Soundwave Blog

Last  week our CTO and Co-Founder Aidan Sliney headed over to the world renowned Google I/O event in San Francisco. It hasn’t even been 2 months  since the Soundwave founders were last in the States for the SXSW event  in Austin, Texas which was a great success and Google I/O proved just as worthwhile.

The event ran from the 15th - 17th of May with Aidan  traveling over for the full week. The first day kicked off with the main  keynote speech which lasted 3 hours and included an unexpected appearance by Google Co-Founder Larry Page. Lots of good news came out of this speech for Soundwave including the following:

1. Google’s new streaming service
Google have entered the music streaming service space which means another partner that Soundwave will be capturing plays from.

2. New IDE - Android development tool: Android Studio
A new development tool to develop Android Apps; very exciting news for the geeks in Soundwave!

3. Alpha/ Beta roll outs from the Google Playstore
Difficulties we had handing out our Beta to our trusted private users will now be a thing of the past. When we need to hand out our Android app we can  now do it using Google Play store.

4. Fused Location Service
Location is a big part of Soundwave and this new method of capturing location accuracy means things are only going to keep getting better and better.
5. Cross Platform sign in
One for the backlog but it is pretty cool that a user can now login to our website and be automatically logged into the app.

The  event itself was packed with talks and classes on best practices in  coding for Youtube, Google +, Google Maps, Chrome and of course Google  Glass. Aidan even managed to get a firsthand sneak preview of Google Glass. He was very impressed with the ease of use but feels that for the functionality you gain it is hard to justify  wearing them for now but they are definitely on to something!
As the main Soundwave features that rely on  Google Services include location, Youtube and Google + these were the events  that Aidan attended. One of these talks was presented by Ade Oshineye  who we are happy to say is one of our first 100 users and a real Google + evangelist.
Throughout  the three days there were many ‘Google friendly’ companies presenting  their work. There were some great conversations and we are now friends with  companies such as Snapette, Pocket, ibotta, Gracenote, MusiXmatch and  many more.

As you all know by now, everyone attending got  presented with a Google Chrome Pixel. For those of you that don’t know  what a Pixel is it’s a touchscreen, Retina display laptop that runs  Chrome OS. Thanks Google!
Outside of the event there are always  people to catch up with. Aidan got a tour of 8tracks’ very cool and  trendy office as well as spending some time hanging out with the Swedish  arm of Spotify who were also on tour in San Francisco. With all this  going on he somehow managed to cycle across the Golden Gate bridge. If  you are one of the lucky people on the private beta you can check out  what songs he listened to once he got across!

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Want to find out more about Soundwave? Head to http://www.getsoundwave.com

This weekend a few members of the Soundwave Team headed to London to attend the 2nd annual Music Tech Fest. The idea behind the event is to allow everyone involved in or interested in the new music/tech landscape to get together and share ideas. Everyone from programmers, app developers, CEOs, composers, artists and designers were milling around for the 3 day event (May 17th-19th).
The event was held in the Ravensbourne building (http://www.rave.ac.uk/) which, in itself is really impressive. It’s situated right across from the O2 in North Greenwich and proved a great venue for this type of event. 

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Soundwave’s CEO Brendan O’Driscoll, took to the stage on Saturday to demo the app and give a quick run down of the company. Apart from presentations like our own there was beatboxing, live hacking, some unscheduled fuseball tournaments as well as some really cool music installations (see pic below, a typewriter where each key is attached to an instrument by wire).
All in all it was a great event with a nice relaxed atmosphere. It encouraged people to get out of their comfort zones and delve into lots of new aspects of the tech side of the  music industry. Well done to all the organisers and everyone involved, especially our friend Damien Joyce! Thanks for having us and here’s to continued success of events like this in the future!

Missed us at the Music Tech Fest but would like to find out more about Soundwave? Visit http://www.getsoundwave.com :)