Infused
An early geofenced arts platform connecting people to place-based creative work from more than 3,000 contributors.
What if digital art could belong to the place where someone encountered it?
Infused began during the early mobile-app period when geofencing and place-triggered notifications were still emerging interaction patterns. The product allowed artists, poets, musicians, and other creators to attach media to physical locations so that people passing nearby could receive and discover work connected to that place.
Startup leadership across product, interaction design, development, funding, and commercialization.
I co-founded Appoet with Jeremy Applebaum and served as CEO, designer, project manager, and hands-on developer. The company operated from 2012 to 2015 and grew around a family of mobile arts and literature products, with Infused as the flagship platform.
My role
Co-Founder & CEO · Designer · Product Lead. I led product strategy, fundraising, interaction design, development, partnerships, marketing, and commercialization while continuing to build the application itself.
Geofenced hotspots turned media into encounters with place.
Creators uploaded text, images, music, and video and associated that material with physical locations. Users could explore media on a map, but the distinctive interaction was proximity: entering a location could trigger a notification and turn a routine movement through the city into an encounter with locally situated creative work.
A creative experiment became a funded startup.
The company raised approximately $10,000 through Kickstarter and later received $20,000 from the Elmspring accelerator along with office space, mentoring, and a pitch event. More than 3,000 creative submissions were received from contributors around the world.
The hyperlocal delivery architecture ultimately became patented technology.
Work on mass-deployable geolocated hotspots led to a U.S. patent co-invented with Jeremy Applebaum. The patent is important less as a standalone credential than as evidence that the product work engaged technical architecture deeply enough to produce a novel distribution mechanism.
Press treated Infused as an unusually early experiment in hyperlocal creative media.
The product received coverage and reviews from outlets including Fast Company, Intellectuapp, Inside Mobile Apps, Android Review Center, and commercial-real-estate technology publications.
- Intellectuapp: Infused is simply an outstanding, creative and inspiring app. Infused connects the digital life you live to the places and people you love.
- insidemobileapps: Not just for consumers and artists, Infused can also be used as a marketing tool for retail businesses and other brands. A shopping deal could be infused to a brick-and-mortar retail location, for instance, inspiring users to make a purchase.
- Android Review Center: Infused does what precious few apps do, letting us look at the world in an exciting new way. The possibilities and uses for Infused are really mind boggling and we firmly believe this app really promises to change the way we look and use our smartphones today.
- Greg Spero, Award Winning Jazz Entertainer in Chicago: Infused is really important because it’s the first application that will allow people to create a local community of art using their digital devices.”
- Kevin Michael Martin, Award Winning Actor and Director: Infused is going to […] inspire artists, get messages out, or just reveal locations of where things were made.