Personalisation Of Music Will Be Focus Area For Dhingana In 2012: Co-founder & COO Swapnil Shinde

Following the launch of a BlackBerry application in November last year, social music streaming service, Dhingana will shift its focus to mobile this year, Swapnil Shinde, Dhingana, co-founder & COO told Techcircle.in.

He said Dhingana's application attracted 100,000 downloads within 40-50 days of launch. Other than this, the music streaming company also developed apps for iPhone, iPad and Android and the app for Nokia platform is out on Beta and will be launched for the public soon.

Dhingana, which had recently launched a new HTML5 version of its website, had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners in 2011.

Shinde told Techcircle.in: "Right now, we have used 50 per cent of the money raised, we will raise more, once it's exhausted. Hence, we might go for another round of fund raising, later part of this year."

Dhingana claims over 3.5 million unique users accessing the site. Around 60 per cent of Dhingana's users on the Web come from India.

Launched in February 2007 by twin brothers Snehal and Swapnil Shinde, it currently has a team of 14-16 people, 6 of them are operational from the US and the rest from India. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and has offices in Pune. By end of 2012, the firm plans to expand to a team of 20 by hiring more marketing and sales people.

"Till now our focus has been on content on technology, but with the new team we intend to build our marketing front," said Shinde.

The focus will be more on social music discovery and personalisation. For that, it will make use of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and encouraging people to be registered users (this comes for free) to get more personalised services.

The company works with about 300 partners from across the globe who are Indian or India focused like Nissan Infinity, Emirates, Gillette, Samsung, movie production houses in India (for flicks like Don2, Players).

The site is integrated with Facebook and requires the same credentials to login and share music with other users. The company is working on an open graph application for deeper integration and auto publishing updates, which it says, will be live in another 20-30 days.

Dhingana's catalogue of songs has global rights for 300,000 digital tracks across 35 languages.

The company which has grown 300 per cent on mobile during the last 8-9 months, has so far not focused much on monetization, but will start garnering revenues in Q3 of 2012.