The appeal of the iPhone, and by association the new iPod touch, is growing as developers come up with more native application icons to add to its screen.

There is everything from the ability to play the original Pong, to Doom, Blackjack, an eBook reader, Etch-a-Sketch and an aquarium.

But, despite Steve Jobs’ enthusiasm for the Safari browser, viewing full-featured web pages is still an unsatisfying experience given the size of the screen.

However, the number of sites that are offering iPhone versions with an app-like feel and format is growing – Facebook’s was shown off by Jobs at the recent iPod touch launch.

The latest site to get the iPhone treatment comes from Seeqpod, a music search engine that will allow you to listen to your favourite music for free rather than have to buy it from the new wireless iTunes store.

Seeqpod is impressive in its full-sized web iteration. I was given a demonstration by co-founders of the East Bay company, Kasian Franks and Shekhar Lodha.

Type in any favourite artist or track in the simple search box and Seeqpod compiles a list of complete songs it has found on the web, showing them on the left side of the screen. Clicking on them transfers them to the right side to form a playlist, where an audio player begins caching and playing the top track. Clicking on a TV-screen icon, opens up a player for the music video found for the song.

Seeqpod calls itself “playable search” but its algorithms originate in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where they matched genes with other genes in life sciences.

Kasian Franks worked there and got permission to take it out of the lab to try to commercialise the idea in 2005. He sees a number of possible verticals – from health and finance to zoology – but hit on music and video first.

The technology goes beyond keyword search to also tap into user recommendations. It has crawled 10m songs on the Web. The founders say they do not host any of them, so should escape scrutiny from the record companies.

BroadClip used a similar argument at the TechCrunch40 conference this week and earned a putdown from former Napster executive Don Dodge.

Seeqpod lacks Apple’s cover art, but the company thinks it could find and add that through its search techniques eventually.

“We’re like an iPod with 10m songs, so we’re bigger than Apple,” jokes Mr Franks.

It plans to make money through its own contextual advertising and will license the product – WFMU, a popular radio station is already using it to index its content and create another iPhone destination.

September 20th, 2007 in Digital media, Internet | Permalink