Hack Night Round 2: Tiny Music Apps

Last month our hack night was focused on exploring the concept of Tiny Apps, this month we decided to zoom in on the music industry, with the idea that the Tiny Apps that were created could be brought together into one ecosystem (or constellation as we call them). Round 2 was a great success, just as fun as the first, with some very cool apps and lots of important things to learn.

It was really great to once again see how easily people took to the ‘rules’ of the OPENFORMAT protocol. We’ve been really working on our language internally (the Web3 industry is famously bad on that front…) and it seems this work is paying off, allowing devs, designers and product mangers to discuss pretty complex mechanics with a common vocabulary. It was very cool to watch. 😎

3 hours doesn’t seem like a long time, but it’s crazy how much progress can be made when you bring the right people together. We learnt A LOT.

General format for the night:

This was the same structure as last time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…

• Arrive 5:45pm for a bit of ‘networking’ and drinks

• 6:30 quick announcement and food served (home cooked Vegan Chilli)

• 6:50 intro from Andy our Head of Engineering

• 7:00 Hack begins

• 10:00 Hack ends : Teams presenting results

• 10:20 judging

• 10:25 prizes and wrap up

• 1:30am Dan made it back to his house in the Midlands 😉

With two prize categories:

1. Best use case

2. Most complete product

It was actually quite a hard event to judge since all the Tiny Apps had very clear and potentially powerful use cases, with two clear winners:

#1 Fan

James and Rich - Appmilla

The victors from our last hack returned to reclaim their place as the best use case. This time they aimed even bigger, trying to find a model that balanced superfans and ‘pay to play’ whales.

After a discussion that covered everything from pyramid schemes (don’t ask….) to hyper exclusive gigs they eventually fixed onto a mechanic. And then they split off with Rich doing the development and James creating a very very very comprehensive pitch deck, who knew you could ask for a £5m investment from a 3 hour project.

The end result was #1 Fan, a Tiny App that pays the listener in reward tokens for watching videos of upcoming artists. As the listener accumulates more reward tokens and XP they choose to watch exclusive content of more established artists and eventually if they get the highest amount of XP on the leaderboard they claim a 1-1 gig with the artist.

The exact working mechanics needed a little bit more fleshing out but they managed to produce a prototype that gave a reward token every 20 seconds when watching a Youtube video.

The Love Dispenser

Andy - OPENFORMAT, Petro - OSINT TEAM

This became a UI designer and developer match made in heaven (AKA Bristol). Having not known each other at the beginning of the night Andy and Peter managed to create an (almost) ‘festival-ready’ Tiny App earning them the prize of most complete product.

Their concept was that at festivals and gigs, especially for smaller artists, fans often want to donate if the performance is amazing. They coupled that idea with a mechanic anyone from the digital generation is familiar with - swiping.

Essentially when you are at a festival, say Parklife, you could download the Parklife app and claim some ‘hearts’ with the free Parklife tokens you got with your ticket. Then on the day you select the act and stage you are at, if you thought they deserved it and want to share the love, you could swipe a heart from your phone sending it to the artist. This could then be shown on the big screen behind the performer.

Seems pretty simple right, well it is, that’s the whole point of a Tiny App. But the very interesting thing about this application is that it would give the artist and festival hosts some metrics surrounding the live music and the crowds engagement. You could easily see the most ‘donated to’ artist, song or section of a song.

More Than the Sum of its Parts

This whole event was designed to show that Tiny Apps by themselves can be awesome, but when they become part of a constellation it supercharges that awesomeness. Using the OPENFORMAT protocol these two winning Tiny Apps (and all the other apps) were built in the same constellation.

Meaning that they used the same reward token (using the Parklife example this could be the $PARK token) and even though they were designed seperately for seperate use cases, they could very easily be linked together to have complimentary mechanics.

For example the video reward mechanism from #1 Fan could be used by fans before the event to build up a supply of $PARK tokens, then once the fans arrive at the event they can use these $PARK tokens via The Love Dispenser to donate to the artist.

If you have any other interesting thoughts on how they could be brought together or any other features that could bring this constellation to life we’d love to hear!

Other notable mentions

Bruce - Our CTO Bruce spent the 3 hours working on some better ways of visualising the metrics within the Tiny Apps and their constellations. We’ll share more about this in the next few weeks!

Eugene - Eugene bravely decided to go solo with the hack and got quite far, especially from the development point of view. He didn’t quite get to a point where he could share his Tiny App, but he managed to experiment with some very interesting music fan engagement mechanics.

Thanks to everyone who came, it was another amazing night! Keep your eyes peeled on our Meetup if you’re interested in coming to round 3. Hopefully we’ll see you next time. 🌞😎🔥