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Chroma, which is working to build a new kind of audiovisual entertainment specifically for mobile devices, is now adding the founder of Twitter on board. The company announced that Twitter and Medium founder Biz Stone, who previously joined Pinterest’s founders in Chroma as an angel investor, will join the company’s board of directors, bringing his expertise in design, product development, filmmaking and skating to the brand.
An early Google employee, Stone worked on the Blogger team before founding Twitter in 2006.
The company has been around Twitter for a number of years, gaining acceptance from millions of users worldwide. In the year In 2011, when Twitter hit the 100 million active user mark, the entrepreneur left to pursue new projects with Obvious Corporation, a startup incubator and investment vehicle that includes Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and former Twitter exec Jason Goldman. Innovation has especially mediated the blogging platform. But, in 2013, Stone and the others shifted their focus to individual startups. For Stone, that led to the creation of Jelly, a question-and-answer app and search engine that was later sold to Pinterest.
In the year In 2017, Stone publicly announced that he would return to Twitter to lead strategic vision, brand and culture, a position he held until 2021.
Over the years, Stone has backed a number of companies, including Square, Pinterest, Slack, Nest, Intercom and Beyond Meat, where he now chairs the Nominating and Governance Committee.
Stone says it was CEO and founder Andreas Pilström who first became interested in Swedish audiovisual company Chroma through an introduction by Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Pihlström previously worked at Pinterest, Beats Music and VSCO as a creative director, design consultant, designer and prototyper.
The two destroyed it and started making monthly calls after the stone angel investment.
“Really, what I enjoy working with is meeting people and spending time — and bouncing ideas back and forth,” Stone said.
The Croma team had various ideas but ultimately settled on audiovisual technologies and their intersection with music and sound.
As Stone explained, the idea was about changing the nature of music and audio and making it a more interactive and immersive experience. In practice, this includes tactile dynamic visuals that create a voice-driven digital space that users can navigate and interact with for a variety of purposes.
The first product to test this concept was released last year, in collaboration with music artist Arca to create an iOS application called Lux Aeterna. The app offers an audiovisual experience to explore music from the Venezuelan producer, DJ, singer and songwriter in a “meditative digital space,” according to the company. Users fly through a virtual world interacting with her music and voices as part of the journey.
Image Credits: Chroma
But this doesn’t show the full potential of the technology, which can have a variety of use cases – some of which Chroma is currently investigating – and other ways users can interact with audio and sound, for gaming, meditation, relaxation, music composition and more. While the company plans to launch production on mobile devices first, Stone believes the technology could become even more interesting when Apple releases its own VR/AR headset.
“I think this is ubiquitous and lends itself well to Metaverse tools. But I can also watch it on my Apple TV. I would love to have it there. There is good sound and sight everywhere,” he added. “mobile phone [first] It’s just because everybody has it.”
In the year Founded in 2021, Stockholm-based Croma raised $5.4 million (€5.1 million) in seed funding last year from VC firms Single and Adjacent, Berlin angel syndicate SpotAngels, as well as Stone and Pinterest co-founders Evan Sharp and other individuals. Ben Silberman. Chroma previously raised €1.6 million in pre-seed funding.
As a board member, Stone expects to meet with the startup several times a month in addition to actual board meetings. With his angel investments, he considers himself a consultant — meaning he’s open to founder phone calls but won’t call the company unless they want to. Chroma did.
“These people are full of different ideas [at Chroma]. So the challenge was narrowing it down because it’s a small group and they don’t have to do a whole job to do something, Stone said. For now, the focus is on adding sensory elements to sound.
Image Credits: Chroma
“The big picture is like the idea of a ‘sound game’. . . It is interactive. It’s transforming natural music to make it richer in 3D, but also visually and . . . You can do things to it,” Stone said.
“Biz brings a wealth of experience in technology and design to our table. Together, we’re paving the way for the future of sound: combining excellence and forward thinking in the digital space to change the paradigm of music,” Pilstrom said in a statement.
The placement of the board is not the only thing in the work, as the entrepreneur says that he “feeds” on something else for himself with a small group of people. So far, the project is self-funded and has not been officially launched, so the details are kept quiet. However, Stone said he is particularly interested in the emerging AI space, and particularly in the use of AI as a tool.
He said he wasn’t particularly interested in other new technology trends like Web3 or some aspects of scaling.
” of [web3] I am not interested in culture. There’s something for me,” Stone explained. On his style: “I don’t want a dystopian future where kids are in the classroom with scuba masks on all day. I don’t want that to happen. This doesn’t sound good to me,” he added.
As for Twitter, Stone admits he hasn’t been monitoring the situation as closely as others, but says it “doesn’t look good right now,” but won’t make any future predictions. “Maybe it’s going to be great, but it doesn’t seem like it… So many people are laid off and it’s like chaos… Every day, there’s some new crazy thing – I mean, it’s always been true on Twitter, I guess. It’s always been something… this is a new level of that.
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