Last week was a big one in New Orleans. Music lovers were excited about the fun-filled two weekends of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and techies and entrepreneurs were in town for the annual Collision Conference.
There’s one place where music and technology are merging, and not for the first time in the Big Easy. Native New Orleanian and longtime hackathon planner Travis Laurendine is the entrepreneur behind the first ever hackathon that happened in the middle of Jazz Fest weekends. Through a connection made at South by Southwest, he met the event’s lead sponsor Cloudinary.
Doron Sherman, Vice President of Evangelism at Cloudinary, told Silicon Bayou News the hackathon was making good progress over the course of a few days.
Laurendine said the hackathon isn’t like typical hackathons because people keep joining as the week goes on. All participants are excited about the local music scene and connecting it with new technology.
Cloudinary was hopeful the hackathon participants would use its image and video management technology while building out their ideas for enhancing the city’s music scene. The platform powered the lead project, which was run by local developers Eric Normand and Brad Huber Jr. who were also working alongside well-known bounce musician Big Freedia.
The lead project at the hackathon, now live, is called Bounce DOT COM.com, a site solely designed for users to view bounce videos and upload videos of themselves twerking.
“One of the interesting aspects of this hackathon for Cloudinary is that music (and entertainment in general) is not currently a vertical that Cloudinary technology is known for,” shared Sherman, “so a successful implementation of the lead project would be instrumental in proving the utility of Cloudinary technology for many more projects in this domain.”