Mashery Developer Blog

“Too much is never enough” was MTV’s famous tagline from the mid-80s. And you know what? They were right. We can’t get enough of music. It’s a staple of our lives. Radio airwaves are saturated with every style of music, from classical to metal. Digital cable TV networks deliver 40+ music channels to our living room. We have CDs, MP3s, Pandora, iTunes, YouTube, Rdio, Spotify, Mog, Rhapsody. When it comes to music, we seem to have it all, any time and anywhere we want it. So why are we still looking for new and better ways to experience, discover… to fall in love with music? Music Hackday in San Francisco is an event where the passion of consumers, developers and music platforms converge into a weekend-long hackathon to feed our insatiable craving for music.

Building the Future of Music
Above I mentioned several technologies, products and services to demonstrate the variety of musical delivery channels at our disposal. Those just represent the tip of the iceberg. Music and video is readily available from development platform APIs in every form imaginable - from fully encoded song files, song sample files, instant playback streaming, radio streaming, to song/album/artist metadata (e.g. biographies, album covers, artist photos, etc.). Every imaginable fragment and building block has been made available to developers that are interested in building the future of music — and those resources were served up on a silver platter at SF Music Hackday.

The Platforms
There are several layers to sift through in the music platform ecosystem. Some of the most popular consumer-facing products/services on the market are also development platforms for partners and third-party developers. On another layer, there are purely backend platforms that do not interface directly with consumers. Here are a few notable platforms that were represented at the hackathon and the resources they offered:

• Rdio - http://developer.rdio.com - consumer facing music streaming and social discovery network. Platform offers developers access to millions of streaming tracks, playback (iOS, Android, Javascript), playlists/collections/queue, music metadata (artist, album, track, label), listening trends, social resources (users), recommendations, etc. Apps built for Rdio can be used by subscribers after authorized with OAuth. Developers can earn perpetual affiliate revenue for any premium subscriptions driven by their app.
  
  
• Rovi - http://developer.rovicorp.com - leader in entertainment metadata about music, TV, movies, games and more. If you use Rdio, Spotify, Pandora or Shazam (to name of few), you’ve experienced the value of Rovi. The fundamentals include artist bios, images, album art, discographies, etc. However, the complex resources they offer developers include recommendations, moods, styles, collaborations, themes and more. The power of Rovi is in their diverse data sets and their ability to search and associate across those resources. For example, developers can find a musical artists Twitter ID as well as when they will be appearing on television, pinpointed across any major cable television network.
  
  
• JamBase - http://developer.jambase.com - consumer facing live music performance discovery platform. JamBase offers developers the ability to find live musical performances at venues all around the world. The same platform that powers the JamBase.com web site and mobile apps is available to third-party developers.
  
  
• MediaNet MN Open API - http://www.mndigital.com/integration/openapi.html - backend service for content discovery, delivery and purchase. MediaNet powers services like Turntable.fm, Songza and MOG. MediaNet provides backend solutions for managing user accounts, content delivery, commerce and reporting.
  
  
• The Echo Nest - http://developer.echonest.com - pure backend API with similar music metadata resources to Rovi. Some of the most interesting data that The Echo Nest offers include the ability to search and fetch: tempo (min/max), danceability, energy, artist “hotttnesss”, song type (live/studio/Christmas), loudness (min/max), key (e.g. c, c-sharp, d, e-flat, etc.).

Other notable platforms that were on site included: Gracenote, Rhapsody, SoundCloud, 7digital, LyricFind, musiXmatch.

The Hacks
Over 200 developers came together to build 66 music apps from scratch in just 48 hours. This hackathon was held the weekend before SF MusicTech Summit, helping to draw a diverse crowd of musicians, enthusiasts, producers, promoters and developers from the Bay Area and beyond. Below are a few notable hacks that caught our fancy:

• MoForte Guitar + Leap Motion by Nick Porcaro (video) - mashing up a virtual iPad guitar with the Leap 3D motion sensor.
  
  
• DJ Wizard by Brian Ferrell and Jonathon Klobucar (video) - a magical playlist generator to get the party started. Tell the DJ Wizard the name of an artist or song, and he will instantly conjure up a fully stocked playlist that based on The Echo Nest recommendation APIs, inject them into an Rdio playlist, and play directly from the HTML5/JS application, using the Rdio APIs.
  
  
• Gordie Howe Hat Trick by Johnny Megahan (video) - a song selection engine based on NHL player statistics and biographical information supplied by the ESPN Sports APIs. GHHT maps key stats, such as penalty minutes and goals, to song/artist attributes, like mood, energy and location (from The Echo Nest APIs).
  
  
• LinerNotes by Ed Hickey (@bassnode) (video) - recreating the album liner notes in the digital listening experience. LinerNotes pulls in metadata from Rovi APIs, including artist biographies, full album credits (“from the tambourine player to the mastering engineer”), album art, and more.
  
  
• Leap Orchestra by Dean Hudson, Vamsi Mynampati, Tyler F, Neal Riley, Seth Tsui and Nicholas Charriere (video) - another hardware hack utilizing the Leap 3D motion sensor. This team kicked of the app demos with a live performance, starting with some ethereal Theremin-ish melodies before shifting into a dub-step jam. Very entertaining!
  
  
• Follow Swap for Rdio by Devin Sevilla (video) - a random music following app to help you mix up your social discovery mechanisms. Simple, fun and useful.

The Prizes and Winners
Most of the teams seemed to be less concerned on trying to win specific prizes, and more focused on learning new skills and meeting new people. However, there were a ton of prizes to be had, and we were all happy to award them to these hard working teams:

• Mashery selected DJ Wizard for the best API integrations, sending Brian and Jonathon home with Jawbone Jamboxes.
  
  
• Rdio chose Tweedio and Sing Along with Me for their prizes, one year Rdio subscriptions for all team members.
  
  
• TokBox awarded two tickets to Coachella to the team that built TokBox Ukulele. Twilio went with Biscuit Orchestra.
  
  
• The Echo Nest awarded iPad Retinas and iPad Minis to Biscuit Orchestra and Inspiration.

A complete list of all 12 prize categories and winners can be found here.

So… Did We Build the Future?
Yes, we did. :) The developers clearly pushed the envelope by integrating the latest music platform APIs with apps for both desktop and mobile. They utilized external hardware devices like the Leap Motion, integrated automotive data controls and came up with new ways to discover and share music. I was a bit surprised not to see any TV hacks, but I can imagine we will see more of that at vertical hack events like TVnext Hack coming up in late April 2013. Overall, the hackathon was a huge success, and extremely collaborative. In fact, there were more projects open sourced than I’ve ever seen at a hackathon.

Big thanks to The Echo Nest, SoundCloud, Spotify and TokBox for organizing the event. That was some amazing hackathon fare — healthy and delicious from morning until night.

See you next year, where we’ll continue to build the future of music!

(original image by David Michael Morris on Flickr)

The Mashery Developer Outreach team heads out to a whole heap of hackathons and tech events (more than 60 in 2012 alone)! We love to see what developers are able to build in a weekend (or sometimes just a day)! Typically, these projects are limited in scope; hackers attend these events for the team building, education and fun that come along with the experience.

While we’re often blown away with the quality of these hacks, once the event has come to a close, teams usually walk away having forged new bonds and new brain cells, but not necessarily with plans for the next big startup. 

However, every now and then, a hack emerges that is truly disruptive. One of the most famous instances of this was TechCrunch Disrupt’s big hackathon winner in 2010, GroupMe. They came out of Hack Disrupt with an app that allows groups to text collectively via SMS (powered by our friends at Twilio) without needing to exchange phone numbers. This app solved a real problem and went on to be acquired by Skype (who was ultimately acquired by Microsoft) for hundreds of millions. 

We’ve seen our fair share of Mashery hacks graduate from weekend team-building projects to market-ready apps. Some of our favorites include: 

The Klout Chrome extension, which was born at the Klout/Bit.ly Groundhacks Day in February 2011, uses the Klout API to place an influence score next the people you follow when visiting twitter.com. It went live on Chrome Web Store shortly after its creation and now boasts over 66,000 users. 

ESPN recently launched their SportsCenter Feed web app as the result of an internal hackathon. The app allows sports fans to create a personalized feed of sports news that’s most meaningful to them. Read all about it on PandoDaily!

The team from Discovr met the Rovi Cloud Services team at the SXSW Circus Mashimus lounge in 2011, and then integrated their search API in their app in the iOS App Store. With 3 million users strong, Discovr’s apps are a high profile example of how APIs can scale quickly and securely.

Find Me Hotel Deals  was born at API Hackday Austin in February 2012 using the Hotwire API to show users great, local hotel offers. It hit the AppStore a few months later.

Rotten Boxes was created at CoderFaire Nashville in August 2012 using the Redbox and Rotten Tomatoes APIs, allowing users to find the closest films available at Redbox locations and sort them by Rotten Tomatoes rankings. 

Qup.tv sends users targeted Netflix suggestions via email, and was born at Hack The Midwest in June 2012 using Netflix API, and covered in GigaOm shortly thereafter. 

APIs allow innovative ideas to move from conception to reality. They connect developers with data sets they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Well-supported APIs can speed up development time by providing interactive documentation and time-saving code examples. Hackathons are a great starting point to demonstrate how quickly APIs can help turn an idea into a legitimate and valuable problem solving tool. 

There are hackathons and then there are TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathons. The semi-annual 24-hour Hackday was held last weekend in New York City in the heart of midtown Manhattan at Pier 94, overlooking the Hudson river. Over 300 hackers attended the event and it was an absolute blast.

Having heard so much about them in the past, I was really excited about getting a chance to not only represent Mashery customer APIs at the hackathon, but also getting my hands dirty with some good ole’ hacking. The fact that we were a team of six people representing Mashery made it even more fun and exciting.

What made it different?

What made TC Disrupt stand out from others was the incredible number of hacks that developers produced. 92 hacks were produced in less than 24 hours. Also, the dedication of the hackers has to be commended. I’ve done my share of hackathons, so I speak with a bit of experience here. You usually see the crowd thin out a bit after dinner. Not here. No sir. The sheer number of people who stood back all night - coding away was very impressive. They just kept hacking all night. The energy was amazing even in the wee hours of the morning. 

Get, set, go

It all began at about 2pm on Saturday afternoon, with the doors being opened to the New York hackers. Pier 94 probably had the perfect setup for a mega hackathon like this. Big warehouse kinda space. Plenty of roundtables, each of which could seat about 8-10 people. Heavy duty power chords hanging off the roof at each table, to make sure every table had enough juice to power the hacking. Not to mention, stable WiFi (for the most part anyway).

Workshops

Prior to the hacking, several API Workshops were held from 3-6pm to expose developers to exciting APIs, tools and frameworks that could be used at the hackathon. I got a chance to talk about I/O Docs and demo some of the APIs from the Mashery API Network - including Rovi, USA TODAY and Whit.li, all of whom had sent a team of developers to compete at the hackathon. What better way represent than to have a team of enthusiastic developers onsite coding? With the workshops out of the way, the hacking officially began at 6pm and ended at 11am on Sunday morning.

Bryan from Whit.li

Rahim from Rovi Cloud Services

Chris from USA TODAY

Mashery USB drive

We also handed out our famous Mashery USB drives that double up as beer bottle openers, preloaded with hack helpers like code libraries and API docs. Needless to say, they were a major hit.

Best Mashery Hack Winner: Sidewinder

The best app built using Mashery API Network was Sidewinder - An iPad companion app that allows you to read stuff on your desktop and pulls up relevant information around that content on your iPad - real time, thereby allowing you to use your iPad as a sidebar. So, reading a TechCrunch article on your desktop browser would pull useful info like the author’s twitter handle, klout score, related articles etc on the iPad. Pretty nifty. It ended up winning our first ever Mashery Red BIG Jambox!

Team Oh My Klout

Another app built using Mashery’s API network was “Oh my klout” - an asteroids game built by Haris Amin (incidentally the winner of API Hackday NYC earlier this year) using the Klout API. Shoot the avatars of people with low Klout scores as they move around violently. Really well done.

DEMO VIDEO: Oh, my Klout

Team Kover

The talented teams from USA TODAY and Whit.li joined hands to build a kick-ass app together - an iPad app that lets you discover the books your friends are reading based on your preferences and compatibility with them, cleverly using Whit.li’s compatibility API and also the USA TODAY Book Reviews API. Definitely an app I’d be using as soon as it hits the store!

DEMO VIDEO: Kover

Team AlfredFlik

Rahul and Amit (me) from Mashery chipped in together to build a quick hack for Alfred App. We built an extension for Alfred that lets you provide a movie name and then queries Rovi Cloud Services to find similar movies, find the reviews for the movie using Rotten Tomatoes API and then sends the result as a text using Twilio. Got its share of appreciation and we ended up bagging the award for best app built using any of the Rovi APIs!

DEMO VIDEO: AlfredFlik

Team CityVibes

Mashery employee Colin McCabe also competed on a team, CityVibes, who ended up going on to win one of the prizes for Best Use of the Echo Nest API.  Their iOS hack also featured an integration with the Rdio API as the engine for audio playback. CityVibes is planning to submit their hack as an iPhone app to the AppStore in the next several weeks. In the meantime, if you want to get the full story on Colin’s hacking experience, check out his blog post on the Mashery blog: Confessions of a First-Time Hacker: From The Trenches of the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon. Colin’s story is an inspiration for anyone learning to code and wanting to compete in hackathons. Don’t be intimidated - you can do it, too! :)

AWARD VIDEO: EchoNest announces CityVibes as a Winner

Team Mashery

I have represented Mashery at several hackathons ever since I joined, but this one was special. This was the first time, I was joined by my awesome NY & SF Masherites on site. It was a full-house! In fact, Team Mashery camped out on site all night. No Sleep. Helping developers. On caffeine. Cracking code. All night.

Winners!

#1: Thingscription - A service that tracks user impressions to figure out what products to offer as a recurring subscription to customers.

#2: Poachbase - A recruiting service that uses Crunchbase data to determine which startups may soon fold, and who’s worth swiping away from them.

#3: Practikhan - A platform that lets teachers create their own online quizzes to share with their students

You can read more about the winners here

We were all obviously sleep deprived and dead tired by the end of it all, but it was all worth it. It was an amazing experience. Definitely worth repeating.

Photo Credits: Rahul Gilani, Sasha Kamenetska

Just the other week, Mashery along with several of our clients (Rdio, RootMusic, Rovi and Klout) took part in participating and sponsoring Music Hackday in San Francisco. Held at the TokBox HQ, over 200 developers spent an entire weekend meeting new people, learning new skills and applying everything in their arsenal to build apps that will define the future of music. You didn’t think that we were finished innovating and disrupting the music industry, did you?

Streaming Music On Demand
We have buried the 8 track, shattered the LP, killed the cassette, and chucked the CD. Trolling for pirated MP3s is passé. Paying $0.99 per song will also suffer the same fate. Why? Because streaming music on demand is what we all want, and it’s available now. For less than $10 month, we can stream unlimited music to all of our devices (phone, tablet, laptop and set-top box) using services like Rdio. The sound quality is superb (320kbps). The collection is vast (12+ million tracks). So what is left to innovate upon in this seemingly perfect music consumption nirvana? Music discovery and recommendations — because with so much to choose from, choosing what to listen to is the new problem.

Multidimensional Discovery
There are various methods for discovering music to listen to. In machine-based music discovery, algorithmic playlist generators such as Pandora, make recommendations based on a musical taste graph. In social music discovery, recommendations are based on what your friends are listening to. It’s a tall order to construct highly satisfactory playlists based on your social graph, preferences and listening history — which explains why there were a significant number of the apps at Music Hackday that leveraged music streaming and metadata APIs to solve the problem.

Behind the Music Apps
Building apps for the music vertical has never been easier. For instance, the Rdio API has methods for streaming playback, retrieving data (by artist, album, track, etc.), playlist control, listening statistics, and social hooks (friends, followers, etc.). For the most comprehensive entertainment metadata, the Rovi Cloud Service API provides deep data for music, as well for TV, movies and games. Rovi’s methods include retrieving reviews, recommendations, credits, images and surprisingly complex data such as moods (expressive characteristics) and themes (topics, feelings and circumstances that motivate or fit with the music). Other APIs like JamBase provide upcoming and historical data for concerts and live music shows around the world, with methods to search by artist, venue, date and geocode. These are just a few of many music-focused APIs available for developers to build the music discovery apps of the future.

Best in Show
Over 60 apps were built and presented at Music Hackday SF — and here are a few of my favorites. The app titled BWV, created by Ian McKellar, presents all works on Rdio by BWV number (compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach). The app Music Smasher, created by Matt Montag, is a music keyword meta-search engine — aggregating search results from six different music services, including Rdio, Spotify, MOG and Grooveshark. Another app by Ian McKellar, titled Musiac, adds a fun approach to music discovery by building a photo-mosaic of an album cover comprised of minature tiles of other album covers — where clicking through on a minature tile launches you into a fractal like experience of infinite random discovery. My favorite app was eezdropper by JB Steadman, a native iPhone app that injects songs into your Rdio playlist based on what other Rdio users within your vicinity are listening to — implicit geo-local social network music recommendations! In fact, we selected JB to win the Mashery spot-prize at Music Hackday, the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker in Mashery red.

What’s Next?
The music industry has undergone radical changes, many of which have been brought on by the Internet — from the pirated MP3, to the $0.99 song purchase, and now to unlimited cloud streaming services. Artists, music industry labels and music listeners have never been so closely intertwined. Data and services have never been so accessible. I believe that the new and exciting things in this industry will be born from events like Music Hackday, fueled by business opportunity, open dialog, and most of all, by the passion and appreciation for discovering and listening to music.