Check out SoundHound & Zoove

Dateline: San Francisco

A trip to Silicon Valley is always inspiring. This time I came back with news of two VC-backed firms to keep your eyes on: SoundHound and Zoove.

If you enjoy music, or are at least trying to keep up with what your kids are (or should be) listening to, SoundHound is for you. The software does some amazing things with sound recognition. The company’s technology searches sound against sound, bypassing traditional sound to text conversion techniques even when searching text databases. The application was demonstrated to me by one of their VCs, Larry Marcus of Walden Venture Capital. It was blindingly fast, and is billed as “the world’s only viable singing and humming search, and instant-response large scale speech recognition” system.

It is available for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. Larry did Pandora (P:NYSE), which currently sports a US$2.4 billion market cap., so you can see where this is going. The fact that our colleague Jason has been using it for some time is proof that SoundHound is top-drawer, and has already crushed its competitors.

Although mobile start-ups generally have a certain shelf-life, Zoove’s opportunity has no obvious endpoint; so long as large consumer conglomerates want to advertise, anyway.

Zoove operates “StarStar Numbers”, which is an exclusive registry of vanity numbers that lets brands easily connect with consumers – anytime, anywhere, on any mobile phone. With agreements across the largest wireless operators in the U.S., more than 250 million people are now sitting in its sandbox.

With StarStar Numbers, consumers simply call the name of brand being promoted, e.g. **Starbucks. This pushes that brand’s mobile app, web page, coupon, videos or more, directly to their mobile phones – without the need to use bar code readers or text message short codes.

Zoove’s focus is to enable brands to better leverage their existing ad spends across any promotional medium. Solving the offline-online problem. It works for TV, print, radio, billboards, online, point-of-sale, on packaging….

Clients include ABC, The Weather Channel, 1-800 FLOWERS, Quicken Loans and Suzuki. VCs include Panorama (Canadian-born Chris Albinson’s firm), Cardinal, Highland and Worldview.

Although both deals have decent sized-syndicates, neither Walden nor Panorama are massive funds. One more reminder that the Series A and B guys can get involved in some fabulous opportunities. Size doesn’t trump expertise, which limited partners need to remember when they set unnecesarily high first-close minimums.

MRM