Andras Velvart talks SongArc

okay so it's pocket game of beers uh today we're in uh vilnius and lithuania for the live mobile conference yeah and we've just been seeing a cool game not actually from lithuania but from hungary so it's it's uh song art do you want to explain a bit about what's up introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about that song yeah so my name is andres welbert i'm the ceo founder of songwork and songwork was my idea i've always been a music guy music i used to play in a band and then for a couple of life reasons like my son being born i had to make some sacrifices and being a band was one of them and not that i regret it but i was always missing this close connection to the music and i turned over to music games but especially on a mobile device uh none of those games have

led me to be as close to the music and connect with the music as much as i would have loved to and um that's where the that's really whole idea of song art came so i really wanted to have a music game that was expressive where i could express all the little nuances of music and not just rhythm but actual melody and music and and and things like that and that was the basic idea of song arc that i teamed up with a couple of very talented guys who won third place in sydney australia for their video game at the microsoft imagine cup and we we created a prototype for the song our game uh applied to the app campus project and we won the app campus award so app campus is actually microsoft nokia which is today the same but it wasn't at that time so it's microsoft nokia and the finnish university uh also

together you know auto is pretty famous for the startup scene over there and they together create an award uh where they would uh give 20 50 or 70 000 euros to promising windows phone exclusive applications and games and we won this award uh which only they only asked us for three months of exclusivity and then we are free to go to other platforms so we launched the song arc last october a year ago and uh and now is this time where we're going to android and first to ios and then to android uh with this game the game has seen pretty big success on windows phone yeah so how does that win this phone it's kind of it's kind of like in the third place kind of platform so there's you know it's but there are music devices out there so kind of you're a free game so how have you done in terms of downloads and have you done in terms of i guess people using the game yeah we we were pretty successful uh and uh lucky in terms of lucky's preparation

meets opportunity you know so there wasn't really any music game in the windows phone scene at that time and uh we really struck a chord with the editor of wp central and he endorsed us and he pretty much followed us all over uh ever since then and we have seen over 1.3 million downloads in this year we have seen uh at our at the top we have been the number six best rated game in the entire store um what kind of what kind of territories are the big ones uh sorry what kind of countries are the key ones for you yeah the key one key countries are usa uk obviously uh the game is only in english right now but we're seeing a huge number of tunnels from uh in brazil and uh vietnam taiwan uh and uh germany italy

france the the bigger european countries for windows phone perspective and now you're going to take it on to the ios and android so what's right now going to be the same game changes uh yeah we're going to do a big change in the ui um because we feel that the ui is somewhat comp it became somewhat complicated and not as self-explanatory as we would have liked so we're going to do some big changes over there and this is kind of over the record but we're also going to do something called featured artist and the featured artist is about bands smaller bands but good bands wanting to get out of their hometown or their home country and wanting to get their music known all over the world and we're going to have a special feature advertising space for these bands where they where people can play with

their music and experience and use their music in a much deeper way than if they were just listening to it and in terms of kind of we're now in yeah it's pretty tight but we want to launch before the holidays so definitely hopefully we should be ready late october early november and then we go to all the approval process which can take any number of weeks definitely we want to be out before the holidays on on android and ios and even on windows tablets