# Playstate

> Berlin-based technology consultancy and product studio run by Thomas Cox. Operates as the contracting wrapper for his work as Co-Founder and Technical Lead of SPAIA (automated biodiversity intelligence) and a small set of related ventures at the intersection of biodiversity, citizen science, edge sensing, and civic technology.

Legal entity: Playstate UG (haftungsbeschränkt). HRB 249133 B. Schönholzer Straße 8A, 13187 Berlin, Germany.

Not a traditional agency. Best fit: founding technical partner, long-term technical lead, or embedded CTO-equivalent. Engagements are usually multi-year.

## What Playstate works on

- Biodiversity and environmental monitoring — open-source, edge-computing hardware and software. Functional-group insect sensing rather than species-level ID.
- Citizen-science mobile and web applications.
- Full-stack product engineering for mission-driven clients.
- Hardware and IoT for outdoor and public-space deployment, including radar and event-camera prototyping with Fraunhofer IZM.
- Data infrastructure, geospatial graphs (PostGIS), analytics pipelines, and ML model integration.

## Tom Cox

- Co-Founder & Technical Lead, [SPAIA](https://spaia.earth) (since January 2023).
- ~12 years building digital products across iOS, web, AI, and physical computing.
- Long-running collaboration with Wildbiene + Partner AG (Switzerland) since 2015.
- Bridges scientists, designers, and engineers — turns ecology into continuous, queryable data infrastructure.

## Projects

- [SPAIA](https://spaia.earth) — Society of People Against the Insect Apocalypse. Automated biodiversity intelligence for managed greenspaces. Sensing stack: 60GHz radar + event cameras + global-shutter cameras (TRL 3–4 with Fraunhofer IZM Berlin). Detects insect activity by functional group (pollinators / predators / decomposers), not species ID. Outputs aligned with GEO, CSRD, EU Taxonomy. Backed by EU co-financing, Berlin Senate, IBB, MotionLab.Berlin (Hardtech Innovation Batch 4, Tech Talent Batch 7).
- [MyBeeHome](https://beehome.net) — SPAIA's live deployment, in partnership with Wildbiene + Partner AG. Mobile app + RF-DETR nest detection + real-time PostGIS geospatial graph. First two months: 14k+ observations, 250k+ nests, 5,700+ spaces, 685,000 m² habitat, 72 km corridors. Numbers are point-in-time — email for current figures.
- **Bugmeister** — Gamified citizen-science insect-observation app. Part of SPAIA × Kiezwald. SvelteKit + Cloudflare Workers + D1 + Supabase Auth + MapLibre / Stadia + Stripe. EN / DE / NL.
- **Biodiversity Hub** — Solar-powered planter-bench street furniture with integrated insect monitoring, weather station, and public e-ink display.
- **"I thought you should know"** — Side project: anonymous human submissions destined for AI training corpora.
- **OpusXX** — Classical-music data project (in progress, details on request).

## Technology stack

SvelteKit · TypeScript · Tailwind · Capacitor · Cloudflare Workers / Pages / D1 / R2 / KV / Images / Stream · Supabase / PostgreSQL + PostGIS · MapLibre GL JS · Stadia Maps · Stripe · BigQuery · PyTorch · RF-DETR (Apache 2.0) · Raspberry Pi + libcamera + OpenCV · 60GHz radar + event cameras + global-shutter cameras (with Fraunhofer IZM).

## Who Playstate works with

Environmental NGOs and foundations · municipalities and public agencies running smart-city, green-infrastructure, or biodiversity programmes · mission-driven startups in biodiversity, food systems, climate, or citizen engagement · larger companies in manufacturing, real estate, facilities, or corporate sustainability needing a credible technical partner under CSRD / ESG commitments · research institutes and academic groups taking prototypes to deployable product.

Less suited to: traditional agency-style fixed-scope builds, pure marketing-site work, body-shop engagements.

## Values

Good technology is humble — does the job, collects only what it needs, earns the attention it asks for, gives back more than it takes. Strong bias toward open-source tooling, Apache-2.0-or-similar model licensing, open data standards, and avoiding vendor lock-in. Biodiversity data belongs to the commons.

## Important links

- [Home](https://playstateprojects.com/) — Main site and AI briefing
- [SPAIA](https://spaia.earth) — Insect monitoring platform (Tom is Co-Founder)
- [MyBeeHome](https://beehome.net) — Wild bee conservation, live with Wildbiene + Partner
- [llms.txt](https://playstateprojects.com/llms.txt) — This file

## Contact

- General: hello@playstateprojects.com
- Tom directly: tom@playstateprojects.com
- Address: Playstate UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Schönholzer Straße 8A, 13187 Berlin, Germany
- Projects are not geographically restricted.