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Social Networking - Sunday, April 8, 2007

Mog Angel Funded For Music Social Network

Berkeley, CA-based Mog, which came out of beta last week, raised a $1.4M in a first round of funding from angel investors. The company says the event happened about a year back but they did not announce it. Mog's front-man is David Hyman, formerly CEO of Gracenote and SVP-Marketing at MTV Interactive.

The scanning software used by Mog was in fact developed by Gracenote of Emeryville, which licenses it to MOG in exchange for a stake in the startup.

The company operates a music discovery service like LastFM, Musicmatch.com, Slacker.com, Soundflavor.com and Goombah.com and iLike. It also offers an embeddable music player. BTW, we happened to catch a CNN news piece this weekend on another competitor here, VC-backed Pandora, which also operates out of the East Bay. Pandora says it is set to launch a mobile version of its music recommendation service for iPods and cars. A new feature, MOG TV, was launched just last week. It streams YouTube music videos to your computer based on your listening tastes gleaned through the scanning.

With so much competition for attention among early adopters here, site users seem to focus on the aesthetics of the site. One commenter noted that Mog looks like "someone took a big doo-doo on some old brown corduroy" while other appreciate Mog's bold look and feel.

Mog's model is to stay free and ad supported. Some competitors like LastFM have been able to get the traffic to make the investment pay-off so Mog would seem to have a good shot at the title.

View - site
Read - Can Social tools save plain ole’ Radio? (Gigaom)
Read - Mog Cleans up some of the chaos (TechCrunch)