At my age, it’s hard to go out and see bands play at night. Plus, let’s just say my new neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of happening music venues. But a new mobile app from a local development shop might change that equation—at least for people at a hipper stage of life.
Cambridge, MA-based Intrepid Pursuits has released its first product, an app called Timbre. I got a demo of it last night at the Mass Innovation Nights event hosted at Intrepid Labs, the co-working space in the American Twine Building, which once housed Dogpatch Labs.
Timbre (pronounced “timber”) is a location-based app that tells you which bands are playing at local venues near you, connects you to iTunes so you can hear clips of their songs, and helps you buy tickets from concert websites. You can think of it as a local band-finder, or a music discovery channel, or a continuous playlist based on which artists are playing live in the area. The app is free and available for iOS devices (an Android version may be coming too); see the screenshot below.
Mark Kasdorf, the founder of Intrepid (both the dev firm and the co-working space), tells me the app had 2,000 downloads in its first eight hours of availability last Friday. Timbre originated as a weekend hackathon project, but might warrant its own company if it gets traction (we’ll see).
Kasdorf has an interesting background. After studying math and economics at Hamilton College, he went to both law school and business school at Boston University. While still in school in 2008, he started Burning Hollow Technologies, an energy management and home-automation company, before founding Intrepid Pursuits in 2010. “I’ve never had a real job,” he says proudly.
Meanwhile, Intrepid Pursuits is 22 people strong and growing. The bootstrapped studio’s business includes both consulting (building apps for big companies and startups such as The Tap Lab) and developing its own apps.
The event last night also featured a number of demos from other startups—some also working in the Intrepid Labs space—including ones from Leaf (reinventing point-of-sale systems for brick-and-mortar businesses), PollVaultr (iPad customer-feedback surveys at point of sale), and Tech Cal (tech-business calendar mobile app). We’ll be keeping a close eye on what we saw in that Twine building.
