after traveling the world for quite some time I had to replace some hardware - so I decided to take a paid job in Berlin at EyeEm this year. The team is nice and multinational. Most conversations are in English. But there was a downside: I had to fix bugs all the day - the guy working on the code before is a very good coder, but was in a hurry with a lot of tasks ( back-end,tech-lead and the android client) Fixing bugs is OK for a while, but I need creative coding to stay happy..
I have one very important motto in life "Love it, Change it or leave it" - in this case I selected [x]change and convinced the founders to let me do a small side project for the company in 20% of my work time. And this is a message to all the people saying "Oh my company has no 20% project" - just ask them - the worst they can say is "no"
So what is it? In buzz words: EyeEmTV is one hyper-local, inter-connected and soon intelligent personalizable picture display for Android devices with focus on big screen devices like Tablets or now especially Google TV.
That means it can continuous play photos which are relevant to the audience and also the position and time of the playback. It is designed to require minimal interaction - just run in the background and show relevant photos with some Meta information ( if the user wants it - user is able to switched off nearly all elements - so that the Picture is the only thing seen ). In most cases we can add the meta-information without making the Image smaller as a lot of pictures are like 4:3 and the TV 16:9. Another Design decision is that the most recent images are preferred. That means if you shoot an image that belongs to the selected album -> your image will be the next to be displayed. There is not much user-interaction, but there is the option to display a BarCode with every Image which users can scan and then interact with the image ( like,comment,..) with an app on their own device.
- At home playing a stream of photos from family/friends
- At office playing a stream of photos from the Team members
- At events playing a stream of photos via big screen or beamer of pictures shoot at the event.
EyeEmTV is using our official API which was released not long ago. The APP is not yet released ( you can ask me for an beta-APK ) but it will be released this month to the Android Market and ( which makes me very happy ) the code to GitHub!
Next step in bringing a fresh wind into the company is to equip the office with a table football. It could replace the - for communication so important - but because of biological reasons not happening anymore - cigarette breaks . Beside that - every cool start up has something like that ..
