Shazam raises $32 million to expand music, TV services (Reuters)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Shazam, whose technology lets people use their cell phones to learn the names of catchy songs, has raised $32 million in funding to bolster expansion plans and move the company closer to a potential public stock offering.

The new funding, led by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners, will allow Shazam to double its 100-person staff and accelerate product development as it steps up efforts to expand into the television market.

The company would not disclose the valuation it received in the funding round, but Chief Executive Andrew Fisher told Reuters that it was in the "hundreds of millions of dollars."

Valuations of Internet companies have soared in recent months, as investors snap up shares of privately held companies that are developing fast-growing social networking and mobile computing services.

LinkedIn Corp, a professional social networking website, and online music service Pandora Music Inc had splashy initial public offerings in recent weeks. LinkedIn's shares more than doubled on their first day of trading, while shares of Pandora gained as much as 30 percent on the first day, but have both since sunk below the opening price.

Fisher said the recent IPO activity has had no influence on his views about going public and he said that Shazam has made no decision about whether to list its shares on the public market. But he said that Shazam, which has nearly 150 million users, was on track to be considered an "IPO candidate" in 18 months as the company makes progress developing its business and its financial performance.

Shazam, which is based in London, does not disclose its revenue, but the company has been profitable for two years.

While the company is best known for its music-recognition software, which runs on cell phones and analyzes the sound waves of music played on the radio or in restaurants, Shazam is increasingly focusing on the television market.

As a result of deals that Shazam has struck with TV networks including Comcast Corp's NBC Universal and with advertisers, consumers can point their cell phones to their TV sets during certain television shows and commercials to access perks such as special offers and additional videos.

Fisher said he expects revenue from the TV business to account for 50 percent of Shazam's revenue in two years. And the company said it is on track to have 250 million users within two years.

DN Capital, an existing Shazam investor, is also participating in the company's latest funding round.

(With additional reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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Google to stream music with new cloud services (Appolicious)

Google made some big announcements at its I/O conference in San Francisco today -- most notably, that it’s now gunning for iTunes.

The tech giant rolled out its Music Beta service, an iTunes-like bit of software that works from the Internet-based cloud rather than your computer’s hard drive. Much like Amazon’s music-streaming service, Google Music allows users to upload their songs to the cloud and then stream them anywhere, on computers or Android-based smartphones and tablets.

That will keep hard drives free while allowing users to set up playlists on any device and have it stream to the cloud, and they still get the option of specifying certain artists, albums, tracks or playlists that will be downloaded to their devices for offline play.

First Amazon, and now Google -- both huge companies are taking shots at Apple’s mobile and music supremacy, with not a lot going on over at the Apple camp. Dollars to donuts, that’s about to change.

We’ve been hearing that Apple is working on a cloud-based music service of its own, building a big server farm to accommodate the storage space and other considerations, but that it was hung up on licensing considerations. With Google clearing that hurdle, I’d wager that Apple can’t be far behind, especially because the company’s media business has been a huge part of its success during the last decade. The popularity of the iPod and the ease of use of iTunes led to the iPhone and then the iPad -- and Apple isn’t looking to hand off that torch to anybody, least of all Google, anytime soon.

So it seems like a fair bet to assume Apple will be announcing, in some capacity, its own streaming digital locker service for music (and other media, perhaps) when its Worldwide Developers Conference rolls around in early June. Apple’s preview graphic on its website says the event will preview the “future of iOS and Mac OS X,” and that will likely concern a lot of how media works with Apple’s powerhouse devices, seeing as a new iPhone and iOS rollout isn’t expected until September.

Google’s new services are a pretty good indicator of the things Apple will be setting as its baseline with its cloud service. Streaming to iOS devices is a given, and the combination online-offline setups seems like a solid choice as well. But Apple will definitely be coming to the party looking for ways to one-up the competition, because that’s really what it is best at doing. And all this competition suggests some very cool services and features coming to the mobile market.

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