Intertrust Technologies Corporation, a company that develops and and licenses technologies and intellectual property for digital rights management (DRM), has moved to acquire the assets of media search service Seeqpod.
Intertrust, which holds over 150 patents and has offices in Silicon Valley, London and Beijing, announced this morning that it has purchased all software and patents developed by Seeqpod via Chapter 7 Bankruptcy proceeding. Intertrust – former by Sony and Philips in partnership with Stephens Bank – has however not acquired the domain names used by the company.
This is all in line with what we were told earlier this month by Seeqpod founder and former CEO Kasian Franks, who coincidentally mentioned that Seeqpod was never actually acquired by social charity company Bloson while pitching his new startup, Mimvi, to us.
Going back to the non-hoax acquisition of Seeqpod’s assets, here’s what Intertrust says they’ll be used for:
“Intertrust plans to use SeeqPod’s breakthrough technology in distributed search systems in a variety of applications and services for Internet television, targeted advertising, recommendation systems, electronic music distribution and healthcare information services.”
The search algorithms in Seeqpod’s technology portfolio were originally developed for searching medical research databases at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.
The technologies have broad applicability for identifying hidden patterns in data that are distributed across the Internet, including indexing and finding playable search results for audio, video, podcasts and text.
The SeeqPod music search service that initially used these technologies shut down in 2009 in the midst of copyright litigation.
Intertrust also invests in third-party services ventures such as SyncTV and the music distribution service Beyond Oblivion. The company says both portfolio companies stand to benefit from the acquired Seeqpod technologies.
Seeqpod is a music search engine, with over 12 million songs indexed. Seeqpod’s player is embeddable and will automatically find music videos while you listen to songs. Users can also create their own playlists. Unlike Pandora, lala, and Imeem, Seeqpod’s music is not licensed. SeeqPod offers a full REST API for Developers and Partners: http://www.seeqpod.com/api.php Seeqpod’s competitors include Songza, Skreemr, Deezer, and HypeMachine.
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