We’re a few days late on this one, but no, FlyFi has nothing to do with wireless internet access on commercial airlines. It’s the new name for Emergent Music, LLC’s music discovery service (formerly known as Goombah), which uses collaborative filtering technology to analyze your iTunes library (we’re not kidding) and recommend new tunes.
Common Media was involved in the FlyFi launch through our friends at Corey McPherson Nash, who masterminded the new design. CMN provided us with layered Photoshop files to represent pages in the new design; we used those to render XHTML/CSS files for the Emergent Music, LLC team, who replaced dummy content in our files with links back to data from their application. This is how I worked with the sharp designers at Sinauer Associates, my former employers, and we’re doing similar work for other companies even now. (More on those jobs when they’re public.)
FlyFi takes the Pandora model (starting from a single song and building a stream of related songs) and goes a step beyond by using entire libraries to build their recommendation streams, which they call “Grooves”.
Like us, Emergent Music, LLC has chosen not to hang out in the insular tech-centric communities around Boston or Silicon Valley: they’re based in Brunswick, Maine. (They’re not even the first Web 2.0 company to come out of Maine: LibraryThing is based in Portland. No, not the other Portland, the first one.)