MakeMusic singing new tune after purchase of Paris’ Weezic

BOULDER — Boulder’s MakeMusic Inc., interactive music –training technologists, picked off what could have become a major competitor for an undisclosed amount last week, along with the Web-based technology needed to launch its own market-leading product into the cloud.

“We have been the dominating player, but there are some new competitors,” said MakeMusic CEO Gear Fisher. “Weezic would have definitely been a competitor.”

Paris-based Weezic, like MakeMusic, produces an interactive method for music teachers to evaluate their students’ home practice. The technology also allows the students to record their music while listening to interactive scores, which can actually skip measures along with the student’s mistakes.

MakeMusic was based on traditional Windows and Mac desktop applications, however, meaning an application had to be downloaded and launched from the hard drive. What Weezic had was a new HTML 5-based application where the application was in the cloud, and the interaction with the student and teacher is browser-based.

“Weezic was acquired due to its core strengths of Web-based music learning and assessment technologies,” Fisher said. “Additionally, the Weezic team is comprised of exceptionally talented researchers and developers.

“We are committed to growing SmartMusic and providing world-class practice tools to musicians, teachers and composers. With this acquisition, SmartMusic will become available on the Web, and in particular, it will become accessible on Chromebook.”

Creating an app that works on Chromebooks, which have extremely small hard drives, is important for educational tools, Fisher said. Chromebooks are based on cloud applications and are also rapidly becoming the No. 1 computer in school settings because of their low cost and useful free applications.

Both teams will now work on releasing a Web-based SmartMusic, compatible with Chromebooks, in time for this fall’s school session. Fisher said the Weezic team would largely be focused on that effort, as their product is gradually diminished over the next several months.

Fisher described most of his team as “musicians with a passion for technology,” but the entire Peaksware team can also be described as cloud-based training technologists. Under the MakeMusic brand, there are several other music technology products, most notably Finale, leading digital notation software for the last 25 years.

But there’s a lot more under the Peaksware umbrella that Fisher oversees, including TrainingPeaks, Best Bike Split and TrainHeroic — all of them cloud-based training apps. Bringing them all under one roof, Fisher said, was the idea of investor Andy Stephens of LaunchEquity Partners of Boulder, which owns Peaksware.

LaunchEquity owned about a third of MakeMusic when it bought out the remaining shareholders in 2013 for about $17 million.  MakeMusic was one of Minnesota’s 100 largest firms, employing about 100 people there and reaching revenues as high as $17 million annually.

However, in its last years as a public firm, MakeMusic was losing about $1 million a year.

“Andy saw how fast we were growing, so he thought we’d all be better off under one roof,” Fischer explained.

About 30 people came to Boulder from the Minnesota firm, but Fischer said Peaksware is constantly hiring software technologists.

Though MakeMusic is already marketed around the globe, Fischer said that Paris would become an important hub of operations. Weezic’s director of technology, Greg Dell’Era, is moving to Boulder to help coordinate technological resources.

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