Music
A talented lineup of founders, engineers and product developers showcased their music hardware at our MusicTech meetup. We were also lucky to have four incredible sponsors - Blender Design, WNT Ventures, StretchSense and GridAKL.
Speaker #1: Lucy Mangin - Hardware engineer
Lucy Mangin works in ideation and creative design at Fisher & Paykel while running her own design business. She believes connecting emotion and design is intrinsic to successful products. Using 3D-printing & CNC techniques she has been working on how we can use tactile surfaces to create richer experiences with sound.
As an early adopter of many rights, Lucy was one of the first in New Zealand to gain a Masters of Design Innovation in 3-D printing.
Speaker #2: Martin Bell from JAVA Hi-Fi
Martin Bell is founder of JAVA Hi-Fi, the company behind the revolutionary JAVA LDR pre-amp. Launched late last year via Kickstarter, the JAVA delivers exceptional sound quality and has been sold to audio enthusiasts worldwide. Martin is also the Director of Student Entrepreneurship at Auckland University of Technology.
Speaker #3: Chris Hardy and Mike Palmer from Wing Acoustics
Chris Hardy (CEO) and Mike Palmer (Co-founder/Executive Director) showcased Wing Acoustics, a company which has created the only audio driver in existence to have eliminated resonance-distortion at the source. It has been demonstrated to over 30 of the world’s leading acoustic, transducer and recording engineers with comments such as “Best headphones in the world” and "Once in a lifetime innovation".
Prior to Wing Acoustics, Chris was Co-founder and CEO of advertising agency Creative Juice, Co-Founder and Global Brand Manager of Artificial Intelligence Analytics software company Arria NLG (listed on the LSE), and foundation investor and Brand Strategist for SaaS company Diligent (listed on the NZX). Mike is a mechanical, computing and electronics engineer (and classical musician) whose technology forms the basis of Wing Acoustics.
Speaker 4: Marc from StretchSense
Marc from StretchSense demo’d their new smart glove.
Sponsors:
Blender Design
Blender Design helps hardware companies gear up for manufacture, in particular assisting with industrial & mechanical design, prototyping services, design for manufacture (DFM) and over all improving the product development processes. Blender provides a full turn key solution, turning ideas into successful products.
WNT Ventures
WNT Ventures is a Kiwi technology incubator investing in and incubating high-growth, early stage companies which are rich in Intellectual Property and novel technologies. Their current portfolio includes the hardware companies Avertana, Onesixone, Mastiplex and Mint Innovation.
StretchSense
StretchSense are the world-leading supplier of smart stretch sensors, developed for the rapidly emerging wearable technology market. Theirstretchy rubber band sensors can be stitched into clothing to measure body movement, particularly valuable for tracking athletes' performance, coaching and rehabilitation. They currently have over 200 clients in 28 countries, and are based in Auckland.
GridAKL
GridAKL is the amazing space we are lucky to call home; a space created to bring established innovative business and start-ups together into one humming technology precinct.
