Type Subsidiary of Twitter Website wearehunted.com Number of employees 10 | Industry Music
Internet Founded April 2009 Parent organization Twitter Inc. | |
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Key people Stephen Phillips, Founder/CTO Richard Slatter, Founder/COO Michael Doherty, Engineer Adrian McLean, Designer/Editor
Ben Novakovic, Engineer Products Online music aggregation Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States | ||
We Are Hunted was a Brisbane based software company that developed proprietary search technology which continuously scanned the Internet to identify the hottest new music in the world. The company was founded by Stephen Phillips, Richard Slatter and Michael Doherty.
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The service provided a constant stream of new music, delivered in a simple, tile-based user interface.
We Are Hunted was originally owned and operated by Hunted Media, a web services company based in San Francisco, California. In late 2012, Twitter acquired the company, announcing plans to turn the platform into a new product called Twitter Music in early 2013.
Music Charts
We Are Hunted is best known for its emerging music chart. The chart provides a continually updated list of the best new songs in the world today, as measured by popularity on music blogs and social media. We Are Hunted also charts the most popular mainstream and top 40 artists in the world, and publishes music charts in a range of genres from Electronic to Metal.
Technology
The We Are Hunted service is powered by a proprietary software system. The platform enables data aggregation, machine learning and content recommendation services. The system generates the music charts, powers the dynamic playlists, and delivers detailed analytics and reporting. The platform indexes approximately 100,000 music articles and 40 million music related tweets each month. It actively monitors YouTube and the Facebook graph for artist activity. The service uses an open source stack including Linux, Apache, Nginx, Python, Sphinx, Postgres, Django, Redis, Twisted, and more.
Team
The core team responsible for the development of We Are Hunted is led by Stephen Phillips and Richard Slatter and includes, Michael Doherty, Adrian McLean, and Ben Novakovic. Several other people have contributed greatly to the development of the service including Genevieve Robey, Russell Keith-Magee, David Novakovic, Mitch Malone, Nathan Oorloff, Jack Murphy, Ryan Blunden, Tom Knox, Eoin McCarthy, Simon Litchfield and the team at Josephmark.
The company is backed by Graeme Wood, the successful Australian Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Hunted Media provides fee for service web and mobile development services to support the ongoing development of the We Are Hunted service. The Hunted Media team has established a reputation in the digital music industry as an app development powerhouse working with companies like MySpace, MTV, Sony, eMusic, SiriusXM, Condé Nast and The Echonest.
Launch
The site was launched on 17 April 2009. It was featured on popular online technology blogs Wired, TechCrunch, Mashable and TechNation. We Are Hunted received over 100,000 visits in its first week online.
We Are Hunted was initially created and developed in Brisbane, Australia. The website concept arose from a discussion between founders Nick Crocker and Ben Johnston in early 2008. Crocker met Stephen Phillips, the founder of Australian news search engine Wotnews, in November 2008. After this initial meeting, Crocker and Phillips decided to work together to bring the idea to life. Crocker and Johnston finalised the site concept, developed the brand name and logo, and designed the first version of the user interface. The Wotnews technical team then, over several weeks, created the first version of the site, including the core music intelligence platform and innovative website interface. Six weeks after launch, the site was purchased by Wotnews from Native Digital. Wotnews was eventually rebranded Hunted Media. Since mid 2009, We Are Hunted been a web property developed and managed 100% by the Hunted Media team.
New Version
The Hunted Media team have recently relocated to San Francisco and are currently working on the third version of the We Are Hunted service. On Thursday 11 April 2013 Hunted Media announced they were shutting down their website due to Twitter acquiring the company. All user accounts were shut down following this. However this public announcement led to Twitter Inc launching their music service by launching their music website #music Their new music service is launched under the website wonder.fm