[brianwhitman]

Few things -- yes, we have been working on our stuff for a while. I've been doing it since 1999 at various grad schools and research labs, for example. Notice however we do not release things before they are good. I've spent 12 years working on this stuff and the state of the art simply wasn't ready until recently. First impressions are very important for music, if you lose the trust of your users it's hard to get it back.

Re: "warmup": My point was technologies like ours don't need a warm up period where users give us catalog and preference data. You can have great results without relying on that. Even better, we think.

Also, re: "please buy us" -- come by the office sometime and have some drinks and you'll see why we all found that comment pretty funny. Hopefully someone still reading this thread knows us well enough to +1 this. Come to a music hack day if you're not near boston.

(post-edit: davemebs -- our stuff is pretty easy to try for yourself if you're a developer. see developer.echonest.com . if not, wait a little bit for some consumer facing things. we're primarily developer-focused at the moment)