Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been spending most of my waking hours working on a new project with an old friend. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but we’ll be at ETech this week and at events at SXSWi and SXSWm the week after, so what better time then now for a long rambly blog post introducing the Lensley Automatic.

A couple years ago, Jaime decided to build a photobooth (and with no prior experience, headed off to Home Depot…) and it’s been percolating along since. We’ve done events at the X-Games, the US Open, and with clients like Nike, Adidas, Diesel, Fuel.TV, Fuse.TV, MTV, etc. Towards the end of last year, after returning from a several month long interruption working on the Obama campaign (that worked out OK, btw :), we decided that it was time to take it to the next level.

It’s been an incredibly busy past few months, but what we’ve ended up with I think is something pretty unique (with a lot of potential). We have a new and improved enclosure (although, admittedly, a new version is already cooking), and more interestingly (well, it certainly took a lot more of my time) our own custom software for the booth, visualizations, and network interaction, giving us the ability to completely customize the printed output, the booth user experience, and the digital followup. For a start, we’ll be tweeting and posting photos to flickr w/ autotagging by way of RFID (fingers crossed on that!) at ETech. Just the first of the cool things we have planned.

And, while learning Cocoa hasn’t been all roses, it has been a great deal of fun working on a project that touches on hardware, visualization, photography, events, and the social web (and soon, video and mobile) – it’s a big cross section of “things I’m interested in.” Plus, all the joys of starting a small business (that’s half facetious, but also half genuine). Sure the timing might not be ideal, but all in all, it’s been a great experience in terms of stretching out some different muscles after being a bit cooped up. And well, there’s no time like the present to do your own thing.

Oh, if you’ve seen me in person in the past couple months (not likely!) and I’ve been more scatterbrained than usual (or have been responding in a zombie-like fashion), now you know why. (Not helped by the fact that for whatever reason, I spent a good few weeks of development time on a 4pm-10am schedule.)