45sound brings fans and bands closer together by crowd sourcing great-sounding live music video footage. Our service allows fans to upload their videos from concerts that use 45sound technology and automatically replaces the poor audio with a professional live audio recording of the show. We have developed a full suite of products to deliver the 45sound experience. iPhone and Android apps allow fans to easily film and upload videos, and videos from DSLR and point & shoot cameras can be uploaded directly via the 45sound website.
Cathal Furey
45sound CEO & co-founder Cathal Furey ran online video production company Present Tense Productions and lectured in IT, Multimedia & Enterprise in Dublin City University prior to setting up 45sound. He holds a BSc in Finance, Computing & Enterprise and an MA in International Relations. His favourite band is Belfast’s And So I Watch You From Afar, who were the first band to trial 45sound technology on their 2012 Russian Tour.
BuddyBounce is a loyalty and engagement platform that allows musicians to know, manage and reward their fan base. These rewards transform casual fans into loyal fans, which increases fan engagement, retention and drives sales. It’s Salesforce.com for the entertainment industry.
Emma Joy Obanye
Emma Joy Obanye together with her business partner Giulia Piu founded BuddyBounce. BuddyBounce are currently incubated at the Wayra academy in London and are in closed beta. Emma studied engineering at University and has 8 years of experience in digital technology both in an agile development and agile project management capacity. Emma has led teams for large organisations including Microsoft and BSKYB.
One of our four overseas participants, Israel-based Joytunes makes apps focused on music education with a strong gaming slant. Piano Dust Buster and Recorder Master are their two main apps. In Piano Dust Buster you can use your own piano or a virtual keyboard to test yourself against a range of challenges with two main levels – Germ Attack for beginners and Staff Master for more advanced learners
Yigal Kaminka
Yigal Kaminka, Music Director and Founder of JoyTunes. Holds a double Masters degree and a third degree in Recorder and Oboe playing from the Karlsruhe University of Music in Germany. Yigal is a winner of numerous music competitions and is an active oboe soloist both in Europe and Israel, aside from holding the principle oboe position in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. In 2010 Yigal co-founded JoyTunes, revolutionizing the way people learn and practice music.
Makelight Interactive make smart special effects for live events that connect fans, artists and brands like never before. If you saw the Olympic games opening ceremony audience display – it’s like that but powered by the audiences smartphones and portable, scalable and accessible.
Joanna Alpe
After stints as a designer at a music company and a strategic brand agency, Joanna founded gold-award winning design studio We Love Inc, spanning London and Auckland. Past clients include Vodafone Music Awards, Sony Music UK and a music festival of 30,000 people. She was also a gig photographer for 10 years shooting the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Bjork and countless more.
Musemantik are the creators of Musicflow, an online music creation tool which makes it easy to add music to your videos, presentations or casual games. The tool allows you to control the ‘emotion’ of the music so you can sync emotional high points and low points within the music at appropriate points in the presentation/video without any need for complex editing.
Ronen Barzel
Ronen’s experience emphasizes computer technology used for artistic endeavours. He was an Animation Scientist at Pixar Animation Studios for over a decade, was a Senior Technologist at Adobe Systems, chaired the SIGGRAPH 2009 computer graphics conference, and was coeditor of the Audio Anecdotes digital audio book series. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology
Six3 is a video messaging application already available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play. Messages can be created using the app and shared privately or publicly via Facebook and Twitter. The company ultimately has a bigger play in mind but is looking to music to help to grow its audience
Leigh Middleton
Leigh has worked with major brands as a graphic designer and design director for nine years. His career has included working with brands (Amex, Bupa, BT, Carlsberg, Microsoft, EMI, MTV, Nokia, O2, Orange), specialist agencies (Frukt, Exposure) and blue chip agencies (OgilvyOne, TBWA, Iris). His work has included tactical commercial marketing, e.g. direct marketing for BT, BA and British Gas, as well as strategic brand marketing for Amex and Carlsberg. Leigh is also a partner in Get Some, a trend-setting record label and music blog reaching 15,000 UK and US tastemakers per month.
Spins.FM is reinventing the radio request line using social media. The app helps artists and radio stations engage fans by making it fun and easy to request songs on local radio — still the most proven way to drive demand for shows and increase sales. Artists using Spins.FM include Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Chris Brown and many more. Since launching in New York City in 2010. Spins.FM has processed over one million social radio requests from music fans in the US, and is currently expanding internationally.
David Baker
David Baker is a developer, designer, and entrepreneur who has worked in technology and music for 12 years. He founded Spins.FM in 2010 to help artists increase radio play by bringing radio requests to social media. Before that, David ran DavidBaker.TV a boutique digital agency in New York City working with top music labels on digital strategy and web development. Notable clients include Interscope Records, Sony Music, and Roc Nation.
Weezic reinvents the way musicians practice music, by providing them with augmented sheet music ® . It is a Parisian start-up that was founded in 2011 by Nicolas Arbogast and Gregory Dell’Era.
Nicolas Arbogast
All-around Geek Manager, Challenge Addict, Learning Junkie. Business & Web Developer. Before founding Weezic with Greg, Nicolas studied law, management and was a business strategy consultant for three years at Bain & Company. He is a passionate software developer, working mainly in Ruby/Rails & JS(coffeescript), an outdoor sports addict, and he knows Weezic definitely will be a game changer in music practice, now.
JUDGES
Christina Chen
Christina Chen is an Investment Manager at DN Capital where she covers mobile, internet and software investments in Europe. In particular, she has a strong focus in the mobile and music segments including investment in Apsmart (acquired by Thomson Reuters) – Unquote VC Exit of the Year 2012, MPme and Mobile Roadie. Prior to working at DN Capital, Christina worked at Investment Banking divisions of Deutsche Bank and HSBC where she advised large technology and media companies with M&A and financing transactions.
Tahir Basheer- Sheridans
Tahir is a Partner at Sheridans and is a highly experienced Intellectual Property, commercial and digital media lawyer. Tahir’s practice has a particular focus on the convergence of creative content and technology, he heads up the brands team and also covers the areas of music, fashion, computer games and entertainment software. Tahir advises a range of corporate and private clients both within the UK and abroad on everything from the development of new business models and distribution channels through to the management, exploitation and protection of their trademarks and brands. His clients range from international corporate entities, start-up technology companies, creative and digital agencies, entrepreneurs, high net worth individuals, musicians, designers and creative industry management teams.
Bertrand Bodson
Bertrand Bodson is EVP Global Digital at EMI Music where he is responsible for leading and developing the company’s global digital strategy.
Amongst other projects, Bertrand oversees the OpenEMI initiative to foster closer and more innovative contacts between EMI and the technology development sector, providing access to EMI’s content including tracks, videos and other assets to developers via API alongside a ground breaking revenue share deal. OpenEMI represents the most extensive collection of licensed music and other content to ever be available in this way, giving developers a one-stop destination to creative innovative digital products for EMI’s artists.
Prior to EMI Music, Bertrand was a co-founder of Bragster.com, the social network for daredevils and worked at the Boston Consulting Group and at Amazon.com where he launched the DVD Rental business across Europe. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Nadav Poraz – WhoSampled
Nadav Poraz is the CEO of Whosampled last year’s winner of the EMI Innovation Challenge. One year after graduating from Imperial College Business School, Nadav Poraz founded WhoSampled.com, the world’s largest online database of sample-based music that has become popular in the US, UK, France, Germany and Canada. The London-based digital music service has a massive amount of samples, cover songs, and remixes in its database which consists of over 140,000 tracks and 52,000 artists.
Martin Mignot – Index Ventures
Martin is a Principal in the London office, working with the early stage technology team. Previously, Martin was an analyst at UBS in London, where he was part of a team advising a range of large cap media and telecoms clients, including ITV, Vodafone and Zain, as well as numerous private equity funds. Martin holds a Masters in Finance & Strategy from Sciences Po Paris, where he launched and ran www.rsp.fm, the students’ web radio. He was also an advisor to Boudoir Prive, a beauty-subscription business which got acquired by Joliebox (www.joliebox.com) in December 2011.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…