What’s nearly as anticipated as the re-release of Arrested Development? Why its the release of Infinite Jukebox for iPhone.  I’ve finally started coding it and have something to show. Here it is running in the simulator:

And on my device:

There still a long way to go, but progress is being made. No tricks here, Michael. Illusions.

Update: Here’s Monday’s coding update .. now with fancy animations (as suggested by Ajay)

My daughter Jennie made a hack last week at Hill Holliday‘s TVnext Hack.  She won her category, and ultimately went on to win the grand prize. She got lots of prizes including multiple iPads, Rokus boxes, Apple TVs, lots of money and even Viggle Points.  Eliot wrote a really nice article about how Jennie found herself at the hackathon and how she managed to win it.  Since then it has been a rather crazy week for Jennie. She’s received multiple internship offers, a number of interview requests and an offer to help market her hack.  Today, her story got picked up by Mother Jones which has opened the mainstream media floodgates.   In the last 24 hours there have been stories in: US News and World Report,  The Los Angeles Times, Huffpo, CNET, Hollywood.com,  Dailydot, The AV Club, IMDB,  Turnstyle,  The Mary Sue (The Geek Guide to Girl Culture) and Wil Wheaton! More to come tomorrow. Yes, it is a big day for Jennie – she had her last AP Exam of high school (Calculus), she got her  birthday present (an iPhone), and she was interviewed for NPR Morning Edition (expect  to hear her tomorrow morning Update – it is here).  Her next life goal is to get more twitter followers than her friend Andrew (@ambushsabre).  It’s a lot for someone just two days shy of her 18th birthday.

(Note, Jennie has never ever seen The Empire Strikes Back).

Update: A few more stories:  Today, The BBC,  NBC News, The Hollywood Gossip, Buzz 60, FastCompany, Let’s get Digital

Update (May 11) – as I write this, a Good Morning America camera is filming Jennie typing on her computer.  She has had recent appearances in:  slashdot, Marketplace, Aljazeera, AP (Wire service),  lots of foreign news sites from Romania, Sweden and France.  Here’s a photo of the Good Morning America shoot:

Update: 5/12/2013 – Here’s a screengrab of the Good Morning America piece.

I’ve spent the weekend on the 35th floor of a very fancy office building in the heart of Boston hacking on the TV at Hill Holliday‘s TVnext Hack.  My hack is called ‘The Curation Station’.  It is a tool for helping music curators pick new music for TV shows.  Here’s how it works:

The curator enters the name of the the TV show – the app then uses either the Rdio or the Watchwith API to find music that has played on those shows.  The curator is then brought to the curation screen where the song collection can be visualized and previewed along any of 16 Echo Nest parameters such as energy, loudness, danceability, artist hotttnesss and so on.

You can click on any particular song, inspect all of its attributes   You can use this to explore the collection and to find new music that matches the mood or style of show.  If you like a particular song, you can ask to see and hear more new music like that song.  If you like one of the recommended songs you can save it for future use.  You can try the app out here: The Curation Station 

I’ve enjoyed the weekend at TVNext hack.  It was a really nice event – with all the best amenities for hacking. Well done all!

Next up in this week of demos is The Artist News demo. This is a simple demonstration of how to get recent news articles for any of the  millions of artists tracked by The Echo Nest.  To get artist news,  you use the artist/news API call.  This call accepts the artist name or ID (an Echo Nest ID or the artist ID from any of our Rosetta partners, including Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody,  7Digital and many more). You can also set a ‘high relevance’ flag if you want to restrict the results to only news articles that are mainly about the given artist.

The Artist News Demo is quite straightforward. Type in an artist’s name, and you’ll get the most recent news about the artist.  Here’s a screenshot:

You can try out the app here: Artist News.  The source is on github.

There’s no hackathon this weekend, but that’s no excuse not to write some code.   I’ve been wanting to experiment with amcharts, a Javascript charting package so I wrote a web app that shows lots of charts and graphs for artists.  The app is ArtistX.  It is an artist explorer that lets you look at all of the Echo Nest song parameters for any artist. For instance, you can look at the Energy Distribution of songs by Weezer:

Energy Distribution of Songs By Weezer

You can look at the tempo distribution of songs by The Rolling Stones:

Tempo Distribution for the Rolling Stones

Or you can look at scatter plots that show 4 attributes at once (X, Y, size and color). Here’s a plot of all of Muse’s songs showing the energy, loudness, hotttnesss and liveness:

Scatter plot for Muse

You can interact with the plots – click on a bar or point in a plot to listen to songs (via Rdio).

The app lets you explore across 11 different song parameters: energy, loudness, danceability, liveness, speechiness, hotttnesss, tempo, duration, key, time signature and mode.  You can use the app to find all sorts of interesting things. Want to listen all the stage patter for an artist?  Create scatter plot for the artist with liveness and speechiness as the X, Y parameters. The songs in the upper right-hand corner of the plot will be the ones you are looking for. Try it with an artist like Elvis Presley or Dean Martin.

Give the app a spin here:  ArtistX.  The source is at github/echonest/ArtistX

Sunday at SXSW was the Artist’s Hack - where passionate developers from around the world gathered to build cool stuff.  Artist’s Hack was organized by Backplane and Spotify and is dedicated to building the future of music, art, video and collaborative though on the web and mobile during SXSW.

The hack was held at Raptor House – a short walk from downtown Austin. There was plenty of bandwidth, good food and beverages for the 8 hour hackathon.   APIs were in abundance: Spotify, The Echo Nest, SendGrid, Twilio, Youtube, Klout, Paypal, Gimbal, SeatGeek, Aviary, Etsy, Topspin, Chute, Dropbox, Music Dealers and others were all there in force offering their technology for hackers to use.

Hackers built around 20 hacks during the event.  Some of my favorites are:

• biomuse – creates playlists based upon your biometrics. This was built on top of the biobeats platform. Quite neat stuff. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
• Jamblot – visualize your song history in a creative way to commemorate any period of your life that affected your music choice.  Jamblot draws your song history for you. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
• Party Together - ambient automatic shared playlists for your party. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
• We browse in public – Stream all of your browser activity live to others. Chat with others based on their activity.
• Bundio – Monetize dropbox.

My hack is A longer life for post-rock fans. This was my first time using the Twilio API. It was a lot of fun to build. The Twilio API and whole developer experience is awesome. Any company with an API should try to emulate what Twilio does.

One novel aspect of the event was that Cory Booker was one of the judges. Here he is watching Danny Kirschner give the Bundio demo

Cory is a pro – when there was a power outage that delayed some of the demos, Cory conducted an impromptu ’interview’ with one of the founders of Backplane while the crew scurried to restore the power.

All in all, the Artist’s Hack was great fun, with lots of creative hacks. Well done Spotify and Backplane!

I like to listen to post-rock. Unfortunately, post-rock bands tend to have very long names like ‘Explosions in the Sky’, ‘God Speed you black emperor’, and ‘This will Destroy You’.  I have a long commute and I will find that I am frequently risking my life trying to type a long band name into my music player.  I wish Siri supported non-itunes players like Spotify, but until then I need a way to tell Spotify to play music by bands with long names. If I don’t, I will die in a fiery crash on Route 3 in Lowell Mass. A horrible way to go.   So this weekend at the Artists Hack I built something to solve this problem. It lets you play music in Spotify without having to type long artist names. Here’s how it works.

I used Twilio to set up a phone number such that if you text it an artist name, it will respond with a spotify link to a song by that artist.  You can add the phone number to your contacts as “music player”,  You can then use Siri  in a dialog like so:

Me: Send a text to Music Player

Siri: What would you like it to say

Me: Explosion in the Sky

Siri: OK, I’ll send it

A few seconds later I get a text message back with a link to a popular track by Explosions in the Sky. I tap the link and Spotify opens and plays the song.  It is about as simple a hack as can be, but it solves a real problem for me.    Here’s the screenshot:

If you want to use it – send a text with the artist name (and nothing else) to 603 821 4328. The code is on github.  Update … much to my surprise this hack won two prizes at the hackathon – the Twilio 1st prize and the overall 3rd prize.