An App to Save Tonedeaf Singers
Khu.sh
Prerna Gupta, Parag Chordia, and Alex Rae
Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia were shutting down their first website business in 2009 when they found a fresh business idea: an app that would compose music around a cappella singing. Chordia had developed the artificial intelligence software as director of the music intelligence lab at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The pair, who are married, and Alex Rae, 35, a childhood friend of Chordia's, started an Atlanta company called Khu.sh to commercialize the technology through an iPhone app they dubbed LaDiDa. It went on sale for $2.99 in October 2009, but Gupta, 29, says sales were sluggish until they added a pitch-correction feature in February 2010. Instead of just composing music around the voice, the program now improves bad singing. "We try to detect the key you are singing in and then try to detect the pitches you’re trying to sing, and if you’re slightly high or slightly flat, we try to correct," says Gupta, the chief executive. LaDiDa has had more than 250,000 downloads, and monthly sales, now in the $75,000 to $100,000 range, continue to increase. Gupta plans to rent the five-employee company's first office space and hire new developers to work on more music apps in 2011, including an Android version of LaDiDa. The company, which became profitable in September, has raised less than $250,000 in grants and angel investment and is in the process of raising more funding.
—John Tozzi (posted on Jan. 11, 2011)
Prerna Gupta, Parag Chordia, and Alex Rae
Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia were shutting down their first website business in 2009 when they found a fresh business idea: an app that would compose music around a cappella singing. Chordia had developed the artificial intelligence software as director of the music intelligence lab at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The pair, who are married, and Alex Rae, 35, a childhood friend of Chordia's, started an Atlanta company called Khu.sh to commercialize the technology through an iPhone app they dubbed LaDiDa. It went on sale for $2.99 in October 2009, but Gupta, 29, says sales were sluggish until they added a pitch-correction feature in February 2010. Instead of just composing music around the voice, the program now improves bad singing. "We try to detect the key you are singing in and then try to detect the pitches you’re trying to sing, and if you’re slightly high or slightly flat, we try to correct," says Gupta, the chief executive. LaDiDa has had more than 250,000 downloads, and monthly sales, now in the $75,000 to $100,000 range, continue to increase. Gupta plans to rent the five-employee company's first office space and hire new developers to work on more music apps in 2011, including an Android version of LaDiDa. The company, which became profitable in September, has raised less than $250,000 in grants and angel investment and is in the process of raising more funding.
—John Tozzi (posted on Jan. 11, 2011)
