Even if you’re not in London from May 17 to 19, you might enjoy MusicTechFest 2013, a nifty conference that will unite stakeholders in the digital music industry (including Seevl, Shazam, Shuffler.fm, SMC Group, SoniqPlay, Songs2See, SoundHound, SoundWave, SpectralMind, Spotify, Stylus, and plenty of companies that start with other letters too), as well as policy makers,…
Mother’s Day is fast approaching, and, typically, we can’t resist putting together another playlist to celebrate it. Let’s literally hear it for the moms. We wouldn’t be here without you. We’ve stocked this playlist with a few tunes to get the ball rolling, but the neat thing about these collaborative Spotify playlists is that you…
At this past weekend’s TVnext Hack event, a loose consortium of geeks, hackers, and businessmen from the television and technology industries gathered in a high-rise Boston office building to compete for cash and prizes by inventing and building technologies that add to the experience of watching television. Several hacks won prizes from sponsor companies, while…
Hackers, coders, and clever people gathered on a beautiful weekend at Hill Holiday‘s well-appointed, high-rise headquarters in downtown Boston for TVnext Hack, a weekend-long competition to build the neatest television stuff out of a APIs from ESPN, Gracenote, GetGlue, The Echo Nest (which publishes Evolver.fm), Ramp, WatchWith, and Viggle. This being a television hack day, not every app…
Although it was designed to help the people who put music into television shows find more tunes to match the mood of their show, Curation Station, one of the hacks to emerge from TVnext Hack 2013 this weekend, also works just fine as a method for extending your taste from television to music. Simply enter the…
You might not have heard of the Belgian band, Amatorski. Neither had we, but The Guardian UK called them “the best Belgian act around,” which counts for something — as does the fact that their music sounds pretty great (even after playing this on repeat). Most of all, we’re impressed by their Deleting Borders project, an interactive HTML5 collaboration…
Going to concerts these days can mean staring at either your smartphone, or the one held aloft by the person in front of you, to the point that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs recently issued an edict commanding their fans to watch the show, not those screens. However, the band’s singer, Karen O, carved out a…
SXSW is almost over — well, it technically ends on Sunday, but that’s pretty much only good for catching your flight back home or, if you’re brave enough to soldier on another day, sticking around to play softball and eat barbecue with legions of SXSW volunteers. Or maybe you didn’t go this year, like us, due…
New York City takes data and crowdsourcing pretty seriously. It has data sets for everything from subway entrances to WiFi hotspots. Since 2009, the city has been asking people to make stuff out of them for its BigApps contest. Update 5/20: It’s time for the public voting; the winners will be announced in two days. Apparently,…
We’re just a little obsessed with SXSW this week, because of course we are. It’s SXSW. There’s nothing else like it in music or tech, and we’re all about both. What did you expect, fake viral videos about race car drivers we’ve never heard of before or penguins falling down? Those are great and all, but…
We are enjoying covering the madness at SXSW 2013 this week, although this time, due to logistics in our editor’s family life, we’re not physically there this year. It’s sad, in a way, to have to watch it from afar, as many can probably relate. Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, we found six great ways to keep…
We don’t normally post infographics from third-parties, in part because many of them are lame or marketing-y. However, MusicMetric did a nice job with this one, which presents data analyzing every band at SXSW. First, a few takeaways:
The following is a guest post from Paul Lamere’s MusicMachinery about the Artist’s Hack at SXSW, which was the first Music Hack Day specifically designed to unite musicians and techies. Lamere is director of developer platform for The Echo Nest, which publishes Evolver.fm, and is a Music Hack Day wizard (see also: Infinite Gangnam Style, Bohemian…
Monday is the last day of SXSW Interactive, which means people are posting lists of trends purporting to distill this incredibly wide-ranging event into a few key trends — “takeaways,” if you will — from the event. These hopefully say something about where we are, both culture- and business-wise, as of March 2013. We like…
The music portion of SXSW begins Tuesday in Austin, Texas. This festival being what it is, the division is never too clear between these legs of the event. Still, one does notice a certain “changing of the guard” between the chunky glasses/fauxhawk/striped shirt/beer-swilling/iPhone set during the Interactive portion, and the pierced lip/amp-dragging/beer-swilling/iPhone set that rolls…
