Last week we launched WeSkins, a site where you can upload your images and design your own durable sticker. A nice and easy way to personalize your favorite gadget! We work with professional artists who regularly contribute to the skin gallery.

We’ve been working on the site more or less since February, but not on full power. Mostly one person at a time, with some periods of team crunching. The project is a co-op between us, Crowd – who’s doing marketing and Stick-It – who takes care of printing, shipping and support. This team shows how we like to work, stitching necessary expertise together to form an ultra-effective company! We’ve also founded the company Stick It On Devices AB where all three companies have shares which makes cooperation easier.

The software platform is based on Ruby on Rails which is running on a number of Amazon instances. All the computing that needs to be done when generating skins from user uploaded images takes up lots of resources. These jobs are run in Resque which gives us a great overview of what’s happening. The client application is a single-page app to prepare for snappy mobile versions, although we haven’t had much time for adapting to anything else than a normal web view yet. The skin design tool is using the Raphael.js library to make a nice cross platform solution. It even works on an iPad!

So far we’ve only shouted about WeSkins in our own channels but the coming weeks will have some big campaigns running. We feel extremely excited working with end-users. Nothing feels as rewarding as feedback from your customers!

We’re currently in Stockholm to listen to entrepreneurs and creative masterminds at the SIME conference. To conclude the first day, we got a great bunch of inspiration ready to fuel into the Popdevelop team. Two really promising startups we’ll definitely follow more closely is Wrapp and iZettle. Both amazing ideas. Especially iZettle who are just about to officially launch their plug-n-play payment solution for iPhone.

Another reason for us to go to SIME is to make sure everyone gets a tasty skin from our new startup WeSkins. We’re launching WeSkins full-scale the two coming weeks after a couple of weeks in beta, and a first step for us is to sponsor SIME with our product. There’ll be a post on WeSkins in a few days so stay tuned!

Finally home after a few days at the Yasuragi spa at Hasseludden in Stockholm. We attended the 24 hour business camp that was held there for the third year in a row. Since it was the first year for us, we didn’t really know what to expect and we went there with some vague ideas on what to build. After spending three days there I must say its one of the better hack events in Sweden, and we have tried most of them.

The atmosphere was awesome, good food, no interruptions and a lot of smart and focused people. The perfect setup for a 24h coding marathon.

When we applied to 24hbc, we got accepted with the idea “Custom NFC Stickers”. The plan was to use these 24 hours to bootstrap our project, launch a site and get enough data to measure and evaluate.

Since the market penetration of NFC-enabled phones are very slim today, it was difficult to build a minimum viable product that gave us enough data/feedback to measure. Our solution to the problem was to move the focus from NFC and look at existing solutions to verify our future NFC enabled idea. To the rescue was QR-codes, that in many areas are used in the same way as NFC.

We coded for 24 hours and launched our MVP, socialdekal.se. A print-on-demand solution that uses both NFC and QR. See our 1min pitch below (ff 6min) or watch the slides here

Big up to the all people from 24hbc Ted, Janne, Vinnova, fpx, .se, jocke, Falkevik, petter and the winners of the jury award, silar.se!

If you like our project, give it some love at fundedbyme.com and check out the pictures we took during the event

Good times! See you next year and perhaps at Internet discovery day or Sime?

After an awesome weekend at SSWC we are back to our cave for some programming. All conversations, meetings and sessions sparked a lot of new ideas, but currently they will have to wait until we have some more time on our hands. Our memories from the weekend are uploaded to flickr as usual, check out our SSWC photos!

Our main project right now is a custom sticker store for Facebook and during SSWC we prelaunched it with some protective iPhone skins that we gave away. We really did our best to find all the 150 people that ordered, but we still have around 30 skins that we want to give away. If you ordered an iPhone SSWC skin and didn’t get it during SSWC, drop us an email at contact@<ourdomain>.com and we will send it to you!

Home screen

The first screen contains the official logo along with some typical Swedish patterns and of course loads of Swedish wood. Notice the horse tab, the most unique feature ever implemented in a Popdevelop production. And it glows when tapped!

Tourist guide

Nine main categories with three that differs slightly from the rest. The first gives you all results which are near you, the second contains nature stuff which will be enhanced with more functionality in the future, and the third sorts events by date.

Item list

Lists a category from the tourist guide. Introduced a new concept of browsing subcategories compared to other tourism apps, which allow you to stay on the same screen instead of going back and forward to see different subcategories.

Tour generator

Click on the magical red button to generate a tour for the day. Gives you an in-app route and enables you to regenerate it if you’re not satisfied.

That’s all folks! See you in the next tourism app!

Helen Alfvegren wrote an easy to follow guide about it and Tomas Wennström made it official on the SSWC blog. Thanks for the attention girls and guys!

The original images used for making the skins can be downloaded here:

For the third year in a row we’re attending hacknight.se, a hacker conference here in Malmö organized by the hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen. It’s a mix of workshops and talks focused on creative use of open software/hardware. The lineup this year is better then ever and I hope to learn new things and meet some nice people.

• Linked Data! — Marie Gustafsson Friberger/@mariegus
• Wearable computing! — Tony Olsson
• Crypto talk — Teddy and Björn
• P2P web apps — Mattias Wingstedt
• Milkymist VJ — Sebastien Bourdeauducq/@milkymistvj
• Pubsub.io — Ian Jørgensen/@ianjorgensen
• Use GPRS with Arduino — David Cuartielles/@dcuartielles
• meshkit! — Jonathan Baldwin/@jrbaldwinn
• Online video broadcasting during the Arabic Spring — Måns Adler/@Manster
• Internet Activism Infrastructure Organization — Etu
• Seven ways to die! — Magnus Eriksson/@monki
• Shared online inventory — Michel Legnered

The highlights so far is listening to David, the co-founder of Ardunio, talking about how M2M and telematics will change and how far the Arduino project has come. Make sure to check out the code at Github if you want to build Arduino based telematics systems. This is how easy it is to send an SMS with the GSM Library for the Arduino GSM/GPRS Shield. The internet of things is here!

 //Serial connection.
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("GSM Shield testing.");
  //Start configuration.
  if (gsm.begin())
    Serial.println("\nstatus=READY");
  else
    Serial.println("\nstatus=IDLE");
  if (gsm.sendSMS("630538546", "Arduino SMS"))
    Serial.println("\nSMS sent OK");

Now its time for some workshops and hacking. If you’re here, give us a holla!

You can also catch us next week on SSWC or in three weeks during The Conference. Later!

A few weeks ago we attended the Öresund Mobile Meetup conference here in Malmö, Sweden. A conference with everything from good speakers, companies like SingTel, RIM, Venture Beat, Golden Gekko and a few VC firms. To be honest we only attended about half of the sessions to get some hours of coding in during that day.

During the afternoon we got invited to a match making event with SingTel, a major tele communications company from Asia. We showed them some of our current projects and prototypes during a 30 minute meeting. Instead of a slick powerpoint pitch, most of the time was spent in an OS X console trying to start different rails servers

But the meeting went well and we got some good feedback and some new opportunities. We promised to keep in touch. See you out there Singtel, holla back!

Twenty minutes before the stores closed this friday, we decided to buy some furniture for our new office. We took our bikes for a ride in the sunset and bought a Muji Sacco sack. Check out the video below



music by @jimtegel, video recording and editing by @brissmyr.