evolve the Facebook-integrated music experience, letting users create personalized streams from songs their friends are listening to and from those with similar music tastes.

After logging in through Facebook, EQuala developers comprehensive taste profiles based on the music you’ve listened to (and shared) through third-party services like Spotify, YouTube and Songza, among others. To decide whether or not your friends’ playlist is worthy of your standards, users can click on any friend in their search results to see what they’ve been listening to on these services and populate their social radio stream accordingly, listening to and sharing these friend-approved songs as they go.

While the experience itself is different from other familiar services, that’s still fairly standard to the social music discovery experience. The real key (and its ace in the hole) is what EQuala does after that. Using its “Friends EQualizer,” users can then customize and control their music stream, managing whose music plays more frequently, for example. The app allows you to see each selected friend on a sliding scale (or equalizer), adjusting those controls based on how much influence you want a particular friend to have in your stream.

Once customized, users can then click play to enjoy or at any time, delete friends from the list if and when they decide to go through a Creed phase. The app also enables users to communicate with one another through “love,” “shout,” and “re-shout” buttons, which send push notifications to alert you via your phone and allow you to quickly share tracks on social media.

Not unlike Pandora (and Echo Nest), EQuala’s tech gives each users his or her own “Music DNA,” which is essentially a breakdown of the genres and types of music you listen to the most — along with data integrated from your “shouts” and “loves,” etc. The more you listen, EQuala personalizes your music DNA and is able to more accurately match users with those in their network who share similar tastes. The app also shows a percentage match between one user and another to give users a sense of the degree of similarity.

The other selling point is that EQuala allows you to consume your friends’ music selections even if they’re not using the platform. As long as music is being shared (through Facebook), EQuala will let you tailor your social radio stream.

Based on early testing, EQuala stands up pretty well, giving much more social context to your daily music consumption. It also does a pretty good job of removing friction that stands in the way of getting music playing instantly, offers a sizable catalog at launch (which is impressive in and of itself) and by allowing you to add, delete and curate your friend-informed playlist and adjust influence, wins some value points.

If you’re open to the idea of social music discovery but haven’t found the right experience yet, EQuala may be what you’re looking for, giving you control over your social stream and finally putting the power to curate and customize social back into your hands.

For more, find EQuala at home here and on the App Store here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch