Here’s who we met at the Williamsburg NY MusicTech Meetup Holiday Bash

Startup entrepreneurs are the punk rockers of tech. So what if they wear less leather? That’s not important. What is important is the DIY ethos and the willingness to disrupt.

So it is appropriate that music entrepreneurial scene has been meeting up at The Knitting Factory, a music venue that’s known for its edge since opening in Williamsburg in 2009.

Seth Hillinger told us that he founded the Meetup six years ago, when he had his own startup to help musicians sell their music. He needed a way to show it to other people, but that was before mobile made it easy to pass apps around. He needed a place where someone could bring a laptop and show a product off. So the MusicTech Meetup was born.

This latest meetup was more social than demo, though some displays were on a large screen without presentations.

Here are some of the people we met at the event:

From left to right: Ben Harmer (Business Lead), John Hunchar (Engineer) and Kenneth Liew (Designer) of Beat Farm. Harmer and Hunchar live in Philadelphia but Liew lives in Ridgewood. They presented their product at the Meetup a few months ago. It’s a device that you put on your snowboard or skiboard that remixes the music in your headphones based on moves made by your skiboard or snowboard. They plan to launch a Kickstarter for it in January.

Jacob Mortensen came out to show the holiday party a side project of his, Demo Queue. It allows a group of people to vote on a playlist, moving songs up or down based on the votes it receives. It was built in Mortensen’s free time, at his home in Prospect Heights. He told us he’s still looking for the ideal use case. It uses the Spotify API right now, making it impossible to monetize.

Matt Green is the Cofounder and Product Manager at Moodsnap. A Williamsburg resident on a distributed team of six, Green met his cofounder at a MusicTech meetup about a year before, when he happened to be visiting New York from Boston. Moodsnap is a platform that will set up personalized music stations based on moods, indicated by images supplied by the app.

There’s a gap between music lessons on YouTube, which has no interaction, and playing Guitar Hero, which doesn’t actually teach you anything. That’s the gap that Playground Sessions hopes to bridge, Darren Majwski, VP of Licensing at the ten person startup told us. They plan to close the gap by teaching people to play piano with interactivity and by establishing some sort of standards. Quincy Jones has become a brand ambassador for the company and one of its investors.