A New Column for the Whyd Blog: Home Tech, starting with Aumi, The Smart Nightlight!

If you’ve been following us in the recent months you know that we’ve announced interesting things to come from Whyd. We are passionate about connected design, IoT, and everything that makes home living not only easier, but more aesthetic and emotional. In our research we stumble upon tons of interesting projects launching on crowd-funding sites around the world. They are created by brilliant minds who need as much support as possible to make their dreams into reality. It would be a crime not to share them with our trendy community of creative music lovers, since we have a hunch that you are into technology as much as we are. It’s part of the modern lifestyle. 

Crowd-funding has changed the paradigm of the way products are created. In this new column of the Whyd Blog, we will be presenting you with the coolest products we can find that combine technology and the home in an aesthetic way – exploring things like new interfaces, increased autonomy, and more functionalities – always with an eye for design. 

If you find any gems yourself, please send them to us! 

- Never stop jamming! 

Let’s start off with a simple idea that was maximized to its full potential. Introducing Aumi, a smart, blue-tooth connected nightlight that you can control either with an app or directly on the device through a unique touch interface. You can select from millions of different colors, control intensity, and set timers. A built-in battery keeps it on when the power goes out, and it doesn’t block a second plug! 

What we like: The combination of touch control and app. It’s not always easy to find your phone, type in your code, and open an app (which is hidden in a folder four home screens away), especially when it’s something as simple as turning the brightness down or up. Being able to control the Aumi on the device is a big plus. 

Bonus points: The design. It’s simple, elegant, and minimal. The rounded design invites you to touch it, and gives you a very intuitive way to do that, but the familiar dial function. 

There are already almost 1000 backers, and it has surpassed its goal already! The early bird specials are already sold out, but you can still get one Aumi if you back $35 on Kickstarter. 

Whyd: re-imagining the speaker

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We’re proud to belong to a community of music lovers like you. Together, we built the leading music curation platform. Now, we want to go farther.

We created Whyd to invent aesthetic, empathetic and simple products that help you feel positive emotions. We’re leveraging art, design and technology to bring you beautiful experiences. We love music. Music inspires us. Music is a fundamental part of our lives. We want to give you the next evolution in music.

  • We believe it is the time to re-imagine the home speaker and how you listen to music at home.
  • It is time to design a speaker that seamlessly connects you to the music you love.
  • It is time to design a speaker that looks insanely great to fit your home.

Music is art. Your speaker should be too.

We’re re-inventing the home speaker and we need your help! Join the journey and get notified as we share stories along the way:

Sign up here to our bi-weekly updates.

Huge Announcement Next Week

If you think things have been a little quiet here at Whyd recently, we can assure you, it’s about to get much louder. 

For the past nine months we have been carefully crafting our next product, and we hope the result will blow your socks off. We’ve added key new team members. We’ve expanded our workplaces. And we’ve been busy preparing all of the ground work. 

As music lovers, what we are building is catered to you, to your needs and desires, all coming from an opportunity we’ve identified to drive innovation towards a better music experience. 

Stay tuned, and never stop jamming!

  • June, 3 2015
  • update
  • whyd
  • office
  • new spot
  • montmartre
  • 18th
  • paris
  • work
  • team

End of an Era, Start of a New One - Our New Workspace

On a sunny June morning three years ago we moved two wooden tables from Ikea up two flights of stairs and opened the door to the small, bright office that would be Whyd’s home, in the Paris Labs Innovation incubator in Paris 20ème. We met some of our most faithful music lovers there, we grilled up meats and comraderie, we moaned when the coffee machine didn’t work, and we had discussions that were usually so loud that our neighbors - both next to and under - hated us. What can we say, we’re passionate people! 

Three years later, Whyd has a new workspace, still with entrepreneurs and young professionals, but we’ve moved up to Montmartre in the 18th arrondissement. We’re in a luminous, modern space called the “Jungle” with palms and beach umbrellas, alongside diverse companies like the real estate marketplace DingDong, a modelling agency, and even an oyster exporter! 

We’re looking forward to a lot of productive days in our new spot! 

Sunny BBQ in Paris

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Whyd’s Chief BBQ Officer had a chance to dust off the tools, scrap the rust off of the grill in the little backyard of our incubator, and under a blazing sunshine, kick off year with our first BBQ of 2015. 

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After the usual challenge of lighting the grills, we got the charcoal smoking and enjoyed Tony’s signature burgers. 

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Sadly, it was most likely the last BBQ at our incubator, before our lease is up at the end of May. The BBQ had become synonymous with Whyd, and it was in this very location that we first launched our music community exactly three years ago, with Gilles, Jie, Adrien, and Loick. 

For those of us with us from the very beginning, you remember how crazy things got

We’ve come a long way since then - as evidenced by the new team members in this photo: Laurent, Jeremy, and Damien’s arm. Luckily, they are fans of BBQ too. And whether we are in Paris, San Francisco, or China, we are all in complete agreement that the next chapter of Whyd will contain at least a BBQ or two. 

In the meantime, bon appetit, and never stop jamming! 

  • April, 13 2015
  • update
  • whyd
  • community
  • japan
  • music lovers
  • tokyo
  • kyoto

Come Say Hello Japan! こんにちは日本

Konnichiwa! We’ve recently seen a surge in music lovers joining us from The Land of the Rising Sun, and we’re super excited about that! As a team, we are passionate about meeting our music lovers in person, hearing their stories, and sharing a beer. Our trusty Community Manager Tony will be visiting Japan for two weeks from April 25th to May 10th, stopping in Tokyo, Kyoto, and bouncing around between a few other places too. If you’d like to meet him for a beer and some conversation, just send him an email: tony at whyd dot com.

He will be very happy to meet you, in addition to learning more about your culture and music! 

Never stop jamming! ジャミング停止することはありません

Say Hello To Laurent

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The situation is getting more exciting every day here at Whyd, as we power onwards towards the realization of our vision. In order to reach this harmonious vision, we need some extra help. Please give a big hello to Laurent, or new techno-lumberjack who is going to play a key role in our top-secret development. 

Laurent comes from the town of Muret, near Toulouse in south-west France. He is a lover of beards and music. He loves beards and music so much that he actually produces electronic music under the name Les Petits Barbus. He is a perfect match for the Whyd team. 

In addition to his music passion, he loves nature, mountains, and the mechanic side of do-it-yourself projects like fixing bikes. He also spent six months in Australia on a surfing road trip making him officially a hipster, and now officially a Whyd team hipster. 

Welcome, and never stop jamming Laurent! 

New Design, New Functionality, New Whyd

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We’ve been quietly working on improvements for Whyd which hit the light of day yesterday. We are very proud to show off the new web version of Whyd, which brings the design in line with our iOS app and blog. You probably saw the changes! 

There are some big differences and some subtle changes. The overall design is cleaner, brighter, and largely more modern, eliminating the boxy feel the old version for a flatter design. We brightened the experience from the darker days of black and gray. 

Most importantly, we incorporated the ADD button into the search box, so now you can search for a track directly instead of clicking the button to add a track, then searching for it. Don’t worry, it’s the central feature of Whyd, we wanted to make it better and more intuitive! 

The new version also includes better navigation, with a drop down menu to access your playlists and the hot tracks from any page. We also opened the landing page so that people can see the tracks trending in our community without creating an account. 

In the next few weeks we will also release a new version of the bookmarklet which will let you import multiple tracks/entire playlists from different sources, so you can add everything you want to Whyd! 

We’d love to hear what you think, so tell us how you feel about the new version here: [tony at whyd dot com]

Never stop jamming! 

  • December, 2 2014
  • update
  • new blog
  • design
  • whyd
  • style guide

New Blog Design!

Look around you, notice anything different? As we modernize all of the Whyd properties, we are bringing everything in line with our style guide: large, beautiful images; a cleaner, brighter feel; and a simpler layout.

All of these elements are designed to put the content forward: to let our music lovers shine and to help our community more easily access the wealth of media that we have and continue to produce. Special thanks to Loïck for his vision and to Damien for putting it in place!  

Since the beginning of this blog back in 2012, we’ve featured hundreds of artists, playlists, and tracks of the weekend. We have made announcements and explained updates. We’ve pointed out funny things that happen too. And most importantly, we’ve laid out and reaffirmed our vision.

There are many exciting things coming to Whyd is 2015, and we can’t tell you enough how happy we are to have you with us.

Never stop jamming!

PS: Like the new design? Hate it? Tell us what you think [tony at whyd dot com]