Florian Meissner, the founder of Berlin-based EyeEm, presented his mobile community app, an Instagram competitor. Meissner believes that technology will help improve digital photography, and highlighted the importance of metadata and the different ways of indexing photos. To leverage both, EyeEm developed Eyesearch, which lets people find photos with a simplified search engine. Crucially, EyeEm does not believe in a model that enables users to index photos themselves.
For the opening of Talking Visuals, Daniel Barroy, the head of photography projects, also emphasised the importance of managing metadata in the service of photography. But how far will we have to go? Will we be obliged to manually improve the indexing and treatment of photographic metadata, or can this be automated?
Meissner holds an MBA from ESCP Europe and studied in Vienna and Berlin at Wirtschaftsuniversität and Humboldt, respectively. After years of working in advertising, marketing and media (DDB, Henkel, Resources), he became a photographer in 2005. He launched EyeEM in 2011 to enable people to connect to photography in new ways. EyeEM was recognised twice in 2013 as Best Product Startup (The Europas) and Best Mobile App (The Next Web Startup Awards).