Elastik Mobile came into being sometime during the summer of 2009 and was formalised as a limited company during that autumn.

As the technical co-founder I spent a lot of the subsequent time writing code and building up a library of apps, mostly built around the Artful platform that we was the core of our planned business.

The Artful platform is a code base that makes it easy to create beautiful apps around related or interlinking collections of images and was originally intended to power a series of white-label museum and gallery apps and eventually, one master app in which art lovers could buy packs of images that represented an Exhibition or a Collection to enable them to carry around their favourite artworks in their pockets.

While these apps sadly didn’t materialise, we did build a number of apps that enjoyed varying levels of success in the app store, most of which were built on top of the Artful platform.

Here is a list of the apps we built with links to download the apps that are currently available† on the iTunes App Store:

• Artful Flickr – our proof-of-concept app that turned out to be a really nice Flickr browser in its own right and proved very successful getting well over 10,000 downloads. This app will be available very shortly in the App Store so please check back soon.

• Buttons – a magical camera that takes moments and locations rather than pictures. A friend put me in touch with the German artist Sascha Pohflepp who had been commissioned to bring his 2006 project Buttons up to date. The idea of a camera that captures a moment in time and then retrieves a photo that someone else took at the same moment really appealed to me and so we agreed to get involved. The app has had a good number of downloads and has featured in several gallery exhibitions.

• MyMzk – we met a London-based arts and music journalist who was building a blog of weekly band interviews with exclusive songs to accompany them. We designed and built an app that kept up to date with each new entry and allowed users to listen to the songs whilst reading the interviews. Sadly, despite the app having been completed, the client’s other commitments have meant that this really cool project has yet to see the light of day.

• Photomonth Live – this app was written to form the basis of an art installation and was never a publicly available app. The installation involved a physical stand and display case that housed an iPhone which was displaying a slideshow of photos submitted to a competition we were running to coincide with Photomonth 2010.

• Cinémoi Cannes – we were approached by Cinémoi, the French cinema satellite channel, to build them a simple app to accompany their coverage of the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. The app pulled in a feed of their photographer’s red carpet shots to give people an insight into the glamour of the event. The app continued to get hundreds of downloads throughout the subsequent year. Sadly, when they came to us again in 2011, existing commitments prevented me from building the more detailed app they needed and their new app has now replaced the original in the App Store.

• Football Stars / Tennis Stars – 2 related apps that took advantage of Wimbledon and the Football World Cup events in summer 2010 to demonstrate how simply apps based around the Artful platform could be built. We pulled together flickr images, youtube videos and wikipedia entries to give people an introduction to the best players in the world and allow them to follow their progress.

† Due to the fact that Elastik Mobile Ltd folded in late 2010, we closed the iTunes App Store account and removed all of our apps. The best ones are in the process of being re-uploaded to my own account.