Mugasha has scored an exclusive on a popular bootleg remix track from the Halo 3 soundtrack by Tritonal. And their gain is, well, your gain. Because you can download the track for free.
Now, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Portland-based Mugasha—the service that helps slice and dice DJ podcasts into manageable, digestible, and shareable chunks—is one of my favorite music sites around. Always great tracks. Always streaming. And always finding ways to make themselves more relevant to their audience.
Well get ready to be happy. Because the folks at Portland-based Mugasha are working to bring some of your favorite DJs to your favorite Web browser – live.
While listening to recordings of DJ sets is great, nothing beats hearing a DJ spinning a set live. But for many of us, getting out to the spots where that’s occurring—where the DJs are doing their thing—can be challenging at best. What’s not quite as challenging, however, is finding time to sit in front of a laptop.
Anyone who has spent any time around Silicon Florist realizes that I tend to be a little longwinded. And that’s putting it lightly. Brevity? Not my strong suit. And for many, reading through my lengthy posts isn’t the preferred way of getting their tech news.
So, I’ve been thinking about ways to get you more of the news you want with less effort on your part. And a different form of media seemed to be the best way to do it. So I begged started talking to the Strange Love Live folks and after a series of tantrums and crying fits on my part discussions, they finally agreed to help.
As you may have read in my previous gushing, Portland Startup Weekend graduate Mugasha launched this week. And what’s a great launch without a great launch party? Well, it’s a great launch. But it’s still cool to have a launch party.
[HTML3]I’ve been following and listening to Portland-based Mugasha—a service that gives you access to an impressive collection of streaming electronica DJ sets sliced into manageable chunks—since its humble beginnings at Portland Startup Weekend in May 2008. (I’ve got Myon and Shane 54 going as we speak.) Since then, they’ve been covered by Scoble (although the Qik video looks like it’s gone now), got some love when they launched their private beta, and were selected for the SXSW 2009 Accelerator program. But I haven’t been able to really gush about them until now. Read More
If you’re into electronica, you’re likely a heavy podcast consumer—a great way to get a ton of new tunes to fill your library. But there’s one major issue with that format: like the live sets, DJ podcasts are a single unbroken stream of music—often hours on end—with no way to determine which songs are which and who’s being sampled.
Enter Portland-based Mugasha—arguably the most successful service to come out of Portland Startup Weekend. Mugasha slices and dices DJ sets into consumable—and intelligible—chunks, making it easier on the listener and providing more promotional opportunities for the DJs.
I’ve been a huge fan of Mugasha and the DJs they’ve had since their launch. But the pool of available music had been growing a little stagnant. Until today. Read More
SXSW is a big stage for the young company. With the event’s mix of music and technology, it’s sure to give Mugasha access to some noted movers and shakers who will no doubt appreciate the service and its capabilities.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Mugasha has stepped into the limelight. (Akshay Dodeja of Mugasha took the chance to speak with Robert Scoble, last year, and I got the chance to profile them on ReadWriteWeb.) But SXSW marks Mugasha’s first chance to demo their private beta to a large group of people outside the immediate Portland tech scene:
Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator is the newest addition to the SXSW Interactive schedule of activities. Scheduled Monday, March 16 at the Downtown Austin Hilton, the event spotlights some of the web’s most exciting new innovations, enabling the entrepreneurial visionaries behind these new products to demo their creations in front of a live audience of industry professionals and technology trend-setters.
It’s great to see Mugasha—and by association, Portland—getting this sort of recognition.
Even if you’re not going to SXSW, you should give Mugasha a spin—especially if you like electronica. What’s Mugasha do? Basically, it parses DJ set podcasts—usually one long multi-hour track with no song info—into separate song tracks, allowing user to play the songs they want to play and actually know which tunes they’re playing.
For more information or to get an invite to the private beta, visit Mugasha.
Akshay Dodeja demoed Mugasha. Originally developed during Portland Startup Weekend, the site has gone through several iterations in development—now it’s ready to launch in private beta.
If you’re into electronica, you’re going to want to check it out. What’s it do? Basically, it parses DJ set podcasts—usually one long multi-hour track with no song info—into separate song tracks, allowing user to play the songs they want to play and actually know which tunes they’re playing.
Taking a different cut on a previous iteration, Kevin Chen demoed a new version of Metroseeq, a mapping application that gives you the options to search for resources around a town, in-between two locations, or by marking your own route and allowing the service to plot resources along that route.
The new version of Metroseeq relies on the Google API and returns to the four closest resource for any search.
The other three demos showed off some new development.
Michael Kelly showed us Foodisms, an early version of a restaurant and food searching site with a twist: rather than searching by cuisine, you search by ingredient. Foodisms then looks for that ingredient and suggests a variety of dishes at any number of restaurants.
The current dataset is currently limited to 100 Portland restaurants (which, for Portland, is a narrow subset) but the foundational structure for the product has been established. If they can scale the data entry—dish by dish, ingredient by ingredient—this is going to be very cool indeed.
Scott Andreas shared Sunago, community management software for nonprofits—especially advocacy groups. Its mission is simple:
“We’re tired of companies charging exorbitant amounts of money for apps that, well, suck. We’d rather you to spend your money on your vision, not software. That’s why Sunago is free for small organizations, and affordable for larger ones.”
Sunago has already been deployed with several nonprofits and Scott is constantly adding new features.
Finally, Dave Miller demonstrated OpenLaszlo, an ECMAScript tool for building “rich internet applications” that will let the developer script structured content that can be compiled and deployed as either HTML or Flash—from the same code. Dave showed off some of the capabilities and demoed an app he had built.
Based on the beginning of his demo, I’d also offer that Dave is available to perform as a mime for your kids’ birthday parties or your next corporate function. Or not.
I hate it when I write the whole story in the headline. But, suffice it to say, that Akshay Dodeja, who came to Portland to attend Portland State and happens to be one of the folks who built Mugasha during Portland Startup Weekend, got the chance to sit down with some guy named Robert Scoble.
I don’t know. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
[HTML1]
Incredibly well spoken, calm, and collected. What a great representative of Portland tech startups.
They’re all in various states of startupedness, currently. But, rest assured, I’ll be dedicating posts to each of these projects as they gain their footing.
For now, let’s focus on Portland Startup Weekend, itself, with a good ol’ fashioned Silicon Florist round up:
At Portland Startup Weekend
“Most participants do it as a challenge to push themselves and see how much they can get done in a weekend. Some take it as a complete business. This reflects on their working style. Those who want to push fast (i.e. Mugasha) focuses on rolling out a working prototype as soon as possible. Those who want to build a business (i.e. TreasuReCycle) starts with an implementation/project plan. No approach is right or wrong, but they have to achieve something by Sunday at 6.”
The Evolution of Startup Weekend
“The day Startup Weekend Portland was announced I was very excited and have been looking forward to it ever since. I have been following Startup Weekend in other cities and the way it has been evolving from city to city for a while.”
Portland Startup Weekend, Day 1
“In the end we settled on five projects, and clustered around those which caught our interest. Except for one group which disbanded for lack of participants (though they had a promising idea), the skillsets seemed to distribute pretty well.”
No doubt more posts will be emerging as the participants recover from the weekend. And I’ll work to capture them here.
If you’ve posted something that I’ve missed, please comment and I’ll make sure to link it up.
