Earlier this year, mobile developer TuneWiki raised over $7 million to expand beyond the namesake lyric-centric music player that put it on the map. Today sees the company’s first major expansion with the launch of a new iPhone game called Lyric Legend, which combines lyrics with the rhythmic gameplay that made Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge a massive hit.

Playing Lyric Legend is pretty straightforward: fire up a song and you’ll see a series of bubbles appear on the screen, each with a different word on it. The song you’ve selected will start playing in the background, and it’s your job to tap each word as it’s sung. There are some bonus tricks involved (you hold your finger on a word when it’s sung for a long time) but even these techniques are easy to pick up.

Of course, if you want to get good at the game you’ll have to actually learn the lyrics of each song, though you can get by in the easiest mode without knowing all of them.

I played the game during its beta and found it to be fun and easy to pick up, and it’s different enough that it doesn’t feel like a complete Tap Tap Revenge clone. That said, the game still needs some polish — the graphics are a bit bland and they don’t change to reflect the song you’re singing. And only time will tell if this will be able to attract the massive following that made TTR one of the iPhone’s most popular applications ever (it’ll be tough).

The free game only comes with three songs (including tracks from the All-American Rejects, Metric, and Vampire Weekend). You can round out your library using an integrated music store that sells songs in 2-pack bundles for 99 cents, with available bands like Kanye West and Coldplay.

Lyrics are comfortable territory for TuneWiki. The company’s original app, which is available for both iPhone and Android, allows users to watch lyrics scroll onto the screen as their song plays, karaoke-style. They app also includes some social features, like being able to see the most popular songs in different geographic regions.

TuneWiki says it will use the investment for to build new products and expand its current mobile and web platforms.: TuneWiki is an app that brings music streaming, a lyrics database and music videos from YouTube to one social, customizable media player both on the web and to mobile devices. In the coming year, TuneWiki plans to launch a mobile game and significant feature upgrades to the TuneWiki social media player.

Of course, the NTT DOCOMO investment will also mean further expansion into the Japanese mobile markets.Rani Cohen, TuneWiki’s CEO, says that because of of the popularity of Karaoke applications in Japan, TuneWiki’s lyrics to music could gain traction in the country. TuneWiki boasts apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia handsets.

TuneWiki is also appointing a new COO, Lawrence Goldberg, who was the former COO of Activision. Another Activision alum Michael Steiner, who worked on GuitarHero at the gaming company, is joining TuneWiki as director of marketing.

Update: The Marker (in Hebrew) says the investment totals $7 million.

TuneWiki says it will use the investment to expand its product offerings for mobile platforms and the Web.

The company will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new ways that connect music fans with new products, including an upcoming mobile game.

TuneWiki boasts apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia handsets.

This is the second funding announcement for Motorola’s venture arm in a week – on Feb 2 the investor announced that it had injected extra capital into mobile barcode company Scanbuy.

Of note is the addition of a ‘Follow’ feature which is only in the Nokia app.

In addition FlyScreen, the customisable lockscreen which features any kind of content widgets, has completed TuneWiki integration into its for Android app (not the Nokia app just yet).

This is FlyScreen’s first music controller widget, and Android’s first lock-screen music controller. It’s also their first partner integration which allows other apps to hook into FlyScreen

Venture capital-backed TuneWiki is also on the iPhone.

Using TuneWiki to stream radio station broadcasts lets you purchase songs you’re listening to directly from iTunes with just one click. It also streams lyrics from its database of over 2.7 million licensed lyrics files for both audio and video, includes the option to translate them into 40+ languages and plugs into third-party social networks.

Of note is the addition of a ‘Follow’ feature which is only in the Nokia app.

In addition FlyScreen, the customisable lockscreen which features any kind of content widgets, has completed TuneWiki integration into its for Android app.

Up until now, the most downloaded application for jailbroken iPhones on Cydia was also a music-related one: TuneWiki, an app that brings music streaming, a lyrics database and music videos from YouTube to one social, customizable media player (iTunes link). In total, the application was downloaded an estimated 2 million times through the Cydia Store.

As of yesterday, venture capital-backed TuneWiki went ‘legit’ by releasing an official application for the iPhone platform, and the app is already making its way to the list of most popular apps on the App Store. It brings lots of goodness, especially for a free app.

When you use TuneWiki to stream radio station broadcasts, the software lets you purchase songs you’re listening to directly from iTunes with just one click. It automatically streams lyrics from its database of over 2.7 million licensed lyrics files for both audio and video, and includes the option to translate them into 40+ languages. TuneWiki also plugs into third-party social networks so you can share music you’re listening to on Facebook and Twitter, and features interactive music maps that show what users are listening to across the globe. Finally, you can ‘skin’ the player to personalize your experience.

TuneWiki is not only available on the iPhone / iPod Touch, as it also boasts applications for the Android platform (since May 2008) and BlackBerry.

A must-have for music lovers.

IsraeliAmerican startup TuneWiki has come a long way.

Soon after the iPhone’s launch, the company released an application that allowed users to view highly-accurate lyrics synced karaoke style to any song stored in their music library. But because there was no App Store at the time, TuneWiki was limited to users with jailbroken (hacked) iPhones. Despite this, the application has racked up over 1.2 million downloads since its launch – a number competitive with those seen by the most popular Apple sanctioned apps. The company raised a funding round from Benchmark Capital’s Israel fund.

And now, after nearly a year of developing a Karaokee-like music program for hacked iPhones, the company has developed an application that stands a good chance at becoming the standard media player on Google’s forthcoming Android platform.

At first glance, the Android version of TuneWiki has more than a little in common with the iPhone’s default media player (except with a black color scheme). Songs are sorted into spartan but easy to navigate lists, and playing a song displays its album art alongside standard playback controls. The player integrates TuneWiki’s extensive database of lyrics, which are played karaoke-style alongside your songs (lyrics are pulled from a user-modified database). There’s also support for YouTube videos – if you search for a song you don’t have, the player will automatically take you to the YouTube version, which also support synced lyrics.

Perhaps most exciting is TuneWiki’s integration with location services. Because the player can optionally tell TuneWiki’s servers what song you’re listening to, it can offer an interactive map that displays musical tastes across the world. This could be a huge hit on college campuses, where breakthrough artists tend to be discovered first. It’s also fun to find people in Dubai who listen to Kelly Clarkson (see the video below).

One of the most key features to the iPhone’s success is its ability to sync seamlessly with a user’s media library through iTunes. TuneWiki recognizes this, and is doing everything it can to make syncing as painless as possible. The company will be offering plugins for iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Songbird, and will also feature support for wireless syncing across Bluetooth or Wi-fi.

Some of these features are already offered on the jailbroken iPhone app, but the Android version is clearly TuneWiki’s focus, and for good reason. The company is one of fifty finalists in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, and has received extensive support from Google and a number of other companies during development.

Android is an open platform, which means users (or at least device manufacturers) will be able to install whatever media player they want onto the phones. Despite this freedom, there will probably be one or two media players that emerge as the platform standards. TuneWiki has positioned itself to become one of these, with features that go above and beyond those found on the iPhone, and a focus on keeping things as simple as possible.

Here’s a demo video we took on the app running on the Android emulator:

I won’t mumble my opinion of Android anymore — *ahem* dead on the vine *ahem* — but that won’t stop folks from creating software for it. TuneWiki is an iPhone-esque media player for Android (it’s already out on iPhone homebrew). It adds Karaoke-style lyric readouts to your songs, which is nice.

Right now it works in the emulator but the video above gives you a look at what it may look like in the future.

The race is on for software supremacy on Google’s Android platform, as developers compete to develop the applications that will eventually come preloaded on branded phones. Today TuneWiki, one of the most popular third-party developers for the iPhone, has announced a media player for Android that will feature an iPhone-esque interface, support for synching with iTunes, and the karaoke-like lyric functionality that put them on the map.

Owners of jailbroken iPhones may be familiar with TuneWiki already – As we mentioned last week, the iPhone version has seen “hundreds of thousands” of downloads since December 2007. The iPhone version of the software features a player that displays karaoke-style lyrics in time with songs in the device’s library. TuneWiki has partnered with Universal to provide lyrics legally, and has ongoing talks with other music labels.

The Android version of the software has the same karaoke synching, with added support for music videos that are synched with lyrics. While this is significant in itself, the real news here is the media player that will accompany the software. From the brief demonstration seen in the video below, the player seems to be every bit as usable as the one seen on the iPhone (it looks nearly exactly the same, which isn’t a bad thing).

Android may be an “Open” platform that will allow handset manufacturers (and possibly users) to install whatever applications they want, but we’re going to be seeing a few dominant leaders emerge in each space. There won’t be any shortage of iPhone-imitating apps, but TuneWiki has given itself a leg up by establishing a number of features that will be difficult to replicate. Whether or not these will be enough to lift TuneWiki above the rest of the pack remains to be seen.

You can try an emulated version of the software (minus some of the navigation seen in the video) here.

The service, which was launched in December 2007, became a hit with “hundreds of thousands” of downloads to jailbroken iPhones alone (says our source), despite the very sketchy nature of the main website and the fact that only hacked iPhones can use the app.

Why is TuneWiki so popular? The video at the end of the post shows how it synchronizes lyrics (karaoke style) to music playing on the iPhone.

A source tells us that the startup has raised an initial round of financing from Benchmark Capital’s Israel fund. General Partner Michael Eisenberg joined the board of directors. We’re still trying to track down the size of the round, and if there were any other investors.

Song Lyrics are still relatively hard to find legally on the Internet. Last year Yahoo began publishing lyrics for hundreds of thousands of songs in image format (to reduce copying and scraping, through a partnership with Gracenote.

TuneWiki as a legal song lyric wiki alone is an interesting site (they recently announced that Universal Music is permitting usage). The syncing software can turn it into a real business. Look for it to take off when official third party applications on the iPhone are released this summer. For now, though, the hacked application is one of the feature applications on the iPhone installer.

TuneWiki was founded by serial entrepreneurs and former Israeli fighter pilots Amnon Sarig and Rani Cohen.