Public display announced via Kanye’s Twitter feed to much fanfare
When you’re looking to debut a new song to the whole entire world, playing it in only a handful of cities throughout the world is probably not the best way to gain publicity.
What makes Kanye West’s approach work is the fact that he debuted his latest single, “New Slaves”, on the side of prominent buildings in each respective city—66 in total as a matter of fact.
The events were announced via Kanye’s Twitter account, which included a kick-over to his website where fans could find out the location of each video play. Some of the cities include New York, Chicago, Toronto, Paris, and Sydney.
Miss your chance to see a super-size video of Kanye’s mug on the side of a building in your hometown? Check out Brooklyn’s play in the video below:
Classic video game comes to mobile devices; fans will love hearing the theme song via portable speaker
Finally! One of the best video games ever has come to Android — the original Sonic the Hedgehog is here, and it can be downloaded via Google Play for just $2.99.
The game was released by Sega and the only modification made was to allow for touch controls, otherwise it’s exactly like the original.
In terms of characters, along with Sonic, users can unlock Tails and Knuckles, characters that appeared later in the Sonic series.
The download is TOTALLY worth it — the mobile version is every bit as awesome as the original version. What’s more, when you hook up one of our super-loud Bluetooth speakers, hearing the original Sonic theme song on full blast will drop a serious case of nostalgia on you and your buds while you guys play the game.
Sonic the Hedgehog was already released on iOS a little bit ago to much fanfare. Users can now go back and update the game to get access to Tails and Knuckles, too.
We know you’ve been waiting for this moment for what seems like eternity. THIS IS the week. The goods have already landed at our fulfillment center. The boxes are going to start flowing out the door. We want to give a huge shout out to all of our backers on Kickstarter for helping make this project happen. We also want to give a big thank you to our investors at Walden Venture Capital, our director John Zeisler for helping set us up with Apple retail, and David Dolby for his product design input. I’m really grateful for my friends and family that helped us get all this started too. Without further adieu, lets get into getting everyone “slappin’ da bass.”
Boombot REX Quick Start
The Boombot REX is incredibly easy to use, but you may find our Quick Start Guide helpful if you need additional guidance. There should be some juice in your Boombot to start, but most units will not come with a 100% full charge.
Precautions
We’ve been using the Boombot REX for several months now and there are a couple areas we’d like to draw some attention to just to ensure you get the best performance and lifetime on your unit.
be careful on the micro usb
When you plug in the rear micro USB on the Boombot REX, do not try to push the connector too far. It might look like the connector is not in all the way, but if the green light is glowing on the speaker, the unit is accepting a charge. We are making some modifications to reinforce this connector, but we found that by being a little more ginger with this connector will increase the longevity of long term wear and tear. Should you have any issues with it, we are happy to offer our free repair/replacement.
Use the bezel for leverage to avoid denting the front grill
With the current position of the Boombot REX buttons, the front grill can become warped if you try to use it for leverage to access the buttons. Try using the bezel around the grill for leverage instead and keep that grill looking fresh ‘n’ flat. This is just a cosmetic thing, but if your unit is looking old and haggard, you can freshen it up with custom grill kits.
respect the clip tension
We increased the spring tension on the clips to be slightly more badass. While this is awesome for getting crazy with your unit staying secured, we noticed that if you put your thumb positioned vertically, it puts a lot of tension on the clip loop. The clip loop can snap under too much tension. We are building reinforced clips which we are happy to ship out to anyone that has an issue with this in the field. This is primarily another cosmetic issue that will go unnoticed. The hole in the clip is a great place to add a fail-safe tie if you use this product while riding at high speeds. A shoestring or heavy duty rubber band make a great fail-safe.
Up and Coming
boombot Rex launch video
We were inspired by this Chevy Silverado commercial to capture the essence of owning a Boombot REX. This isn’t JUST another speaker. This is a Boombot. Enjoy.
customize your boombot rex at our launch party
If anyone is around SF on June 7th, we are having our launch party at Dijital Fix in San Francisco. We will have a wide assortment of grills, clips, and connector covers for visitors to trick out their Boombot REX in their own unique way. Accessories will be FREE at the event (limit one set per visit, Boombot owners only).
Thanks again for everyone’s continued patience and support. We appreciate everyone that has been spreading the good word. Whenever you get the chance, please let us know how your experience has been. While this is a fantastic milestone for the company, we know the best is yet to come. Let’s ride.
LOW STOCK ALREADY
Our first airmail of Boombot REX has nearly been wiped clean. In the last month, we got higher than anticipated online orders. We are currently arranging a second airmail of product to keep up with the demand. We recommend getting a pre-order for all Boombot REX models. Backorders will be taken care of in the order they are received with expected delivery of 2-3 weeks. We will do our best to keep up with the influx.
Creating corporate culture isn’t something every entrepreneur thinks about initially. A lot of founders don’t start off with a big team, so the early stages of a startup have more to do with character and work ethic than culture. Corporate culture is created when you have an organization (for better or for worse). The culture of a company defines the brand and thus has a tremendous impact on the success or failure. Boombotix has a very unique corporate culture and I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on what we’re doing well and where we are really screwing up. If you have a bootstrapped startup, this is a pretty useful article to understand how to get people to give their 110% at 50% of the market rate salary. This isn’t about money. This is about culture.
I’m going to admit that I am guilty of not finishing a book cover-to-cover for at least 19 months. Maybe I failed to find content that held my interest or offered unique insight. More likely, I leaned towards content on blogs that was narrowly focused. It solved immediate problems and curiosities but failed to give me a bigger picture on what I was trying to accomplish. Tony Hsieh’s book on Delivering Happiness helped drive a major paradigm shift in my business strategy. If you are in the middle of pivoting your company or at the start of building a great brand, this is an awesome read that takes you through the roller coaster of being an entrepreneur (without having to lose millions of dollars). This book helped me think about our culture on a deeper level. Continue reading →
3 Boombot REX speakers synchronized using Seedio App
the closest attempt at making a music synchronization app that we actually want
Ever since we started our company, we had a vision to create a social experience through portable audio. One of the pieces of technology we have been trying to develop is a way to synchronize audio across multiple mobile devices to enhance our portable speakers with ad-hoc networks. We’ve seen a number of apps come through that attempt to do it, and Seedio is probably the closest we’ve seen so far. The Seedio full version allows one person to play DJ and create a local broadcast over a Wi-Fi network.
Seedio’s user interface is pretty simple. There are two modes (seed and receive). To “seed” a song, pick a song stored locally on your device (you can also pay an extra $.99 if you want to use Youtube or Soundcloud as a content source). This creates a channel that will pop up on anyone set up on the “receive” mode on the same network. The range is basically as big as you can make a single Wi-Fi network. I used a good length podcast (DnBRadio Drum and Bass to be exact) and my first attempt broadcasting was successful. My broadcasting was being done on my iPhone 5 and the receiving on an iPhone4S. The channel quickly popped up on the 4S with my phone I.D. and the song that was being played. The first time I attempted to jump on the channel, the songs were a little bit off sync. I stopped and restarted the broadcast and the second time, the songs went into sync pretty nicely. I rounded up three phones to get a set of Boombot REX speakers synced up and it sounded pretty rad.
On the iPhone4S, you can pull up a list of previous sessions. This is kind of cool because it offers receivers a convenient way to purchase the content that was being streamed to them. The list remains on the device so that even after the broadcast is done, you can still go back and locate the content…possibly even download it if it’s that awesome.
Seedio has several shortcomings. It is not yet truly mobile while using Bluetooth devices. The app claims that you can use the tethering from your iPhone to create a network (which you can). This worked fine when we used speakers or headphones on line-in modes, but not while connected to a Bluetooth audio device. I’m not quite sure why Bluetooth would interfere with the song buffering. On some occasions, I got a song to start on the receiver device, but the performance was off sync and short lived. The tethering Wi-Fi signal off a phone not only guzzles phone battery, but the range is relatively short (less than 30 feet) This doesn’t exactly solve our music synchronization conundrum for biking, skiing, flash mobs, or silent discos, but it does enable some functionality anywhere we have a good WiFi spot. The other issue is that if you use music streaming over a tethered connection, be prepared to rack up some data usage.
limitations with music synchronizing audio over bluetooth and wifi
There are limitations to music synchronization on Bluetooth. The bandwidth is too small to handle streaming music to multiple devices. We’ve seen some speakers use CSR’s True Wireless Stereo protocol for getting a single device to pair to two speakers, but it takes three to make a party. Bluetooth on most devices is also pretty limiting in distance (30-40ft in most Class 2 Bluetooth devices). On WiFi, when you use a public network, there is actually a lot of noise on the network that results in latency and poor sync performance. This is perhaps where 4G/LTE networks might actually be even better.
Overall, I’m stoked that other people are looking at this type of tech. We still don’t see anyone on iOS doing this type of music synchronization function over 3G/4G/LTE, so I guess we’ll have to do that ourselves.
