Between 25 to 27 November, Spotify Tech Challenge took place at Spotify HQ in Stockholm. It is an event of exploring new ways of interacting with music and collaborating across competences. Under the guidance of Spotify employees we were given the opportunity to create something amazing and present to our fellow participants finally.
On 25th November night, cross-functional teams were formed and there was a get-together where we could meet the other participants and get ready for the weekend ahead. Spotify employees gave us an introduction about how to properly use Spotify’s open data – Spotify Web API and Mobile SDKs, which would work as the code resource library during this weekend. Apart from that, they built fine atmosphere for us to get familiar with other team members and come up with new ideas of music service. We discussed advanced functions of music APPs and finalised three backup concepts as the basic goals of this weekend. Besides, it became a great night also because Thomas Stenström’s live show was arranged as a big surprise for us.
On the whole weekend, we decided and enriched our idea, found possible solutions to implement new functions, and completed the main programming work. In the morning, Spotifier recommended us thinking lines of new concepts of interacting with music. For instance, new ways to share music. Thus, we came out with an idea that A playlist can be attached to a specific place on the map. In order to implement this idea we built a project on Github, got source code from Google Map APIs and Spotify API. By organising this code properly, we developed our own mobile APP to make it possible that users can share music in a certain place and record their own story relating this music and this place. In the final step, we presented each other our final work and got new skills and knowledge from others.
As developers and normal users, we had this innovative concept of interacting with music. Open source from Spotify and Google Map provided feasible functional code to make it possible. Besides, Github worked as an innovation community to help us build private project. It was convenient for us to collaborate and organise our programming work. Within two days, we completed main functions. It can be seen that open and user innovation is an efficient way to implement user’s new need.