Passing 1 Million Downloads, Discovr Raises $1.1 Million; Launches On Mac App Store

Today, Discovr, the awesome tool that allows users to discover new apps for iOS (by way of interactive graphs) is announcing that it has passed the one million downloads milestone and has closed a $1.1M seed round led by Australia’s leading VC firm Yuuwa Capital. Of course, there’s no better way to celebrate these achievements than launch a new version of your app for Apple desktops, right? Today, the startup is also announcing the release of its Discovr Music app, which is available for $5 now on those Mac App Stores near you. Discovr Music, put simply, makes it easy to discover new music from the comfort of your laptops and desktops.

To give a sense of context, in January of this year, Discovr launched a nifty iPad app that essentially provided users with an interactive map of the music world, displaying (among other things) connections between bands and artists in a graphical web. With a few quick taps, users could see musicians’ videos on YouTube, band info and other extras, all while experiencing a fairly unique visual interface that provides an easy way to weave through connections between bands to discover new music and cool apps.

The app attracted 150K downloads in three days, and by June, Discovr had taken its music discovery and visualization model for iOS to the apps world at large. Discovr Apps enabled users to search for their favorite apps, choose from Discovr’s curated, featured apps, at which point the tool will show your choice in an interconnected network of related apps that are linked together based on their similarities.

How does Discovr determine these similarities? Thank you for asking. Like many other recommendation services, Discovr serves the user with its web of similarities based on a synthesis of machine algorithms and human curation. Those networks of similar apps can be expanded as the user surfs, and ostensibly, if the page were large enough, as I wrote in June, one could probably “create a massive, mind-melting map of all the apps on the App Store”.

Not that you will, but you could, were you so inclined.

And speaking of larger screens, as mentioned above, Discovr is now back into the music game with its new launch of Discovr Music for the Mac App Store. While Discovr’s iPad functionality is terrific, the visual layout is almost better suited to the larger screens of your desktop and laptops. The user experience is the same as Discovr’s first app, in that it uses data visualization and music recommendations to provide a visual map of the world of music. Users can navigate through the musical ecosystem and discover new music based on what their individual tastes.

What’s more, the app is built from the ground up to make the most of OSX Lion, but also supports backwards compatibility to Snow Leopard. It’s dual-cat compatible.

To accompany the release of Discovr Music on the Mac App Store, Filter Squad (the company behind the Discovr apps) is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, led by Australian VC firm Yuuwa Capital. The raise follows Filter Squad’s recent victory at the Australian startup competition “Tech23”, where it was awarded $25,000 as the Aussie startup with “the most potential”.

I suppose it’s easy to say that Filter Squad has potential when, in just 9 months, it has attracted over 1 million downloads across iOS devices. And now we’ll see what kind of adoption Discovr is able to find on Apple desktops.

One more thing: Android fans, never fear, Filter Squad is currently building Android versions of its Discovr apps, which are on the way and will hopefully arrive by the end of the year.

For more on Discovr Music for the Mac, check out the video below: