Xconomy: Get Your Own Personal NPR Station with Swell
Summary
To get Swell built, Concept.io raised $1.8 million in seed funding in April 2012, with Charles River, Google Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Andreessen Horowitz all chipping in.Today the company has a dozen employees, including Ramkumar’s co-founders Keshav Menon, who was a principal engineer at Snaptell and A9, and Dominic Hughes, a mathematician and machine-learning expert who teaches at Stanford.Concept.io’s one big advantage over Pandora, Ramkumar notes, is that it doesn’t have to pay artist royalties: all of the programming it transmits is free for the taking at the producers’ websites.If enough people abandoned their local stations in favor of apps like Swell, it would choke off one of public radio’s main sources of funding.But the startup might find ways to head off that eventuality: Ramkumar says he’s open to including credits, fundraising appeals, and “other mechanisms that respect the content provider’s business model” in Swell’s audio stream.