In this month’s edition of First Fridays, we introduce you to Kasey Fleisher Hickey, co-founder of Turntable Kitchen, a site devoted to the increasingly significant intersection of music and food. In addition to featuring recipes using local Bay Area ingredients, along with musical pairings to score each dish, Turntable Kitchen offers a subscription-based Pairings Box. The monthly delivery includes a limited edition 7-inch vinyl record, a digital mix tape, three seasonal recipes, and a special ingredient or two that can be used to produce one of the dishes featured. Read on for Kasey’s thoughts on customer retention and the other startups that she looks to for inspiration.
Between the endless lines, corporate sponsors, and wallet-sucking airfares, South by Southwest Music is no longer the indie haven it once was. While attendance shows no signs of waning when the festivities kick off this week, a handful of alternative festivals hoping to siphon off devoted fans with better weather, cheaper tickets, or, in one case, snow have sprung up.
Savannah Stopover: Georgia’s Savannah Stopover aims to please local music fans that usually have to travel to Atlanta or Athens for shows, as well as bands that want to break up the trip to Austin. The festival, which just completed its second now-annual run, occurs the week before SXSW and is in many ways its opposite: there are no gifting suites, arena-caliber bands, or exorbitant wristband fees. What it does offer up in spades is Southern hospitality. In addition to communal dinners, welcome bags filled with local treats, and shows that are tailored to complement each band’s sound, about 90% of participating musicians reside with locals who volunteer to be hosts.
The line between the digital and physical worlds continues to blur, as evidenced by the buzz surrounding 3D printing’s ability to transform computerized renderings into tangible objects. And, since people are now reliant on technology for most everything they do, the one-dimensionality of analog products is leaving them, well, a bit flat. However, several new devices are designed to change all that by giving new “life” to formerly inert objects.
Twine: There’s now an easy way to know if one’s dog is snacking in the shoe closet or if the laundry is done. Twine is a new device that enables everyday household objects to tweet, email or text alerts. The 2.5 inch square box contains an accelerometer, temperature monitor, moisture sensor, and other external sensors that recognize surrounding activity. When it’s plugged in, it automatically recognizes a corresponding online application and reacts to what the sensors are “seeing” in real time. By setting up rules based on a menu of conditions and actions, users can go about their lives without having to worry about, say, a flooded basement.
Kids today rack up charges on their parents’ iTunes accounts, but children of the ’80s, too, had ways to spend surreptitiously. When unsuspecting moms and dads weren’t getting solicited by collection agencies for unpaid Columbia House bills, they were being billed by hotlines advertised during Saturday morning cartoon blocks. Tapping into nostalgia for said hotlines, a rash of creative projects has people using their phones for more than texting and apps.
VFILES Toll-Free Hotline: Glossy V Magazine has been artfully, and intelligently, covering fashion and popular culture for 13 years. This spring, V is launching VFILES, a new social media platform “for the image obsessed.” As a teaser for the forthcoming aesthetics archive, the V team created a VFILES hotline (1-855-MYV-3800) that prospective readers can call to get a taste of the types of content one might expect. Press 1 to hear new exclusive music tracks (artists include Brooklyn MC Zebra Katz). Press 2 for party listings (including one that suggests wearing waterproof shoes…?). And, press 3 for what’s hot (Madonna, Red Bull, chunky highlights) and what’s not (Monsanto, neon tracksuits, Monroe piercings).
From cat videos to memes to current events, YouTube is a vast ocean of entertainment. As such, playlists have become a necessary way of tracking and queuing videos, particularly those of the music variety. And with Spotify’s free unlimited service having expired, people are looking for new ways to access tunes from the cloud that don’t show up on their credit card bills. On the heels of flavor-of-the-month Tubalr are a flood of similar applications that offer tools for creating simple, convenient YouTube playlists.
MusicTandem: Pandora’s most alluring feature is its ability to identify users’ musical preferences through taste graphing. Taking that concept in a more visual direction is iPad app MusicTandem, which helps people filter through millions of YouTube videos by creating custom video playlists to match their unique tastes. To begin, listeners build channels by typing in a favorite artist, song or genre, upon which they are presented with relevant videos to queue up and offered suggestions of similar bands for uninterrupted music video streaming. To ensure that favorites aren’t forgotten, any video can be added to a ‘loved tracks’ list or can be shared with friends through via Facebook and Twitter.
