Multiselfie, or how we decided to do the impossible, fought Murphy and built it
Multiselfie is a mobile and web app to take photos with multiple devices at the exact same time. Only one person clicks and all the phones take photos together. Selfies are not so selfish now.
How does Multiselfie work?
Taking a Multiselfie is simple!
- A single person creates a “room”, just like creating a chat room.
- This person shares a link with everybody else. They only need to open the link. No downloads required!
- Everyone opens the link and get ready.
- Only the person that created the room clicks a button to shoot the photos.
- You all get the photos and share!
It’s a selfie with many phones. You have multiple photos of a single moment, and instead of a logistic problem you have fun taking the picture.
Why it’s good for your event too
In larger events we can integrate Multiselfie into other apps or sites, and give a more fine grained control to the responsible person, as well as information about the pictures and analytics. Think about a major event like a sport match or a music concert, with everyone taking pictures at the same time. That’s where we want to get.
The origins
The origins! Multiselfie comes as a sort of spin-off of Camera360, a product we made to take those nice bullet-time photos (you know the ones, when the camera seems to freeze like the Matrix movies).
We talked about how nice it would be to let people use their own phones for that. There were several technological problems to achieve it, but one day we set to do it. We had a good starting point, but we had a lot of work cut out to do.
We needed a nice new interface, a completely different user flow, we needed it to run in any sort of device, we needed it to scale. People were amazed that Camera360 could work with 80 cameras. Now we wanted 80, 800, 8000.
We had our first prototype quite quickly! It proved that it could be done. Then we had a few months of hard work, making sure it not only worked, but worked well. When you’re testing with 100 cameras at the same time, Murphy gets really creative.
Maybe we could have launched earlier, but it would have made our first users disappointed with the early problems. We have been in closed beta for the last month or two. There are few feelings as bad as showing it to your friend and… failing. Now things work well. We are ready to face the world.
How to grow
Although we still have a few extra features to add later, our focus now is to ensure people enjoy it and to grow.
How we are going to grow? We like this project because every time new users wants to take a picture they need to tell their friends about it! New users have to spread the word to try it.
We also made it very easy to share and take a picture. You send a link to your friends and they open it. No forced login, no multi-step procedure, no installation. If you open the link you’re using it. Only after taking the picture you’re asked to login, and it’s not required.
What do you think? And have you taken your Multiselfie already?
