The current Nike+ FuelBand bracelet tracks your jogging, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As one example, Nike slapped those bracelets on audience members at a Sleigh Bells show at SXSW, and made the colors of an the entire building change to reflect how hard the crowd was dancing. That was neat, but…
Music is not made in a vacuum — not literally, because vacuums abhor jams, nor figuratively, because musicians are in bands, and bands are in scenes. A “scene” can range from a handful of hopefuls going to see each other’s sets at the same local venues each week to larger-scale transformations, like the New York…
Most people who make apps are entrepreneurs, which is as it should be. According to Steve Jobs, they’ve made over $1 billion on iOS alone. Perhaps it takes someone of a more artistic bent to build a platform for pinning songs and live-recorded audio to specific locations on a map — and then open-source it, so that…
A small robot holding a smartphone, called Shimi, won the hearts and minds of the technology press in June, in part on the strength of the below video. Watch it. You will see a robot that dances, learns how to dance from you, and points its ears (which are actually speakers) at you as you…
Oh, how we wish we could divulge the source of this information, because A) It comes from the developer of a pretty nice app; B) It’s fairly juicy information, if music apps are your thing; and C) We hate quoting anonymous sources. Nonetheless, we’re going to publish this anyway, because it’s so interesting, and the…
At its San Francisco headquarters, Rdio recently held its first-ever hack day — a marathon event where coders build stuff that works, fast. Most hack days, including the one our editor just attended in Sydney, are open to the public and consist of programming wizards getting together over a 24-hour period and building a slew…
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Australia’s first-ever Music Hack Day has begun here at Red Bull’s Sydney headquarters, and judging from the volume and intensity of the initial conversations between the over 50 hackers and sponsors in attendance, it’s going to be real “corker,” as we say here down under. The music hackers are honing their ideas…
Application Programming Interface, thy name be “awesome!” Excuse the geek-out, if you’re not up on your API ABC’s, but how else are we to react to the fact that Facebook just added a Listen button to its artist pages that lets you play songs from that artist just about instantly, by hooking in to each…
Spotify has received plenty of attention for its app platform, and rightfully so. Rdio also has an app platform, offering access to the same songs, more or less. Evolver.fm caught up with Rdio vice president of engineering Todd Berman to discuss the one-year anniversary of Rdio’s developer API; the service’s approach to third-party apps; and his belief…
When Spotify announced that Spotify users had listened to over 1,500 years of music within the past three months, the company jokingly expressed envy about one of those apps: SpotON Radio, which lets you listen to artist-based radio stations on your iPhone, if you subscribe to Spotify Premium (a prerequisite for playing any Spotify music…
We heard it again at the Digital Music Forum East conference earlier this week: YouTube, which most people consider to be a general video site, is where “the kids” go to hear music these days. It’s arguable the biggest music service in the world, even though it lacks a premium tier, and includes only fairly…
At Spotify’s big press event in New York today, CEO Daniel Ek announced that, as suspected, Spotify has become a music platform atop which app developers can build their own apps. These apps will appear in a new Apps section on the left side of the desktop version of Spotify starting Wednesday afternoon. Paying and non-paying…
At a posh press event in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on Wednesday, freemium music subscription service Spotify revealed the “new direction” at which it has been hinting: a new API (application programming interface) that will let developers create apps that are powered by Spotify. (In other words, we were right, for the most part.) Spotify CEO Daniel…
Spotify isn’t the only company with the bright idea to release an API to make it easier for app developers to build stuff that works with its products — which, in Sonos’ case, consist of a line of wireless speakers and modules for the home that let otherwise average people pipe music throughout their homes…
