Senzari becomes Wahwah, loses web service to go mobile-first
Senzari is a Pandora-like Internet radio service, that allows you to listen to streaming music centered around an artist or genre of your choice. For a little while now, the company has hosted the service on its website, but it recently picked up another service called wahwah.fm, and now is going to streamline its offerings into one, mobile-first app. The new app is going to be called Wahwah, and it will combine Internet radio with the idea of "broadcast stations," where you can send out music on your local iPhone to anyone else using the app. The Wahwah app is set to arrive sometime around SXSW, which will take place starting March 8 in Austin.
There are of course quite a few of these streaming music services around -- I like Slacker a lot, and lately I've started listening to Rdio as well. But what's interesting here is that while Senzari is launching the Wahwah app, it's actually taking its web-based service offline completely and solely depending on the iPhone (later, Android and other platforms) for its users. That makes sense from a programming perspective (because dealing with one platform at a time is easier than trying to run a few), but it also speaks to the iPhone's popularity, that Senzari can get a solid audience by only going through an iPhone app.
Eventually the web service will relaunch, which Senzari says will happen in two or three months. Most Internet radio services commonly run both a web-based service and a separate mobile app (in addition to custom apps for any other platforms), so it'll be interesting to see how Wahwah does with a mobile-only (and essentially iPhone-only) launch.
