Click here for Part I

An entrepreneur innovating in engineering, defense, and mobile technology

Warren Citrin is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Fractograf. For more than 20 years, Warren has played an integral role in Maryland’s startup community. In addition to Fractograf, he has founded several companies, including Redox Power Systems, Alchemee, Solipsys Corporation, and Gloto Corp. Through his business ventures, Warren has been involved in diverse industries such as cybersecurity, engineering, and mobile technology. He also spent 18 years as an assistant supervisor of the Engineering Analysis Group at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and holds patents in multiple fields. In 2003, Warren won Ernst & Young’s Maryland Entrepreneur of the Year award.

EDWIN WARFIELD: How did you work at Solipsys and Gloto lead to Fractograf?

WARREN CITRIN: Pivoting is what we do. We pivot and pivot and pivot until we find something that’s going to work. In the case of Gloto, doing the services I felt wasn’t going to allow us the growth rate that we wanted to, and so we spun off another company based on a little product we were doing at Gloto and which we ultimately named Fractograf.

Fractograf is a smartphone app that allows one to take personal pictures or pictures based on a search object or search word, and create a mosaic. As you zoom into the mosaic, it breaks up into the pictures. Some of those pictures may come from social networks, from search engines, or from your own camera roll, but the interesting thing about it was in addition to automatically rearranging these photos into a photo themselves, you can keep zooming in. So, imagine you take a picture of your child at graduation and you zoom in and now that picture breaks up into a mosaic of pictures of them as young toddlers. You pick one of those photos and you keep zooming in and that breaks up into a mosiac made out of photos of them as an infant or whatever you wish to do. Fractograf allows you to create such objects.

From that, we decided to create a whole host of smartphone applications. The two we have been focusing on right now are a thing called Yammo, which allows you to edit and animate any photo you have, and the other one is called Sticker Sorter, which allows you to with just a flick of a finger cut pieces out of a photo and turn them into stickers that you can share over texts, or you can put into Yammo to insert into your photos.

Q. What’s the business model there?

A. The business model for Yammo is potential. It’s aspirational and we have built-in to Yammo the ability for you to quickly identify or isolate pieces of an image. The pieces may be animated—I could have an airplane flying behind you in the photo and when I tap on that airplane that airplane could be linked to a site that would allow you buy airplane tickets and so on. The business model we saw for Yammo was one that could have a slightly different take on advertising in the sense that the advertisements are built right into the environmental photo, and it’s very graphic oriented. An airplane represents a linkage to a site to Southwest Airlines’ site or tapping on a car will take you to the BMW dealership. Tapping on whatever you really want to link them to, you can create photos that tapping on various aspects of the photo take you to links within SoundCloud and plays music—anything you wish. The key would be there’s no skill required. You can do Photoshop-types of things and fun types of things share them with your friends over social networks, messaging, or email and it requires no skill—in five minutes you’re the expert. That’s the idea behind Yammo.

The app industry is so swamped and there’s so much out there that rising above the din is very hard. We felt like this was an area we didn’t see anything that was as easy to use and as—in our opinion—compelling and so we thought this is the an itch that might actually gain some traction.

Connect with Warren on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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