With the iPhone and other smartphones gradually becoming the default point and shoot cameras we always have with us, photo apps have exploded.
One wonders how another startup could possibly come up with yet another app and hope to succeed. However, hot Berlin startup EyeEm, thinks it might just have stumbled up on a new approach, missed by the likes of Instagram and others: the content of the photos.
Now live on the iOS App Store and Android Marketplace after a beta trial with over 5,000 users, EyeEm is a smartphone camera and photo sharing app which monitors its users’ tastes in photography and uses the data to recommend albums of similar photos of friends and like-minded people.
EyeEm has also raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Passion Capital, Wellington Partners and well known Berlin angel investor Christophe Maire, who is also the company’s executive chairman.
The app itself is also very good at exposing new photos you might might like. It is probably the best interface for content discovery in a camera app I’ve seen, including Flickr’s. It’s almost, dare I say it, beautiful. EyeEm has paid careful attention to the interface for the consumption of photography, and it shows. Instagram, look out.
Ten built-in filters allow for quick photo enhancing and images are automatically categorised using something EyeEm calls ‘vibes’. This is like a smart photo album that puts images into topical photo streams. As a result you can curate a photography feed based on your interests not just who you follow on EyeEm.
Capturing, filtering, location tagging and sharing to Facebook and Twitter is very easy.
Founder and photographer Florian Meissner was inspired to develop the app after losing his digital SLR and discovering a whole community iPhone photographers. He describes it as an Intelligent photo album or “Magic magnets for photos”.
Joining Florian Meissner, the founding team includes joint MD Lorenz Aschoff, CTO Ramzi Rizk, creative director Gen Sadakane, lead iOS developer Wojtek Sczygiol and front-end developer Guillaume Cambon.
