Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under cereal boxes and empty bags of chips, you can assure yourself that you’ve found a more efficient means of saving these items instead. You snapped a photo of them.

The sense of relief is overwhelming, I tell you.

OK, I kid…a little.

But as any parent will tell you, kids’ art output is overwhelming, forcing you to curate with a heavy hand. That’s why so many moms (and some dads, too) have begun snapping photos of the art before it hits the trash.

Explains CEO Jedd Gold, who has extensive experience working in kids’ entertainment, including with the relaunch of nostalgic 80′s brands like Strawberry Shortcake and Trolls, he was inspired to build Artkive after witnessing this very behavior at home.

“I was watching my wife take pictures of our kids’ artwork on her camera, that she would upload to her computer, and then she would upload from her computer to one of these photo sites. But by then she wouldn’t remember who created what piece, or when they were created, and they’d be out of order,” he says. “I thought, ‘there’s gotta be an app for that.’ But there really wasn’t.”

So he launched one.

The Kive Company raised $500,000 late last year for its mobile application that helps you to not just take the photos, but also annotate them with things like the child’s name, date of creation, and other comments.

Although the original goal was to make the art archiving process easier – as you can tell by the name – the app’s small but growing customer base of 105,000 (almost all moms) have already found other uses for it. They’re documenting everything that you would save for a kids’ scrapbook, including report cards, photos, other items from events and school activities, and more. One woman even used the app to document the last seven months of her pregnancy.

With this expanded focus, the printed book option begins to make more sense. Because as much as I love my own daughter’s art, I’m not sure how often I’d really revisit it in hardcover book format. But a scrapbook of her pre-kindergarten years? That I could get on board with.

Gold initially tested the concept with an alpha product launched in December. He added a “print” button to the app, without offering an explanation or any details as to what the final product would be. Despite this lack of information, a couple hundred Artkive users ordered books.

With the app’s recent update, the book purchasing feature has been overhauled. Users can now review and edit their books, changing things like the title, text on the page, the pictures it includes, and more. Books can either be 8

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May 2010, a young startup named Art.sy took home the “Rookie Disruptor Award” for its art-focused search engine, which allowed users to find art by style, category, size, color, and more. Art.sy also tapped into users’ social graphs to offer personalized recommendations to make art discovery a little less overwhelming.

The idea caught the attention of investors, and over the next year-and-a-half, Art.sy raised $7.25 million in two rounds from the likes of Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, Keith Rabois, David Tisch, Charlie Cheever, Dave Morin, Peter Thiel, Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Wendi Murdoch, and Dasha Zhukova.

This week, after two years of development and beta testing, Art.sy finally opened its doors to the public and announced its partnership with over 50 art museums, estates, non-profit institutions and more than 275 art galleries. The result is a free platform that allows users to discover, learn about and peruse digital reproductions of over 20K works of art provided by Art.sy’s roster of partners.

Just as Pandora has done for music and Netflix has done for video, Art.sy is on a mission to not only help digitize art, but give people a trusted resource for discovering artwork based on their personal preferences. The startup aims to take advantage of how image-centric our digital consumption and presentation has become, thanks to Tumblr, Pinterest, Behance, Instagram, etc.

Art.sy Founder and CEO Carter Cleveland has said before that the startup’s goal is to make the world’s art accessible to anyone with an internet connection. In order to educate and expose people to new art, Art.sy itself has had to spend the better part of two years developing a taxonomy system that will help its own understanding of the nuances and trends in art.

The result is Art.sy’s “Art Genome Project,” which borrows both its name and inspiration from Pandora’s Music Genome Project, and provides the startup with a reference system by which to analyze and label commonalities and contrasts between different works of art. When Will Glaser and Tim Westergren first conceived of Pandora, they knew that they would need to develop an almost scientific method by which to break down music into its essential features.

The idea was not to be reductive, but instead to be more granular and rigorous in their classification of musical types, going beyond the handful of genres used by terrestrial radio to identify music. The idea was to use this rigorous analysis to provide results that are fine-tuned to listeners’ preferences.

Art.sy’s conception is much the same. Using its algorithmically identified art “genotypes,” the startup offers a more refined search mechanism for artwork than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the web, with the ability to break down discovery based on particular colors, patterns, schemes, and even sensations.

To this last point, like Pandora, Art.sy employs a dedicated team of data scientists and art historians that add that level of human touch (and interpretation) to its machine-based deconstruction, which manually assign values to each artwork based on categories. Technology can only do so much, in the end it’s up to humans to decide how much a particular painting is representative of Impressionism — or any other genre. (And it’s worth mentioning here that, according to the New York Times, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy has previously served as a consultant to Art.sy, so it’s not as if the startup is doing all this behind its elder’s back.)

On the front end, all this complex backend gymnastics comes together in a fairly straightforward user experience. Users search based on geography, trends and styles, and clicking on results takes you to the artwork’s page, where you can view descriptions, context, artist’s bio, etc. After choosing your favorite pieces of art, Art.sy starts populating your feed with personalized recommendations in a way that’s reminiscent of Netflix’s “If you like this move, then you’ll love this move.”

You can then sift through filtered results to find stuff you like, and if a particular piece is for sale, you can click to find more info and get connected with a broker. Of course, the artwork in Art.sy’s collection are definitely high-end, so the site isn’t going to be a destination for you to find affordable artwork to hang on the walls of your dorm room or apartment. (Ironically, Cleveland founded Art.sy after being unable to find art to hang on the walls of his own dorm room.)

For affordable, poster-type art, you’ll probably have better luck at TurningArt, Art.com, Zazzle, or many of the others in this space. And to that point, writ large, Art.sy has plenty of competition in the lets-digitize-art-and-educate-people-while-we-do-it movement — Paddle8, for example, has the same goal in mind. Educating the unwashed masses (like myself) on the finer things in life is a mission we can all get behind. Just as Google aimed to democratize knowledge and information, Art.sy is trying to do the same for art.

The other area that needs improvement is content. While Netflix-ifying art is awesome, it’s not too far into the Art.sy search experience that one starts to feel the limitations of its catalog. As the New York Times pointed out, the Google Art Project (itself an image-based art collection) is double the size of Art.sy.

That’s an easier problem to fix than a business model, and I’m not totally sure how the startup will monetize its model, even if it does continue to scale based on the pleasure we take in its serendipitous connections and edification factor. (Prior to launch, Art.sy had 60K registered users, 100K invitation requests and 50 million artwork impressions in 170 countries, so it’s off to a good start.)

Perhaps it can follow Google, Netflix or Pandora’s leads towards monetization, or strike out on its own. The pressure to define that approach will grow, but for now it’s just awesome to see a Disrupt alum attacking such a daunting goal. Applying the Pandora formula to art may not work (or sit well with the notoriously offline and discerning tastes of the art industry), but it’s an important experiment — and one that could help develop our inner art critics.

Meanwhile, I’ll be working on my finger paintings.

More on Art.sy at home here.

Top Photo by Crosstemporal

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Love Etsy, but looking for something even more unique? Makeably, a new marketplace for custom-made goods, can help. The site, founded by two ex-Googlers and longtime friends, Ryan Hayward and Anastasia Leng, has just launched into beta, offering makers a new way to manage their custom work requests online – a process which, today, is largely handled via email.

On the site, buyers can search through a variety of categories ranging from apparel to kids’ items to household goods and more, and can check out photos of the types of items the makers produce, as well as the prices associated with the custom work. Buyers can then begin to communicate with the maker about what sort of work they want done, and settle on an exact price and due date.

According to Hayward, both he and Leng had been inspired to create a resource like this, but for different reasons. For him, the inspiration came about from struggles with finding an easy, but still affordable, way to have a piece of art commissioned online. Meanwhile, Leng’s interest was in serving the wedding market, saying that many brides have exact visions of things they want for their big day, from shoes to cake toppers, but often end up settling for what’s available.

After discussing the ways their visions could meet, in August, the two founders left their respective positions in product marketing at Google, which had them working in places like Tokyo and London, and relocated to New York City to start Makeably.

While there are some similarities to the handcrafted goods marketplace Etsy, Makeably offers a different experience. “We do not see ourselves as a competitor to Etsy,” says Leng, “we really see ourselves as a complement, and so do many of our makers.” Etsy has proven there’s a real demand for handmade goods, she explains, but Makeably’s focus on custom work sets it apart. “You cannot buy anything ready-made on the site,” she says. “And our vision is very much to enable people to make what they buy. If you have an idea for something, if you’ve thought of an original gift, or anything else, you can go and pick a maker whose designs you like and work with them to create that specific thing.”

But not to worry – even if you don’t have that creative a mind to have an exacting vision, you can still use Makeably to have a unique, one-of-a-kind item produced for you. For example, if you wanted a custom gadget case, you could tell a maker that you like the color yellow and don’t care for floral patterns, and they could share some sample designs with you. That’s not to say that Makeably is extending into “spec work,” exactly. Many of these makers were already offering custom work, but were doing so through archaic means – like emails back and forth with potential customers. Others prefer custom work because it means they don’t end up with excess inventory that’s not selling on Etsy or elsewhere because they failed to forecast consumer demand.

Hayward explains that the makers housed on the site are also carefully chosen and vetted. They have high-quality items, but they’ve also been selected because of high feedback scores, sales volume and reputation. Many already have an Etsy presence (only around 20-30% do not), but they aren’t leaving Etsy to come here – they’re just adding Makeably as another place to attract customers.

Currently, there are around 100 makers on the site, who have an average of 2 to 3 templates apiece. (“Templates” are the descriptions, prices and photos that explain what the maker can do.) Around 40% of the site is wearables, with the rest being art or other lifestyle items. The majority of makers (around 75%) are U.S.-based, but that will change as the site grows, with more coming in from Asia and Europe in the future.

Makeably doesn’t charge listing or subscription fees for either buyers or sellers, but rather takes a percentage of the transaction fee, which the team currently won’t disclose. (It’s competitive with what Etsy charges, however.) Going forward, they plan to also offer premium features which will help the makers communicate better and plan their buying cycles.

The bootstrapped service is still in a closed beta, but you can use the code “TechCrunch” to try it now. The founders tell us that they’ll start fundraising in mid-October, and they’re already in discussions with angels in San Francisco and New York.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Works of art are timeless and now, thanks to Makerbot and the Met, they can be deathless, too. A June 1 hackathon brought a group of artists and hackers together at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art where they 3D scanned a number of well-known pieces of art. The work is now appearing on Thingiverse where you can download and print things like the head and shoulders of a sphinx and Bather by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis wrote:

The project, which is now ongoing, led to the Capture Your Town initiative which encourages makers to wander the streets of their cities, 3D scanning cool stuff willy nilly.

I find this whole system – a sort of guerrilla curation – fascinating and amazingly important. Art is meant to be shared and like MIT’s open classroom initiatives and public domain book projects, this initiative gives things that may moulder on shelves and in out-of-the-way museums new life. While the reproductions aren’t as beautiful as the originals (yet) 3D printing is only getting better and it’s only a matter of time before we can beautify our homes and lives with art, design, and architecture from around the world.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While I find that I like my ferrite-based Kickstarter art projects to be a bit more automatic, the Ferrite Interactive Liquid Sculpture is still pretty cool. It’s a tube containing a Ferrofluid – a suspension of ferrite particles – that is shock-resistant enough to survive a few tumbles. You can use a magnet to create odd shapes, experience the magic fo magnetics, and you can put it on your desk and toy with it as you wait for 5 o’clock to roll around.

$100 gets you a mini tube while $125 gets you the larger model. Both include powerful magnets for controlling your ferrite experience and all are made by one David Markus, an industrial design student from Georgia.

While the project isn’t very high tech, what it lacks in gizmos it makes up for in creativity. Besides, who, I ask you, who doesn’t like magnets? Who?

Project Page

Article courtesy of TechCrunch