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published 2013-12-12
Friday 20th will be my last day at Moodstocks. I am leaving a company where, after three years and a half, I was the most senior employee. As you may imagine, it was not an easy decision.
Moodstocks has grown up since I joined it. After several pivots, the founders have assembled a great team [1] I will miss, and together I dare say we have advanced the state of mobile image recognition. Recently, we have also been looking at other technologies related to mobile.
We have released two new products. The first one is what was known as Physalis [2] and took the commercial name Winch [3]. This is what I have been mostly involved with for the last few months. I believe it has the potential to become the reference solution to write native mobile applications that react quickly and work offline.
The second product is Overlay [4], a mobile application that lets you buy products from paper catalogs online. Years after Pikadeo and Notes, it is finally time for a real application available in the stores, leveraging Moodstocks' image recognition SDK [5] and Winch, showcasing the best of both technologies. But beyond pure tech, it is also a demonstration of Augmented Reality as we like it: fast, predictable, purposeful. No need for 3D models.
With those two products in the pipes, choosing to leave was incredibly difficult. But I did nevertheless, because of an opportunity I could not turn down.
1: https://moodstocks.com/humans.txt
2: http://blog.separateconcerns.com/2013-06-20-three-years-proprietary-projects.html
So, what next for me? After two weeks to see my family, eat too much and have some welcome rest, I will be joining [6] the team developing the Lima [7] as a core developer.
The Lima, which promises no less than to solve the personal data storage problem, is the first hardware product I backed on Kickstarter. I was thinking: "this won't be easy, but if those guys can do it, I want that device."
The Kickstarter went (very) well, so they started looking for help and got in touch. I was curious and decided to meet the founders. After a Saturday morning spent discussing the project at Starbucks, I was convinced: they are the right people to do this.
For years I have been convinced that ubiquitous computing is one of the next big things in technology and wanted to be part of it. As I see it, Lima gives me this opportunity today.
So it looks like my short-term future holds some Unix development and a good dusting of my rusty C. I may try to sneak a Lua interpreter in that box at some point, but please don't tell the others! ;) Severin and Gawen have high expectations and I do not expect much relaxing but hey, it should be fun to live the adventure of Early Stage again.
6: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices/posts/691351