Toby Murdock (shown on left) and Mike Lewis (shown on right) are the founders of Qloud. Prior to Qloud they both served as Vice Presidents at Ruckus, a digital music service. Prior to that, they both worked in various digital media capacities at America Online. Visit the company blog here.

What is Qloud, how does it work, how did it get started, and what is the reasoning behind the name?

Toby: Qloud is a search service focused on music discovery. We help users find music they want to listen to through a user-controlled, immediate search experience that provides really accurate results. Qloud also helps users better organize and manage their own music libraries through our plug-ins that allow users to tag their tracks inside their players.

As users use our plug-in, their behavior populates their profile on our service. All of that data - plays, ratings, tags, playlists - then powers the browser-based search service that users use to find new music.

Mike and I have worked together for years in digital media at AOL and at Ruckus. Since working with Savage Beast (now Pandora) at AOL, we've always been interested in music discovery. When we decided to go out own our own, we started in my basement researching, analyzing and prototyping. And with came up with Qloud, a music search service.

And the name Qloud? In engineering diagrams clouds depict networks, and our service is a network of users, a collective cloud of their intelligence. We also liked the celestial connotations of clouds. Clouds too are great icons graphically. And the Q instead of a C? A little intrigue to keep you guessing (and, most importantly, the domain name was available).

How large is your team? What are your responsibilities on a day to day basis?

Mike: We recently expanded our team and there are now twelve of us: Toby and I and about ten developers and designers in Europe. Toby and I are both programmers, but we haven't written much code since the beginning of the project. We spend our time writing specs, de-bugging, and communicating with users, investors and press. Our team abroad is: Vasile working on our Windows iTunes plug-in; Adrian and Boti working on our Mac iTunes plug-in (coming soon); Sergiu, Alin, Dragos, Lucian and George working on the service; Tibi doing design; Lucian keeping an eye on the servers; and Ovi managing the whole project. We also have a Mozilla-guru, Brian, helping us with our Songbird plug-in out of Slovenia.

We've been very fortunate in the team we've been able to put together and we live on Skype and Trac. Everything happens through those tools.

If Apple were to ever integrate a tagging feature into iTunes, would that spell doom for Qloud? What is your business model and how are you planning to expand the service?

Mike: Users love the ability to tag tracks inside their library. We can't believe that it hasn't been done it already! We expect Apple to deploy this inside iTunes. And we welcome it coming - it will create more tagging data.

Toby: Qloud has two value propositions: 1) better organization and management of your personal library and 2) discovery of new music through the collective intelligence of the community. We need to always provide value on proposition #1 to earn the data to power proposition #2. Currently we add value on #1 through enabling tagging inside players. But we will not stop there. Our plug-in value proposition is not confined to the PC but also pushes and pulls information to and from our service and community. Soon we'll enable more pulling. By continuing to innovate on proposition #1 we hope to keep our player plug-ins valuable to users.

We have very low incremental costs per user so we can be profitable upon reaching scale with advertising alone, particularly the sort of targeted advertising that our service lends itself to. We also are considering premium services or expansion into other media verticals.

Mike: Going forward, we have lots of plans for expanding the service - different ways to view data, different ways to search, more rewards for power users, and an expanded universe of music to find. As we have decided to come out early with a public beta, however, we're most focused now on strengthening our core search and plug-in experiences.

Toby: In the end, we hope to do for music what Google has done for web search: make the search for new music super easy, fast and effective. And in doing so, we want to realize the potential of all of the music that's available now because of the Internet by connecting users with the music they'll most enjoy listening to.