HomeOther Stuff5 promising startups we saw and liked at Sónar+D in sunny Barcelona

5 promising startups we saw and liked at Sónar+D in sunny Barcelona

Another year, another Sónar. This time was the 25th anniversary of the festival, which resulted to be the most successful edition with 126,000 attendees from 119 countries. Sónar+D, the part of the festival committed to technology and innovation that got the participation of 5,900 professionals from 3,300 firms and entities, is what we have followed with a closer eye. Given our love for startups what we enjoyed most has been the Startup Garden, which is the space dedicated to the entrepreneurial ecosystem related to creative technologies, where 30 startups have been selected to participate in a competition and have had a series of activities at the festival, getting also promotion and visibility with investors.

Below you’ll find a brief list of the five startups that we found most interesting:

PartyPlay-logoPARTYPLAY is a free mobile app, created by a Spanish startup based in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, that allows you to create a shared music playlist where anyone is able to collaborate on. A practical use case is for example when you host a house party and up to 25 people, connected through the wi-fi network of the house, are able to collaborate simultaneously on a shared playlist for the party, by adding their favourite songs. Simple idea, but a very cool one.

watchity-logoWATCHITY is a well-established B2B startup, based in Barcelona, that built an agile digital production platform for digital channels. With their innovative and powerful cloud solution, they make it possible to produce live broadcasts simply with the use of smartphones, even over 4G and public wi-fi networks. With mobile journalism (MoJo) growing quickly, their offer looks promising and useful for journalists and broadcasters.

dBud-logoDBUD BY EAR LABS volume adjustable earplugs with an acoustic filter, that don’t need any batteries, nor any charging, and promise to provide “a safer, clearer and more personal listening experience”. The use envisaged spans from concerts and festivals, to noisy offices and train commuting. With 2,171 backers that pledged a total of $132k, they have been to complete a very successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and to produce and the deliver their earplugs around the world. Now we are curious to see how they will develop things further. The company is based in Malmo, Sweden.

Skoove-logoSKOOVE offers an interactive piano teaching platform and an app to learn to play piano in a fun way. We don’t know if it’s the “fastest and most extensive platform to learn the art of playing piano”, as they market it, but it’s certainly a very cool one. This German startup is a graduate of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Berlin.

Unison-logoUNISON proclaims to be the world’s first rights management entity that uses blockchain to ensure that music rights of the artists are managed with efficiency and transparency. After much hype and expectations is now good to start seeing some practical applications of the blockchain technology, also outside of the financial services industry. Unison is based in Barcelona.

All the 30 startups selected and much more information is available on the Sónar+D website.

If interested to check the startups that caught our attention in the previous edition of Sonar+D, you can take a look at this list that we prepared last year. While more information about the Sonar festival, and the history of it, can be found in this comprehensive interview that we did with its Executive Director Ventura Barba.

By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!

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Alessandro Ravanetti
Alessandro Ravanetti
Alessandro Ravanetti is a writer and editor based in Barcelona. He helps startups with their content strategy, curates the Techstars Startup Digest's fintech newsletter, serves as an independent expert for EU projects, and mentors aspiring changemakers with Bridge for Billions.
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