We prototyped the Matrix….
In 2012 my business partner and I came up with an idea about synchronizing phones.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could tell all the phones to take a picture at the same time!?! It would be like the Matrix — you know bullet time. :)
At the time in 2012 BAAS (backend as a service) didn’t exist and the thought of building a production suite in the cloud seemed silly… Fast forward a few years later… Tech has caught up.
During my “downtime” in 2014 I pulled an idea off the shelf. See this story about my entrepreneur rash. Camera Slice. A way to sync phones and have a connected or shared experience. We didn’t think about how we were going to make money. We didn’t think about how this would scale. We didn’t think about any of that… however, I made sure that it was a C-Corp based out of Delaware. We put some effort into the foundation documents to a point. We had some founders and a good idea. Let’s get off the pot and make something happen! Go!
We prototyped an idea: What if in a group, say 5 of us could tell all the phones to take a picture when I told them too. But you could do that too. It was like having a “who could push the button first” type app. If I was successful at pushing the selfie button first then BOOM, we all took selfies together.
Here’s the team messing with the prototype at dinner. We were about to go into First Ave (music venue in Minneapolis) to test out syncing.
Did it work? Yep, it sure did. We connected 5 phones at the same time to take synchronized shots. The surprising part? It was actually fun to push a button.
Below is a “slice”. One moment in time — synchronized shots.
Alright. Mission complete. We made a synching app. Next level: The Festival Prototype.
What did the “team” learn from this prototype?
- Its fun to push a button and win.
- It is possible to synchronize devices in difficult spaces.
- What’s the deal with group selfies? Groupies? It was fun as hell.
- We collected a ton of content for one event. Under 1 gig between 5 devices. Not bad when we only there for 3 hours.
- We learned that Bluetooth at the time sucked and our portable wifi hotspot worked great.
- We only sent short packets of data for syncing. The photos were stored locally.
- We didn’t send the photos to the cloud at this point.
What did “I” learn from this prototype?
- There’s something new here. I had never felt a simultaneous moment before digitally. Its emotional.
- Shared experiences are not unique but I believe there is a threshold. How many connected people will it take for that moment to get people to shit themselves? We just took a picture together in this space/stadium/event. 100,000? That’s an emotional connection.
- This prototype is not scalable.
- Its a fancy feature for a camera app.
- B2C for sure! We have the next Snapchat.
- Damn WiFi. Not everyone has WiFi so timing for this product will be off.
- I had a good time and I would do it again. I enjoy pushing buttons and seeing the reaction. Ok, so this action is repeatable? How many times can I repeat it before its annoying?
Read about what happened next: The Festival. 14gigs of selfies.
