Brisbane start-up We Are Hunted has struck a partnership deal with online music giant Spotify that will see its technology rolled out on a global basis.

Spotify, which is set to launch in Australia early next year, recommends music to users based on their existing preferences. It has already enjoyed success in the US and Europe.

Spotify has chosen 10 partners to work with on its new App Finder service, including US music bible Rolling Stone.

However, We Are Hunted is the only Australian business to be included on Spotify’s new platform.

The company, which was founded in 2008, provides the top 99 tracks being talked about, blogged, shared and reviewed online each day.

Aimed at helping people discover new music, We Are Hunted will be used by Spotify to offer its customers a way to access new artists, rather than just established bands.

Richard Slatter, co-founder of We Are Hunted, tells StartupSmart that the platform, which launched yesterday, provides a good fit between the two businesses.

“We can help Spotify’s functionality and allow them to focus on what they do well,” he says.

“Spotify has 15 million tracks on it, so the question is, what do you play? Invariably, people choose music they already know.”

“If you like Snow Patrol, for example, it’s easy to say that you’ll also like Coldplay. You probably already listen to them. But out technology tells you who the next Bob Dylan is, if you’re a Dylan fan. You have to keep people excited by new things, which isn’t easy to do.”

“There is no financial deal with Spotify. We just want to get people participating. We’ve already seen a rise in traffic to our site.”

This article first appeared on StartupSmart

Perhaps the most beautiful of the new Spotify apps, We Are Hunted is a music recommendation engine that breaks music into several searchable categories:

1. Emerging Chart: The 99 most popular songs by emerging artists, ranked in terms of their popularity on We Are Hunted.
2. Mainstream Chart: The 99 most played songs by Mainstream Artists.
3. Genre Chart: The 99 most played songs in seven genres.
4. Instant Playlist: Enter an artist and have a custom 99-song-long We Are Hunted playlist made just for you. Above, a playlist based on my love of The Avalanches.

A great HTML5 design by the Australian team at We Are Hunted makes this app a rich and rewarding music discovery experience on Spotify.

We Are Hunted, perhaps the most intriguing app of the bunch, builds top song charts for you based on social media, P2P networks, message boards, iTunes downloads and Last.fm scrobbles. Aesthetically, it looks quite different from Billboard’s app with large pictures of the artists or bands in order of their popularity.

To try the new apps you’ll need to grab the preview version of Spotify. The first thing you’ll notice is that the What’s New section which pops up on launch has had a big redesign. Ignore that and hit the App Finder icon in the sidebar.

You’ll see a familiar, Apple App Store-like list, right now containing just 11 apps. These run from a simple list of reviews with linked songs (the Guardian) through lyrics (TuneWiki) to full-on playlist generators (Moodagent). Just click to install.

This last, Moodagent, lets you build a playlist either by picking your mood, or by dragging a song into the app. It then build a “song curve” which shows how the mood changes throughout the list. You can tweak this curve, making the list build and build, or get angrier or happier. It’s fun to use.

My favorite, though, is the app from We Are Hunted, which just gives you a grid of emerging artists (you can also choose mainstream artists, or a specific genre). Just click to play, and sample new music. There’s already a great iOS-tuned webpage that does the same thing (I have it saved to my iPad’s home screen). The difference here is that if you like an artist, you can listen to all their music right there in Spotify.

Spotify says that more apps are on the way. “Lots of them,” in fact. As someone who pretty much listens to the same old things over and over, I’m pretty excited by this.

We Are Hunted dumps all that sentiment and musical analysis nonsense and focuses instead on what music bloggers, prominent social media figureheads, music messageboards and P2P fanatics are getting excited about.

The Spotify app lets you access up-to-the-moment charts of what the bleeding edge of the music industry is buzzing about, charts of more mainstream artists, and also who’s getting noticed in specific genres. A simple button-click saves those playlists for later listening, even on mobile devices.

Check out what Engadget says about the We Are Hunted App:

We Are Hunted, meanwhile, takes a more dynamic approach to charts, building them much more quickly based on things like iTunes downloads and Last.fm scrobbles. The app is certainly more instantaneous than Billboard, albeit perhaps less thorough. It also offers great visuals, building the interface around large titles of band images.

You can also watch the Keynote on Mashable and watch the new promo video on YouTube.

More recently I’ve taken on an amazing opportunity with We Are Hunted and I’ve already been able to do a significant amount of work on their main site fixing a whole variety of bugs, and I am also working on a super top secret project, which I am super excited about.

Also, I am working from my home in Sydney, via remote to Brisbane…

There are some key challenges that working from home presents which effect most people, but for myself and probably most engineers, there are a bunch of different problems. I am going to go through each one I’ve noticed and some hacks I’ve implemented to get around them and try not to drive myself crazy.

1. It’s never quitting time
   One of the biggest perils of working at home is that you can work all night. In fact, living where you work or working where you live often tends to blur the line between these two activities.

   Calendar reminders have been crucial in this. Not to start work and to stop work, but rather to ensure you are living. I’ve set reminders to remind me to eat, remind me to get out and exercise, remind me to pour some wine and chill out, remind me to engage with hobbies and remind me to call friends.

   This might seem juevenile to some, but when you do your first 20 hour day you will thank me.

2. Breaks and inspiration
   The hardest part about not working in the office is the lack of people to bounce ideas off, share problems with and generally just chat to. I’ve solved this in two ways.

   The first is to know other people who are working from home and have them on your Skype list. Chatting throughout the day and having a 2-minute phone call can often be the only thing you need to break it up and make your day feel a bit more normal.

   The second solution is using an application called Time Out (Workrave on Linux) to make sure you take microbreaks and actually get away from your desk. A few small 15 second breaks and a larger 10 minute break every few hours makes all the difference.

3. Your body will turn to shit
   If you’re going to work from home you need to schedule exercise. You need a gym membership, maybe a running partner and you need to get the hell out of your office. Don’t be that guy who nobody saw for 6 months and now you way 250kgs.

   Also, get a standing desk if you really want to add some energy to your finish.

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