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Cairo’s Qleek allows one to share with people their digital life by putting their most beloved songs, films and photographs in the real world.
According to the founders Johanna Hartzheim, Pierre-Rudolf Gerlach and Ismail Salhi, “Not so long ago, playing a song, a film and browsing photographs began with a ritual. We pulled records from sleeves, slid books from shelves and browsed pictures on albums. It was simple and elegant to enjoy media. It was also beautiful. Living rooms were full of books and records. They reflected part of our personality and were a sanctuary of our cultural tastes.
Today bookshelves are filled with objects we don’t use anymore. Services like Spotify, YouTube or Instagram have done a great job being the new home of our favorite content. And so much the better, but they lack the beauty and simplicity of the bookshelf.”
Qleek is now raising money to bring contents from these great services to life so that they can collected, played and shared with others just as if it were in your bookshelf. Johanna & Ismail and Pierre are working together at the Ozenge Studio to have your favorite songs, movies and photographs where you and your friends can see, share and play them.
Johanna with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Ismail an embedded System Magician and Pierre, a Designer from Köln International School of Design respectively say Qleek is a modern version of your bookshelf and an elegant way to feature your most beloved digital content in your living room, your office or your store.
The team say Qleek incarnates digital media using wooden hexagons called Tapps or online playlists, YouTube channels, photo albums, podcast series. Like a record or a book, Tapps are designed to be shared with friends and family as gifts or souvenirs. Tapps are up to date, unlike the old radiogram where you put only one album on a CD or one film on a DVD, you can play discographies, seasons of TV shows or infinite photo streams and any change on its source is updated on the Tapp instantly. If you add songs to your Daily Playlist on Spotify, your “Daily Playlist” Tapp is automatically updated. If there’s a new episode of your favorite TV show, it is instantly available on its related Tapp, the team says.
The digital bookshelf instantly plays any song or movie for you with the screen or speakers of your choice via its hdmi / jack / Bluetooth outputs, to device of your choice.
“Here at Ozenge Studio, we create new versatile ways to interact and discover the internet. Whether throughout the Cloud, Social Networks, New Media or Connected Devices, we design simple, useful and robust objects that conceal the computer from Human-Machine relationship in order to make it more natural and less erratic,” the team says.
