May 18, 2010 - Atlanta, GA USA · ZOOZ Mobile has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant of $150,000 will support the development of an innovative music intelligence engine for a new line of ZOOZ music creativity apps.
“The NSF SBIR grant validates the quality of our research and the high prospect of commercialization of our efforts,” said ZOOZ Mobile Founder and CTO Dr. Gil Weinberg who is also the Founder and Director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT). “We hope that the first phase of support will lead to great results and to the continuation of the NSF SBIR support, which can grow to mmore than $1 million in funding.”
The SBIR grant will be matched by additional funds from Georgia Research Alliance and Georgia Tech’s Venture Lab, who have supported ZOOZ Mobile in the past. ZOOZ Mobile is one of two spin-off companies that came from GTCMT. Various versions of ZOOZbeat apps have been downloaded more than 1.4 million times from the Apple iTunes App Store.
ZOOZ Mobile has partnered with brands such as Sprite and labels such as Universal Motown to deliver innovative music creativity and remixing apps, including ZOOZbeat Sprite and ZOOZbeat Jackson 5 Remix apps. Our thanks to the NSF and GTCMT where more than 20 faculty members are involved in research and commercialization of innovative music technology.
The in-app ZOOZbeat Store now offers 17 song beats and five collections of song beats from six ZOOZbeat Artists. Plus, ZOOZ Mobile (ZOOZbeat) is in discussions with many major and indie labels to add additional Artists to the ZOOZbeat Store. Stay tuned!
ZOOZbeat Artists and song beats available now include:
Our new genre-specific apps, ZOOZbeat Latin and ZOOZbeat Rock, have been released and are now available in the App Store. Each features 3 new background beats and several new instruments to play with.
Atlanta, GA – ZOOZ Mobile, Inc., developers of the first mobile music studio, ZOOZbeat, today announced the availability of myZOOZbeat.com and ZOOZbeat Latin as part of a major upgrade to its popular ZOOZbeat product family. myZOOZbeat.com enables users to save the music they create with ZOOZbeat on the iPhone and iPod Touch as MP3s, and share them using Facebook® and Twitter®. Users can also listen to songs uploaded by their friends, and to special featured and recent songs from users around the world. The company also announced the availability of ZOOZbeat Latin, which allows the creation of songs with Samba and Tejano rhythms, just in time for Cinqo de Mayo.
ZOOZbeat is a gesture-based mobile music studio, simple enough for non-musicians and children to immediately become musically expressive, yet rich enough for experienced musicians to push the envelope of mobile music creation. The new offerings are the next generation of the company’s integrated web and mobile music studio for creating, manipulating and sharing music. ZOOZbeat Latin lists on the iTunes™ AppStore for $0.99; version 2.0 of ZOOZbeat Classic, containing Pop, Hip-hop and Techno beats, lists for $2.99.
“Our early users requested new Latin beats, plus the ability to save their music as MP3s,” said Dr. Gil Weinberg, ZOOZ Mobile’s Founder and Chief Technology Officer. “We spent the last several months creating the new beats, improving responsiveness, and building myZOOZbeat.com. Now users can save their music as MP3’s and share it with their friends on Facebook and Twitter.”
”The company’s first products were made available on the iTunes AppStore in November, 2008,” said Scott Geller, the company’s new CEO. “Since then there have been over 1,000,000 downloads of ZOOZbeat products. Response to the highly acclaimed music applications and content has been wildly enthusiastic. So we’re excited to introduce our next iteration, which is better than ever. We’re sure this version will encourage adults and children, musicians and non-musicians alike to express themselves through music, right from their mobile devices.”
We were in Vegas last week for a very productive visit to CES where we presented at the ShowStoppers event. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and chatted!
Since then, we’ve had some nice international press pick-up, from America, through Europe, Asia, to the Middle East…. and some video of Mark and Gil demoing too.
“The NSF SBIR grant validates the quality of our research and the high prospect of commercialization of our efforts,” said ZOOZ Mobile Founder and CTO Dr. Gil Weinberg who is also the Founder and Director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT). “We hope that the first phase of support will lead to great results and to the continuation of the NSF SBIR support, which can grow to mmore than $1 million in funding.”
