Denver New Tech - March 2013

Another month, another great Denver New Tech Meetup. This time around New Tech featured two particularly interesting new music startups. They’re both pretty fresh, but have some interesting ideas.

First up, Piq.fm.

Fresh out of Boulder, Piq.fm aims to empower users to have a say in the music playing in a shared space. For instance, your friend who just loves “Call Me Maybe” might be playing it on repeat. With Piq, the music choices are crowdsourced via a web application. It currently hooks up with streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, and is intended for use in small, collaborative spaces (since they don’t have public performance figured out at this stage). For hardware geeks, they’re currently using a Raspberry Pi with a USB Wi-Fi Dongle and an SD Card for storing the application.

It’s a very cool idea. They’re currently selling five prototypes to beta users and are soon to launch a Kickstarter for their initial production. Piq.fm also plans to eventually move to a custom hardware solution. If you’re fast, you might be able to get involved with their beta program, so hit them up if that tickles your fancy. Also, remember to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

The other music-oriented startup presenting tonight was Musikfly. Also out of Boulder, Musikfly aims to connect music bloggers with artists. Today, the process of submitting music to a blog is a manual process. It sucks for artists; it sucks for bloggers. Musikfly aims to easily connect artists and bloggers who mesh. They also have a unique feature that allows bloggers to quickly and easily provide feedback to (paying) users as they listen to their song.

Musikfly started as a school project, but these full-time students are looking to change the music blogging scene. These guys are putting in long hours while still being students, so I’ll be interested to see what they come up with!