Founder — Design,
Development, and Everything

Led product definition, design, and development for concept-phase startup focused on adding creative content to videos in education and entertainment. Designed mobile-first, coded Android app, tested with target users, and analyzed business case for potential markets.

Design and Markets

1. Blowing Bubbles

This demo shows the process of adding text, drawing, and emoji bubbles to a video. The bubbles can be moved, resized, and their color changed. The start and duration can also be changed as well as whether the video is paused during the bubble. In the actual application, the bubbles are not added to the video file, but stored separately as metadata that can be used to insert the bubbles at runtime. This allows for content to be added dynamically to existing videos.

2. Social Video Market

The general market of social video is huge and growing rapidly. In just the last year, the amount of video content has more than doubled, with everyday users becoming content providers for everything from entertainment for family and friends to how to, gaming, and political commentary. My partners and I believed that many of these uses could be enhanced through the ability of both authors and viewers to add creative content to the videos without having to edit the source of the video.

3. Delivery Platform

In the case of almost any market we considered, we ran into the need to provide a broad and deep delivery platform. In talking to target markets, we quickly learned that requiring friends and family to download another mobile app is a big adoption hurdle. And restricting that platform to only Android or iPhone or desktopweb was clearly a non-starter. So, in evaluating our development requirements, we were looking at a delivery platform with a cloud back-end supporting all of these end points.

4. Prototype Development

I developed this Android app using Java, Android Studio, and the SDK tools. I designed the data structures, interaction model, and application logic. I quickly learned about Android layouts, widgets, media tools, performance monitoring, debugging, and the Gradle build system. Though we put the project on hold for business reasons, I continue to tinker with the app in my spare time.