Music Hack Day – Aug 10-11

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“Music is the soundtrack of our lives.” – Dick Clark

There are an amazing set of Toronto based music startups emerging.

It should come as no surprise that with a burgeoning community there are events. Paul Osman (LinkedIn) who is now part of the team at SoundCloud and Rdio, The Echo Nest and Unspace are hosting:

musichackday

  • To fast prototype and create brand new music apps (web, mobile or physical) in just 24hrs.
  • To bring together the music industry and the developer community.
  • To highlight and showcase the platforms and API’s of companies working in and around music tech.
  • To foster cross-platform and cross-device innovation.

Looks like a great event for local startups and developers to get access to APIs and hopefully distribution.

Music Hack Day Toronto will be held on August 10th-11th, 2013 at the The Glass Factory, 99 Sudbury St.

If you are interested in participating in the fast prototyping and creation of brand new and innovative music apps, be sure to register (tickets are free) for Music Hack Day Toronto today.

Ontario House – Aug 14 @ The Portside Pub

Portside Pub

We’re on the official Grow Conference schedule. Together with Communitech, we are hosting a party. You can decide for yourself if these conferences are right for you or your business (need help, check out Kevin Swan’s piece for insight). But we’re going to be there. We are going to be highlighting Ontario startups (and investors). Who is coming so far?

We’re looking for startups to highlight, stories to tell, and connections to make. We need startups. We need sponsors. We need volunteers. If you’re coming to Grow Conference please feel free to join us on August 14 at The Portside Pub.

How about you? Are coming to Grow Conference?

Testing the market before you build a product

Mangabox on Instagram

Jason Kottke’s just shared an interesting story about Instagram shops which are doing gangbusters in Kuwait.

A description from ‘shop’ owner Fatima Al Qadiri:

If you have an Instagram account, you can slap a price tag on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it. For instance, you could take this can of San Pellegrino, paint it pink, put a heart on it, call it yours, and declare it for sale. Even my grandmother has an Instagram business! She sells dried fruit.

Amazing. This is not only such a low-impact way of testing the market for a particular product, but it’s so smartly circumventing issues around modern shopping cart systems.

Specifically, the sellers can:

  1. Easily update their inventory from their mobile phone.
  2. Quickly share new inventory across multiple networks.
  3. Easily conduct their business from their mobile phones by leveraging low-cost options like WhatsApp.
  4. Leverage another network without the need to integrate APIs. In this case, by using Instagram directly.

No storefront maintenance, no hosting requirements, no need for a desktop or tablet, no fancy marketing. Just the goods.

This kind of lightweight testing is great for getting an understanding of market interest in your product and can lead to great insights, just like the four noted above.

[Ed.note: This post originally appeared Say Yeah! blog on Friday, July 12, 2013. It has been republished here with permission]