Home :: Jaisen Mathai

A little about myself

I'm a Christian, father and husband. At the moment I am bootstrapping an open source photo service named OpenPhoto and living in Sunnyvale, California.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and moved out west in 2007 right after getting married. Back in 2005 I co-founded a photo sharing start-up. We raised a round of angel funding and stored over a million photos before finally shutting down the service. Since then I've had several side projects including a Twitter marketing service we sold for virtually nothing and a textbook rental site that's still chugging along today.

Ultimately Rachel and I plan on moving somewhere (probably India) to help people that don't have easy access to things like food, clothing and shelter.

The OpenPhoto Project

I am currently working on The OpenPhoto Project. The goal of the project is to provide an alternative to existing photo sharing and management services by giving ownership and control of users' photos back to them. It's entirely open source and available on Github.

Photo list

Photo detail

iOS application

Melts My Heart

I built a mobile photo sharing application for parents. The application was built using Appcelerator Titanium and is available for Android and iOS.

Mobile Splash Screen

Launch Page

Child's Photo Page

The Scholar App

I co-founded a student collaboration platform on Facebook and Twitter. My co-founder provided an alternative to Blackboard and Moodle which doesn't suck and students actually enjoy.

College Selection

Classmates

Add Your Class

Textbook Revolt

In addition to The Scholar App we have also built a student textbook rental platform. While provided an alternative to Blackboard and Moodle we also helped solve the overpriced textbook problem.

Home Page

Amazon API Search

Checkout Process

PubliciTweet

A recent site I created was a Twitter marketing tool named PubliciTweet. As part of the project I wrote a library for the Twitter OAuth API in order to better understand the OAuth specification. That library is available on Github as is the documentation. One of the biggest challenges of this project was to efficiently make tens of thousands of API calls while honoring Twitter's API limits.

I ended up selling the site in order to focus on the student textbook rental platform mentioned above. Before selling the site it had already sent 700,000 direct messages on Twitter and averaged over 40% click throughs.

Create Campaign Form

Dashboard

Campaign Analytics

Photagious

In 2003 I began working on my largest and most successful project, a photo sharing application named Photagious. We bootstrapped for 2 years and raised funding but ultimately had to shut the service down in 2009. I still run a version of the site for my personal use and utilize it's API to integrate my photos into the right bar.

Photo Detail/Edit

Photos

Blog

Feel free to check out my resume, portfolio or contact information.

Work

I'm bootstrapping an open source photo service named OpenPhoto and living in Sunnyvale, CA.

Articles

Twitter

@goonieiam I am. Going to drop by? at 11:16 on Friday, Jan 27th

Photos (via OpenPhoto)

About

I created this site to express my technical and creative sides. Very little of my personal life is on this site (or on the Internet for that matter). I do, however, have a lot of involvement in various technology groups and advocate free open source software. Most of the code I write is available on Github.

I'm also an entrepreneur having successfully launched a handful of companies and raising angel funding for one and selling another. I continue to invest a portion of my time pursuing ventures.