Mid-way through 2009, I was trying to make a name for myself as a web application developer when a chance encounter with Luke Razzell led to me moving in the new and exciting direction of iPhone applications and then to the creation of Elastik Mobile, an iPhone company with a desire to craft beautifully simple iPhone applications for the discerning modern gadget freak.

We started with an exciting idea to bring the greatest art from across the world into people’s pockets and a great partnership with a start-up who were developing great links with the best museums and galleries not just in the UK but across the world. And so Artful was born. It started life as a proof of concept that we ended up liking enough to put in the App Store as our first app, Artful Flickr, and it has remained a firm favourite among the few thousand people who download it and continue to use it regularly a year on.

However, as time went on the opportunities for Artful didn’t materialise as we would have liked due to many factors but mostly because while most of the galleries and museums were very excited by the idea, their digital strategies were not quite at the point of putting their content onto mobile devices.

As time went by we gradually moved more into building apps for other people and ended up in conversation with a German artist Sascha Pohflepp who had a fascinating idea for a unique camera, Buttons, which caught lots of people’s imagination and is due an upgrade very shortly.