Google Maps creator to change music consumption with new app Weav

Last month, TMN reported that Facebook engineering director Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps and Google Wave when working in Australia, left his post to co-found a music start-up with his fiancé, Elomida Visviki.

Now, the UK-based start-up aimed at changing the way artists compose and fans experience music, has launched in Beta. Titled Weav and created by Rasmussen and Visviki’s Cute Little Apps business venture, the format acts as a mixer for creating music and as a player which can be embedded in a third party app and allows fans to interact with parts of the track’s tempo which suit different speeds.

The software created by Cute Little Apps’ team of six software engineers and four designers allows musicians to record separate elements of the song at different BPM trigger points, which opens Weav up to be used by third parties such as fitness or exercise apps.

Weav has offered musicians the chance to beta test the software alongside their own DAW software at www.cutelittleapps.com and has released tracks by creative partners Dean Gillard and Matt Ward, composer Konstantinos, producer/songwriter PhilYesPhil and producer Ryon Lawford.

UK-based producer, composer and engineer Nick Launay (INXS, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Midnight Oil) and designer/engineer Alan Cannistraro are also on board as advisors. Cannistraro has worked with Apple on iTunes and Final Cut Pro and with Facebook on News Feed and Creative Labs.

Rasmussen and Visviki met with producers/songwriters Mary Brown (Destiny's Child, Michael Jackson, P. Diddy) and Tony Dofat (Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, Will Smith) on April 15, although it’s unclear how the pair fit into the fold.

Rasmussen was one of the creators behind Graph Search, a Facebook search engine and left Facebook’s account portal for employees, Facebook at Work, to launch Weav. Before he joined Facebook in 2010, Rasmussen’s Sydney-based company Where2 Technologies was acquired by Google in August 2004. Where2 became the basis for Google Maps.