curiousgirl's playground

Just when we hear about "Save Pandora" last April... my dearest friend Charles Yong (Berkeley, '07) gives me a sneak preview of one of his latest projects: Chargle Jukebox Beta (Click Stable version only, and type any song name into the box provided.).

In a nutshell, Chargle Jukebox takes what you can normally do through traditional search on, say, YouTube, and immediately tries to match your song video, returning the song of highest relevance. Instead of trying to search through several music videos, Chargle Jukebox directly connects you. Currently, it searches through video networks such as YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, and Veoh.

• Simple, easy-to-use, and elegant. Enough said.
• Efficiently leverages and aggregates existing music. Similar to sites like radio.blog.club, Chargle Jukebox streams data from existing music video sites. Unlike radio.blog.club, Chargle Jukebox incorporates "rich media" video (which may or may not be desirable for pure music listeners).
• Future richer web. Build a social networking component? I think it'd be interesting to see this type of functionality incorporated to an existing music social music community like Last.fm. This only enhances the end-user front-end music listening and discovery.
• Easily scalable and deployable. Did I mention that my genius programmer friend Charles coded this project in just only 2 days?
• Future potential. Sure, the player can be more feature-rich, but this model of streaming data from -multiple existing sources- can be applied to all web media, not just music. Mashups are definitely the future of the web.

Charles Yong deserves more than just a paragraph to describe him, but I do want to say a few things. Hands down -- he is one of the most talented, most well-rounded people I've ever met. Aside from being an amazingly talented programmer, he's actually a premed (soon-to-be medical student as he was accepted to medical schools like Yale) senior at Berkeley. I had known Charles since high school, where he was equally as impressive. Charles was an all-star student at Rancho Cotate High School: 4.91 GPA (Is that even possible?), President of the Interact Club, Founder of Stepping Stones program bringing high-school students to local elementary schools to make presentations about goal-setting, Senior Teen Attorney for the Teen Court, Tutor/Mentor, Varsity Tennis Team, 2nd Degree Karate Black Belt, Received the Youth Summer Research Award, Completed a summer internship at the National Institutes of Health, working with top researchers....(the list goes on I'm sure...). On top of all this, Charles is an extremely charismatic, social person and great to be around.

Now, here's a list of projects he has or is involved in (those I'm aware of):

• Syzyx: pioneer AJAX-driven blogging platform (before "AJAX" was even coined and still has features which Charles says "does not exist on any other existing platform" such as Livejournal, Xanga, Wordpress..)
• Below the Mean: comic strip on life at UC Berkeley (Read more press here. Please add closet "artist" and "illustrator" to list of characteristics for Charles.)
• Chargle: Charles' personal homepage and what I call "true" personalized search :)

Charles, like I told you, perhaps you should reconsider medical school ;p.

technorati tags: chargle, charles yong, music, youtube, mashup, technology, idea