Slashathon at SXSW: all the hacks and of course Slash...
The Slashathon was announced a few weeks back as a hack day focused on creating interesting tools for music and with the twist of being backed by none other than Slash himself - thus the name. Slash, Robert Scoble (Rackspace), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) were the judges for the presentation of the hacks created during the rather brief 7 hours of the event. That’s right, the hackathon didn’t go on overnight so developers had to work double speed to get the hacks out. Slash himself got pretty involved in chatting about and giving feedback to all of the developers involved.
Below a rundown of the hacks and winners
Winner of the 1st prize, presented by Slash: Slash TV - any user in any place should be able to create a rock video for a new album. On a mobile device it’s hard to film a video, but music stickers are a way to make a video more compelling. With Slash TV you’re able to promote an experience with stages and digital stickers to record your own rock video.
Simon Solotko, one the members of the Slash TV hack team commented on winning the event: "I'm the CMO of Tagaboom, and we decided to show up at this hackathon as our developer's appendix had burst but we managed to get a great team together and it was a super-well run hackathon. We came in with no expectations and can't believe what happened."
2nd Place: Pretune - as an artist you don’t have time to spend marketing new songs and there’s an associated cost - Pretune is a platform that would automatically promote your album and have the crowd reveal the song bit by bit by. Fans can unlock the song progressively by logging in with Twitter or providing their email address.
3rd Place: Crowdroar - The idea is that you can get a real time feedback from the stage on how people are reacting to songs you never played before via a loudness meter that shows up on the Google Glass diplay.
Groupieology : Engage fans with a map of their tour movements. You type in the band and it shows you a map of where they have been touring. It’s a way for fans that have been to the show to go back and order merchandise from previous gigs, or for future shows they can buy tickets, flights, book hotels and everything else. Also Groupeology has a way of supporting geolocated photos. On the tech front they integrated Seatgeek for the data and Rackspace for the back-end.
2nite: If you want to check out new artists playing in your town you find short 30-second clips of each artist that is playing that evening. The chicken and egg problem is very real though, artists have to actively add gigs to the service so Scoble suggested that they add some scraping to pre-populate the site.
SOS - Improve Sound quality in your headphones. The team thought it’d be cool to play with the Dolby API and the new MUZIK headphones that have touch-sensitive surfaces on the side, but they were asking a lot of questions about the API to the Dolby team so ended up calling it SOS. The goal was for these headphones to augment the experience of listening and the idea is to play around with the touch sensitive surface of the headphones to change the sound around you.
Get Hooked! A way to find hooks of your favorite tracks in no time! As an artists you’d go on to the site and add all the songs you want to upload. As a user you’d have a list of the full songs as well as the spotify link and then a list of specific hooks. If you want to create a hook for the song, you select the part that you want that you think is the hook and "hook it". The idea is that you’d have all the information and hooks about an artist on a single artist page.
Proximity picks: based on the Qualcomm’s Gimbal gadgets that react to location the team created playlists that are associated with the devices. For example, Slash has a playlist on Spotify that has his top picks, Proximity Picks created an app that is going to start playing the music when your phone gets close to the Gimbal, you can sell Proximity Picks to fans and/or distribute them as part of your album release.
(Andrea Leonelli)