Dan Kantor

ExtensionFM is a browser extension for Chrome that turns the entire web into your personal music library. As you browse, ExtensionFM runs in the background indexing every MP3 file you come across, building a music library for you. ExtensionFM will continue to check the sites you've visited, adding new music for you to listen to every day. ExtensionFM was founded in March, 2010 in New York City. It has received funding from Spark Capital, Betaworks, Founder Collective and Dave Morgan.

As product director of AOL Music, I lead the product teams for AOL Music's web properties, which included music.aol.com, Shoutcast, Spinner, Tourtracker and Streampad (among others). As of 2009, Comscore reports AOL Music as the leading music property on the web with 30 million unique visitors a month.

Streampad was born out of a desire of mine to access my music from everywhere. Along the years, it has morphed into a true web-scale music application. It combines the ability to listen to music across the web while providing social features to see what others are listening to. Today, it powers thousands of other sites as well as AOL Music. Streampad was acquired by AOL in July of 2008.

I spent five months at Yahoo working out of the New York office. The del.icio.us team grew each month and I had a chance to work with some very smart developers. I concentrated on getting the 'save on del.icio.us' link on other sites. At the time, this was not as common as it is now. I was able to get the link on many high profile sites and still to this day, smile when I see it everywhere.

What can I say about del.icio.us? I worked at the hottest startup on an awesome product with amazing people. My only regret is that it didn't last longer. My two biggest achievements at del were the Firefox extension and Playtagger. I acted as the product manager for the extension which is pretty ubiquitous among Firefox installs. Playtagger was the little music player that made all mp3 bookmarks playable right on the page. Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005.

While my time at Microsoft was short (just three months), it was an incredible experience. I was hired into the social computing lab in the research department. A month before I got there, the entire team was transferred to the Windows department to work on the UX of Vista. It was a crazy time at Microsoft. Vista had just been reset with many of the promised features removed. It was very interesting to see this historic story unfold from the inside. I enjoyed my summer in Seattle immensely, with the highlight being a party at Bill Gate's house. I stood an arm's length away from Bill as we drank wine and chatted about the industry. Amazingly cool!

ITP is an incredibly unique program. It is a convergence of art and technology, housed in a loft in Greenwich village. It is there that I learned how to code. I also studied design, social software and physical computing. In addition, I met my wife there! I can truly say that ITP changed my life.

Urban Hotspots was a very early player in the public wifi space. I wore many hats in the company of three - sales, marketing, installations and technical support. My wifi claim to fame is that I sold (and installed) the first public hotspots in New York's Penn Station and Grand Central Station. Urban Hotspots was eventually sold after I left to a larger player in the space.

My time in Ann Arbor was some of the best years of my life. I chose Michigan because of it's academics, sports, social life and town. I studied social psychology and cognition which I believe has helped me tremendously in my understanding of how people use and communicate on the web. I loved everything about Ann Arbor and got to see us win a national title in football. Go Blue!