Forget speakers — just use everyone’s phones with Amplify

By Lulu Chang Published December 4, 2016

Amazon music — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Who needs speakers at a party when you’ve got dozens of guests along with their mobile phones? Amplify is a new app that emerged from the TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016 Hackathon, and its aim is to get everyone’s smartphone playing the same tune at the same time. Because really guys, we’re all in this together.

While you could try to create a similar effect by having everyone cue up the same song, and hope that they all press play on your command, human error can be quite frustrating. So instead, Amplify’s creators decided to rely on something far more dependable — technology. “We’ve been to too many parties with this problem — everyone’s got a phone, and we keep running into a situation,” one of the app’s creators, Jamie Hoyle, said before presenting the app at TechCrunch Disrupt. “We just never got around to starting it, so we said why not get it done at a hackathon.”

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It’s a pretty straightforward concept, but one that seems like it would get plenty of use in a social setting. Simply log into the Amplify service through a web browser (whether it’s from your phone, tablet, or computer), and your device will automatically begin playing the song of the moment. Sure, it may be different than using say, a Sonos speaker, but when you’ve got the same music blasting from every smartphone, iPad, and laptop in a home, the effect could be comparable.

While it’s a cool concept, it may not be one that comes to market all that soon. Jamie and his two other team members, Doherty and Jonathan Madeley, are presently otherwise employed at Harefoot Logistics, and Amplify is naught more than their side hustle. That said, Madeley noted that the trio were open to open sourcing certain aspects of the app, so if you’ve the wherewithal to do so, maybe you could be the one to really amplify Amplify.

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