PostrWall Wins BeMyApp Music App Hackathon

By David Knight |

Wander around any town or city and you’ll see countless posters for concerts and other music events pasted on any spare bit of fence or wall. And an app which moves these posters online won the BeMyApp hackathon on Sunday night to take home the €5,000 first prize.

The seven-man team behind PostrWall put together the app in just 48 hours, and won over a jury of five which included yours truly. Now they have big plans – including heading Stateside for South By Southwest (SXSW).

A total of nine teams fought out a closely-contested finale at the BeMyApp WeekEnd Music Hackathon, which saw the creation of apps powered by streaming music service Deezer and its new open API. Deezer provides access to 15 million tracks as well as international metadata from 49 countries on a revenue-sharing model.

And after two days of hard work, the pitch contest at the Ahoy! co-working space in Charlottenburg provided a chance for the enthusiastic teams to show off what they have achieved. There were some cool ideas, including Snoozr – an alarm clock app that uses increasingly annoying music every time you hit the snooze button – and Tape.it, which brings making mix tapes for your friends and loved ones into the digital age.

But it was PostrWall which claimed a narrow win. One of the team members was Alex Ford, an American from Austin, Texas who was passing through Berlin when he decided to take part in a hackathon for the first time.

He told Silicon Allee after the event: “I felt that I was in Berlin and had nothing to lose so I just came out here. Everybody just came together, with designers and developers and idea men, and it just came together into a product. It was just absolutely amazing to see from all the teams that participated.”

PostrWall brings together musicians, concert organisers, app users and music streaming services, and allows people to find cool music wherever they are. They can even sample a band they haven’t heard of through Deezer.

And Alex revealed that he has big plans for the app, specifically to take to his hometown, which plays host to SXSW every year. He added: “They have 1,000 concerts minimum, all with posters, all in one place downtown in a three mile radius, in one week. Everybody comes there, they get this app, they scroll through these shows; it’s probably the best way to figure out what to do on the fly or even planning ahead a couple of days. All the tourists can use it then go home and take it to their prospective cities. I really think it has a lot of power behind it to be a real thing.”