Hydric Media

True North offers the opportunity to discover a destination that’s just right for you by comparing your musical tastes with the unique soundtrack of select cities.

Hydric analyzed the unique musical identities of hand-picked destinations and integrated them the True North recommendation engine. This engine scans a Spotify user’s unique listening history, compares it to the unique music genre fingerprint of all the destinations, and serves them the city that they’ll love the most.

Handpicked destinations such as Tokyo and Madrid await discovery by True North users who can navigate tailored local content to get a unique insight into local music scenes, the history of these destinations and the best areas to stay. Best of all, users can share their True North boarding pass on Twitter and Facebook to show others where their ‘true north’ really lies.

Gatorade partnered with Spotify and Hydric Media  in 2016 with a vision to create a data-driven, personalized web experience that would anchor Gatorade’s North American marketing campaign.

To create Gatorade Amplify, Hydric took acoustic attributes scientifically proven to enhance workout performance and synthesised them into a web application that generated personalized, performance-enhancing playlists for users. Hydric also identified and mapped the integration of both public and beta Spotify APIs to power playlist personalization.

In a world-first, Spotify’s playlist recommendation engine was paired with track crossfading technology that generated playlists which transition accurately between timed interval training segments. In another first, Hydric’s proprietary playlist management platform, Lineup, was integrated to refresh user playlists each week.

Bose, known for their award-winning speakers, asked Hydric to help them build a deeper integration between their SoundTouch device and Spotify's platform.

This project required integration of the Spotify API to allow Bose customers to log in to their Spotify accounts and sync information to their newly purchased speakers. In order to have the buttons on the SoundTouch speakers corresponding to preset radio stations, Spotify playlists and the like, the buttons had to be integrated with back-end web services. In addition, Hydric supported the creation of new APIs by the Bose team, ensuring optimal integration.

ReadySet allowed customers to seamlessly use the Spotify platform to create and assign playlists to each button on their SoundTouch speakers during the checkout process on Bose.com. So when the product was delivered, it was personalized and ready-to-use.

Rate My Professors is the highest trafficked online and mobile destination for researching and rating professors from colleges and universities across the U.S.

Viacom enlisted Hydric to develop iOS and Android apps for Rate My Professors. With over 17 million student comments to search through, the app needed to enable easy navigation and a tailored user experience.

Hydric first engaged in technical consultancy on the API to ensure it was appropriately specced for new mobile apps. At the time that Hydric began work on the iOS application, the API was still being built by Viacom’s internal team. Managing this required close collaboration between client and agency-side teams to achieve the best combination of features and user experience within the constraints of legacy backend systems.

Rate My Professors 2.0 for iOS was released in August 2016 and Android was released in January 2017.

LearnVest enlisted Hydric to build native iOS and Android applications for their parent company, Northwestern Mutual.

Working with sensitive time constraints, Hydric began constructing the iOS application while the LearnVest team was still building the APIs necessary to power the app. To support LearnVest in this process, Hydric applied its solution architecture expertise to guide both parties through the process of creating RESTful APIs.

With an even tighter deadline than iOS, completing the Android app required a sizeable team of Hydric developers to work concurrently. To facilitate this, Hydric created a custom set of development guidelines for the programmers to adhere to, ensuring consistency and efficiency during the project, and allowing LearnVest’s rapidly growing Android team to ramp up quickly on delivery of the app.