Sunday, February 20, 2011

#Musichackday NYC: Youzakk.com et al.


Last weekend Nick Ursa and I participated in Musichackday at General Assembly. I'm a big fan of hackdays on specific verticals and have blogged about this one before so it was fun to finally participate. We used the Foursquare, Hunch and Spotify APIs to create Youzakk.com so that venue owners (+ stores & bars etc.) can stop playing crappy music and play music their customers actually want to listen to.


We thought the name "Youzakk" was kind of funny since the app basically creates your muzak. It generates a playlist (from Spotify) based on the musical preferences (from Hunch) of your Foursquare check-ins. Yet another reason to check-in!

Check out our live demo below (3:30- 6:00):

(Oh, btw in theory this only works for NYC-venues for the time being and sorry if performance isn't always great - that's what a 24h time limit and pinging 3 APIs gets you).

Some fun blog coverage from Ben Gleitzman at Hunch (kudos to him for showing us around the grooveshark API and of course for his awesome and somewhat similar hack - Automatic DJ - which I'm keen to test at my next cookingforlooking event:) and from Kim at PSFK. We generally had the same favorite hacks - go here for the full list of demos
Also fun that Scobleizer, Fred Wilson and Dens tweeted about it.

Btw, if someone at Boxee is reading this - please could you build a similar hack so we don't have to watch sports in bars anymore -




UPDATE: nice coverage from Hunch here and here