HearWhere: Location-Aware Live Music Search Engine You Can Share Virtually Anywhere
When I came across HearWhere on Techcrunch today, I was quite surprised I’d never heard of it until now as it launched May 21, 2008. Hearwhere, founded by Pete Field and based in Whistler, British Columbia, is a search engine that enables you to find live music shows from all around the world. The company currently claims to have a database of over 1 million different shows from upward of 1 million artists.
To simplify the search engine’s use, HearWhere has implemented the Google Maps API and Location feature in order to auto-detect your location. Once it’s found you have the option of searching for live shows in your area by any variation of genre, date or date range, and distance from your search location.
However, the location algorithm detect me as living in Springfield, Manitoba which lies just east of Winnipeg but I actually live in the southwest quadrant of Winnipeg. But as long as I’m not searching for live shows within 5 kilometers of my home, it shouldn’t make too much of a difference in the search results.
Once your search results have been returned, you’ll be able to see who’s playing the show’s, on what date and where, as well as link to the artist’s MySpace page and listen to a few of their songs with the site integrated MySpace music player. Thanks to an integration with Clearspring, you’ll be able to share your find on virtually any social networking platform as well.
Plus if you see an artist missing from the search engine and you’d like to see them added, you can add the bands MySpace page URL and their shows will be tracked from then on. The next logical step is a mobile application, but a previously released HearWhere iPhone app has mysteriously been pulled.
via techcrunch
