Senzari Launches Mobile Personalized Radio App, Wahwah, at SXSW in Partnership with .CO

Wahwah Integrates Personalized Radio with Real-Time Co-Listening, to Make Activities More Fun with Music and Friends

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Senzari^® today announced the launch of Wahwah, a new mobile music experience allowing users to enjoy music with friends while participating in their favorite activities, regardless of location. Now available in the Apple App Store in Brazil, Spain and the United States, Wahwah combines the personalized music recommendations of Senzari’s original music service with the added co-listening experience of the Berlin-based Wahwah.fm, acquired late last year by Senzari.

“We try to leverage every sensor of the phone, from the GPS to the accelerometer, to ensure that we can understand the context of the user. This allows us to deliver the perfect song, and do it as close to real-time and as efficiently as possible.”

“After we acquired Wahwah.fm, we went to work to combine the vision of both companies and decided to build a completely new mobile-first experience from the ground up,” said Bill Hajjar, CEO of Senzari. “We want to be more than just a music player for smartphones, which is the focus for most current services. Wahwah is a real-time, intelligent, social music experience that contextually adapts to whatever the user is currently doing, like driving, cycling, running, cooking or just relaxing, and broadcasts the experience, allowing others to join in and listen in real-time.”

Wahwah provides users with three ways to create a music experience:

• by starting a personalized station based on a catalog of 15 million songs by just typing the name of their favorite artist;
• by selecting a custom station from dozens of stations that have been specifically programmed for the activity they are doing; for example: “The Climb Radio” for cycling uphill;
• or by allowing users to “tune in” to someone else’s station and co-listen in real-time together.

Given that each station has an activity and location associated with it, Wahwah makes it easy to find other listeners based on what they are doing and where they are located. So, if a user is going for a run in Central Park, they can either start their own station or join someone that may be running in Miami Beach, to elevate the music experience to a whole new level.

As one of the featured startups from the domain hosting service .CO, Wahwah is sponsoring the music for one of this year’s biggest parties at Austin’s SXSW: Celebration of American Startups at the ACL Live on Saturday, March 9th. Wahwah app allows users who can’t be there to tune in to the SXSW Startup Celebration Radio to listen to the music that will be played at the party.

In addition, Wahwah is co-hosting the Wahwah Beer Run with the Austin Beer Run Club on Monday, March 11^th at 6:30pm. For the first time, users will experience the Wahwah experience when dozens of people will go running while listening to the same music on their headphones using the Wahwah mobile app. Go to wahwah.co/events to register for the Beer Run and to check out other Wahwah activities around the world.

“Technologically speaking, we have concentrated on optimizing the experience for a real-time, personalized and mobile co-listening experience; which is very different than just building a music player,” explained Demian Bellumio, COO of Senzari. “We try to leverage every sensor of the phone, from the GPS to the accelerometer, to ensure that we can understand the context of the user. This allows us to deliver the perfect song, and do it as close to real-time and as efficiently as possible."

Download the Wahwah app for listening access to SXSW: Celebration of American Startups at the ACL Live on Saturday, March 9th: www.wahwah.co

Register for the WahWah Beer Run: http://plancast.com/p/gwvc/wahwah-beer-run

Find Wahwah events near you and sign up your event: wahwah.co/events

About Senzari

Senzari^®is a technology company applying the latest techniques in machine learning and big data technologies to generate a real-time semantic graph that can provide contextual recommendations across different media types. Senzari has two products that leverage these technologies, AMP3 and Wahwah. AMP3 is graph-based recommendation engine, which powers Wahwah’s personalized music recommendations. Wahwah is a music app for iOS that makes activities more fun with music and friends. With Wahwah, users can find other users doing similar things, such as “running”, so they can run together while listening to exactly the same music, even if they are miles apart.

Senzari^® and the Senzari^® logo are registered trademarks owned exclusively by Senzari, Inc.