Tab Pro for Prison and Other Crazy Ideas

Hey readers,

If you’ve been keeping up with Ultimate Guitar you may have heard/seen that we have bras laying around the office. We promise that there’s an explanation for that. It all begins and ends with crazy ideas.  

Every Monday, our office holds pitch meetings. These typically begin after everyone’s had their morning dose of caffeine or Jack Daniels. Ideas result in projects that range from revamping the site to developing new features on our apps and working on marketing and social media content. It’s all pretty standard.

However, last week we ditched the office and took part in the Crazy Idea Hackathon. Twelve teams classified by their astrological signs with two hours each to come up with an out of this world idea pitch. We present to you:

Gemini: Rock ‘n’ Roll Music Festival for Charity
Aquarius: Pay Users Because Users Love Money
August Virgos: ‘Ultimate Guitar Chop’ the video game
September Virgos: ‘Call an Artist’ feature on UG site
Capricorn: Stereotyped Marketing
Libra: Ultimate Guitar is my Religion
July Cancer: GeneG
June Cancer: UG ring
Pisces: Tab Pro for Prison
Scorpion: Easy tab adding process, even the drunks can do it!
Sagittarius: UG First Aid Guitar Kit
Taurus: ‘GoGetDrunk’ application

Prototypes were created and even tested ( the app ‘GoGetDrunk’ is now available for all employees) in just a couple of hours. Now most of these projects won’t go into production; actually all of them won’t, at least not for now.

So why the hell would we spend our workday researching ‘GeneG’, a scientific approach to discovering your music potential or build a UG ring prototype that allows guitarists to sooth their pain and receive progress updates?

The Hackathon served as a platform to cultivate new innovative ideas by actively practicing creativity. While in the office, we may get intimated to suggest something out of the ordinary. We wanted to overcome this fear. Under the circumstances where the goal was to create something strange or even stupid, we were able to justify those crazy thoughts. And as a team, we learned to be open-minded toward unfamiliar ideas.

We stepped outside of our usual work responsibilities and allowed our creative minds to run wild. Programmers got the chance to forget about their coding duties, iOS developers took a break from fixing mobile bugs and the editorial team excused misplaced commas for a day.

At the end of it all, we came up with some pretty outrageous ideas and even surprised ourselves with the potential that we all have. So who knows! Maybe one of these days you’ll be able to purchase a UG First Aid Guitar Kit for when you’re blistering hands are aching from hardcore guitar shredding.

And as always, don’t forget:

PLAY IT FUCKING LOUD.