Musi2k: Shamal Ranasinghe of Topspin and Giveback, Inc. February 26, 2009

PariSoMa's Musi2k series gives people a chance to come hang out in our beautiful converted loft, enjoy free beer, wine and snacks, and listen to speakers give talks on a range of music/tech related topics. PariSoMa is the SF office of French technology innovation firm faberNovel.

This month we are happy to host Shamal Ranasinghe, Co-Founder of Topspin Media. Shamal will be talking about Topspin Media, which he co-founded, as well as one of his other ventures, Giveback, Inc.

Topspin is a media technology company dedicated to developing leading-edge marketing software and services that help artists and their partners build businesses and brands. They help artists manage their catalogs, connect with fans, and generate demand for music.

Giveback is a platform designed to promote social action by contextually linking these causes to news and sites around the web. Their thesis is that people are most inclined to give when they are inspired by reading about related news or blogs on social topics. The first phase of Giveback's engine matches social actions and causes to submitted news articles. The second phase of development will deploy these social actions across the web through an embeddable widget that can contextually surface the most relevant and appropriate actions on any news site or blog.

Shamal's Bio:

Shamal Ranasinghe, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Topspin, has been at the forefront of digital music product strategy and development for the past decade, and he has been responsible for defining software and service best practices for leading companies in the digital music space.

Ranasinghe embarked on his career in music application product management with RealNetworks in 1999, working with the product team that introduced one of the first digital jukebox software applications, RealJukebox. In 2002, he connected with mentor and future partner Peter Gotcher and started incubating the Topspin concept. Ranasinghe later joined Musicmatch where he headed up the product team and was in charge of their web-services product development, which included the On Demand, Radio, and Music Store web-services.

Following the acquisition of Musicmatch by Yahoo! in 2004, Ranasinghe created and led a product team focused on building data mining applications for the Media division of Yahoo!, and in 2007 he reunited with Gotcher to start Topspin.

Ranasinghe also co-founded Sol System and Giveback, both music projects with a purpose.

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