Karaoke Gets Even More Social, Competitive, With This Cute Web App

Karaoke is already a pretty social activity, but one Chinese startup wants to make it even more so. iHou allows users to sing pop songs online, get a score for their performances, challenge other people to a sing-off, and then share your score and recorded performances online.

It’s all so neat and so perfectly fitting for China, where karaoke (or ‘KTV’ as it’s called here) is a really popular pastime, that I’m surprised one of the Chinese web giants hasn’t done this already.

The site is not new – having been started up last August – but it has just been revamped so that it’s effectively at v2.0. It incorporates some clever voice-recognition technology so that it can rank a crooner’s performance, giving the whole site an element of healthy competition. But mostly it’s about the social media elements, with user profiles and bios serving as a complement to their recorded sessions so that other users can better judge who they’d like to listen to – or compete against. Scores can be shared with your buddies on Sina’s or Tencent’s Weibo.

Above: the main iHou interface for singing (or listening in). Below: after your performance, get a score and share it on weibo.

Unfortunately, despite the refreshed website, the service has no mobile apps, which is a pity as I get the feeling this’d be even more cool if it could cram pretty much all those features into an app. It just begs to be used on a smartphone that’s clutched like a mic to a singer’s lips.

Give iHou.com a try by signing up, or just browse through some users and listen to their karaoke crooning.

[Hat-tip to Web2.0Share (article in Chinese) for spotting this]