“What’s your favourite humming noise?” Five minutes into one of the globe’s biggest tech events and someone appears to be quoting a line from Father Ted. It’s the founder of humtap.com, pitching his humming app. “Have you ever hummed for a few seconds in a shower? Within a few seconds you can make original music, copyright free, on your own,” says Tamer Rashad, whose iPhone app is “soft launching” in Ireland soon. Hmm...
Deep in the recesses of the Web Summit, beyond the stages where tech giant CEO’s discuss their expanding waistlines, madcap inventors of the information age sell their wares. Unusual apps on display include Hug Me (send people virtual hugs), All Square (a social network for golfers), and wearable tech such as energy generating soles for shoes.
This year’s event, which had its first music stage, danced to a different beat. In the grand hall of RDS some start ups plugged radio apps (radiosound.us), others taught instruments through smartphones (musopia.net). Even Latin America ventured into the damp streets of Dublin to pitch their online answer to MTV, sayyeah.tv.
We snuck a look at the Pono Player, Neil Young’s high fidelity audio device. The singer has been banging on about the crap fidelity of MP3s for ages, so does his invention fit the bill? Equipped with a single track — from Young’s album Harvest, fittingly — the Pono presents studio-quality playback. The device looks like the bastard child of a Toblerone bar but it confirms Young’s argument that music should be valued, not compressed and commodified.
At a time when vinyl records are doing the business, this year’s Web Summit brought retro chic to some of its tech. Fojo is an iOS camera application that gets physical. The app’s features include manual focus, exposure, white balance fine tuning, and more. At the Summit, its Croatian creators demonstrated the Enfojer – hardware that allows users to develop photos from a smartphone using traditional darkroom techniques.