I quit the Robot Co-op in June, and have been working on this tiny new company since then.  I think I’ve finally reached some definition on what exactly this company will be about.

Here’s what I’m working on:

Locavore has continued to sell at a steady pace.  Nowhere near enough to be a living, but definitely a nice supplement to additional streams of income.  I have realized that in order to sell 200/day regularly, I’d have to be mentioned in the NYT or be featured in iTunes pretty regularly, and unfortunately my app doesn’t really have “news-worthy” things to report often enough.  That said, I have been working on a new release that integrates with the wonderful work of Foodista (so long, Epicurious!) to show related recipes.  I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to show you what we’ve built.

Mirror, Mirror is my little photobooth side project that I’m working on with a good friend.  I am building one for Vain (to be installed any day now!) and another to be rented out to local weddings and events.  It’s a fun project, but also not a business idea so much as a cool gadget to play around with.

The other thing I’m working on is actually a full-blown company with a good friend and a local business.  I’ve commited to working 40 hours a week for the next 9 months on it, so it’s gonna be a big chunk of my weekly work.  I’m super excited about it because it’s something that’s practical, has a good business plan, and caters to both my interests and my skill set.  I always scoff at people who withhold details about their projects for fear of being copied… I am withholding details because there’s a bit of an issue of protecting the company we’re working with.  Otherwise, I’d tell you all about it.

A thousand little projects also keep me pretty occupied.  I am helping the guys at Track Your Happiness to build better reporting and such for their data (I also just recently launched Twitter integration for getting your random notifications through the day… try it out!).  I’m helping a friend in California build a website for her new business.  I’m thinking constantly about moods, standards for meaningful work, and event planning, to mention a few of the bigger ones.

Keeping busy, and loving it.

I’ve been working on a photobooth for Vain (a great hair salon, where my wife works and where I have my little office). It’s different from a normal photo booth in a few ways that I think modernize it a bit and make it more social. One, it’s free. Two, it’s social — you can browse all of the pictures taken at the “booth”. Three, it’s not in a booth — this latest version is a two-way mirror with a camera behind it that takes your picture when you press a button.

I’m writing the software as a Mac app, since there are pretty easy hooks into triggering a camera, downloading the picture from the camera, and uploading it to the web.

This last Tuesday we tested out the first version of it (that still needs a lot of work) at a Bastille Day party put on by our favorite event-planning business The Adventure School.

Here’s what it looked like:

During the 7 hours of the party, almost 800 pictures were taken. Here’s a sampling

The full set is posted on The Adventure School website.

After watching this many people use the booth, I think I’m going to make the following changes before officially setting it up at Vain:

1. More feedback between pushing the button and having the picture taken.
   1. Speakers with some kind of sound
   2. Flickering lights / torches / a flash
   3. On-screen spinning thing
2. Figure out lighting
3. Possibly a way to delete pictures that people don’t like (without making it so easy for people to delete other peoples’ pictures)
4. Some better instructions that this is a photo mirror, that it’s free, that’s it’s easy to use, etc.
5. Indications on the mirror about where to look (lipstick?)

I’m making a photo booth for one of my favorite local businesses, VAIN, a hair salon in Seattle with locations downtown and in Ballard.  Building off of the popularity of the McLeod Photobooth, I’m gonna take the general idea and upgrade it to use a better camera and to have more social features.

Parts purchased:

• Mac Mini
• Nikon D60
• 15″ touch screen
• USB button
• Large 2-way mirror

After hooking this all up, I’m going to write a bit of software that connects all the dots.  The software will basically be a Mac desktop app that triggers an Automator script to take the picture, save it to the computer, and display it on the screen.  From there, it’ll will allow you to delete the picture, take another, tag the last picture, or browse all pictures taken.

The main differences between this photo booth and the traditional photo booth is that instead of printing out a picture for you, it simply uploads it to Flickr. This saves paper, and creates a social element around the photobooth that typically doesn’t exist. By having pictures available immediately on Flickr, anyone can browse all pictures taken, comment on them, and have a semi-live stream of what’s happening at the space at any given time.  During the 2 years that the McLeod Photobooth ran, over 33,000 pictures were taken.  Thousands of comments and favorites have been made on those photos, and now they exist as a strange history of the whole endeavor.

The photobooth I’m making this time is also going to have a couple extra features to make it more appropriate for a hair salon.  For example, having before and after pictures.  Being able to browse pictures by stylist, and by customer.  It will be encased in a large mirror so that instead of framing yourself in a grainy webcam shot you can simply frame yourself within lines in the mirror.  The camera will literally shoot through the mirror, via 2-way mirror technology.  Isn’t that cool?  Also, the lighting’s gonna be a lot better.

I’m excited about this little project.