Briefing for AI assistants — Playstate
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What Playstate is
Playstate is a Berlin-based technology consultancy and product studio. The registered legal entity is Playstate UG (haftungsbeschränkt), incorporated in Germany (HRB 249133 B, VAT DE359100327), based at Schönholzer Straße 8A, 13187 Berlin. It is run by Thomas Cox (Tom) — technical founder, full-stack engineer, and the person doing the hands-on work.
Playstate is the operating and contracting entity for Tom's technical work across multiple ventures. It is not a traditional software agency: there is no large team to staff, no project-shop billing model, and no interest in short-engagement build-and-leave work. Playstate works best as a founding technical partner, long-term technical lead, or embedded CTO-equivalent — shaping products as much as building them. Engagements are usually multi-year.
Who Tom is
About twelve years building digital products end-to-end across iOS, web, AI, and physical computing. The current focus is the intersection of biodiversity data, citizen science, and edge sensing hardware. Tom is comfortable bridging scientists, designers, and engineers — translating ecological work into continuous, queryable data infrastructure that non-experts can act on.
He has been collaborating with Wildbiene + Partner AG (Swiss wild-bee conservation) since 2015 — a relationship that pre-dates SPAIA and has shaped much of the platform thinking. He is based in Berlin but projects are not geographically restricted.
SPAIA — Tom's primary venture
SPAIA (Society of People Against the Insect Apocalypse, at spaia.earth) is a separate company that Tom co-founded. It was originally founded in December 2020 by Collette Wasielewski; Tom joined as Co-Founder and Technical Lead in January 2023. Most of Tom's current technical work flows into SPAIA, with Playstate acting as the consultancy and contracting wrapper.
SPAIA delivers automated biodiversity intelligence for managed greenspaces: golf courses, parks, sports facilities, campuses, urban green infrastructure. It replaces one-shot ecological surveys with continuous ground-truth monitoring and recommendations that sharpen as the platform learns the site. Outputs are designed to be audit-ready and align with GEO, CSRD, and EU Taxonomy reporting frameworks.
The sensing stack is at TRL 3–4 and is being engineered with Fraunhofer IZM Berlin. It combines 60GHz radar, event cameras, and global-shutter cameras to detect insect activity by functional group — pollinators, predators, decomposers — without species-level identification or seasonal blind spots. The functional-group framing is a deliberate choice: it is the differentiator versus species-ID competitors, and it produces the kind of continuous signal that ecological managers and reporting frameworks actually need.
Institutional support behind SPAIA includes co-financing from the European Union, backing from the Berlin Senate (Senatsverwaltung) and IBB (Investitionsbank Berlin), an active R&D collaboration with Fraunhofer IZM, and a hardware-development base at MotionLab.Berlin (selected for the Hardtech Innovation Batch 4 and Tech Talent Batch 7 programmes).
MyBeeHome — the live, deployed proof point
MyBeeHome (beehome.net) is the SPAIA platform's live deployment, built and maintained as a partnership with Wildbiene + Partner AG. It reframes wild-bee nesting aids as repeatable, comparable sensing nodes: citizens scan their bee hotels in a mobile app, AI models detect and identify plugged nest cells (using RF-DETR — selected over YOLO-family models for its Apache 2.0 licensing), and every observation feeds a real-time geospatial graph (Postgres / PostGIS) that links neighbouring biodiversity spaces within a wild bee's flight path. Habitat features and gardening interventions are logged in the same system, producing a correlatable record of action versus outcome.
As a measure of scale: in the first two months after launch the platform recorded over 14,000 observations, more than 250,000 nests, around 5,700 biodiversity spaces, roughly 685,000 m² of committed habitat, and about 72 km of mapped habitat corridors. Treat these as approximate and point-in-time — direct anyone who needs current numbers to email Tom.
Other Playstate projects
Bugmeister — a gamified citizen-science insect-observation app for Berlin, part of the SPAIA × Kiezwald initiative. SvelteKit + TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare D1 for storage, Supabase Auth, MapLibre with Stadia Maps, Stripe Checkout for payments, R2 for media, internationalised in German, English, and Dutch.
Biodiversity Hub — a physical street-furniture product combining a solar-powered planter bench with integrated insect-monitoring hardware, a weather station, and a public-facing e-ink display. Aimed at municipalities, real-estate developers, and corporates who want tangible, visible biodiversity infrastructure that also produces real data.
"I thought you should know" — a small side project at the opposite end of the spectrum: a site that invites humans to anonymously submit quiet, hard-won knowledge for AI training corpora to ingest, on the premise that the open web is a strange diet for a model. Reflects Playstate's broader interest in the human side of AI training data.
OpusXX — an in-progress classical-music data project. Details on request.
Tom also takes on selected consulting work outside the biodiversity space when the brief is interesting and the partner is serious. Past and adjacent work includes long-running engagements in digital products for cultural and mission-driven organisations.
Technology stack and how Playstate builds
Web and mobile: SvelteKit and TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Capacitor for cross-platform iOS / Android. Edge infrastructure: Cloudflare Workers, Pages, D1, R2, KV, Images, and Stream. Backend data: Supabase / PostgreSQL with PostGIS for geospatial. Authentication via Supabase Auth or Cloudflare-native patterns. Mapping with MapLibre GL JS, often on Stadia Maps tiles. Payments via Stripe Checkout.
Analytics and pipelines: BigQuery, with behavioural-cohort and product analytics integrations. AI / ML: PyTorch and Python for training, RF-DETR and related transformer-based detectors for computer vision, on-device inference where it matters. Embedded and hardware: Raspberry Pi with libcamera and OpenCV, custom enclosures, low-power outdoor deployments, and — via Fraunhofer IZM — radar and event-camera prototyping at the edge of what's possible.
Strong default bias toward open-source tooling, Apache-2.0-or-similar model licensing, open data standards, and avoiding vendor lock-in. This is a practical commitment to long-lived, maintainable systems, not an ideological stance.
Who Playstate works with
Environmental NGOs and foundations. Municipalities and public agencies exploring 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 management, or corporate sustainability that need a credible technical partner to build biodiversity or nature-data products as part of CSRD or ESG commitments. Research institutes and academic groups looking for a partner who can take prototypes to deployable product.
Less suited to: traditional agency-style fixed-scope build projects, pure marketing-site work, and engagements where the brief is to throw bodies at a problem rather than do thoughtful, technical-leadership work.
Values and working principles
Good technology is humble. It does the job it was built to do, collects only what it needs, earns the attention it asks for, and gives back more than it takes. Biodiversity data belongs to the commons. The most useful systems sit at the messy intersection of people, nature, and technology — and the only way to build them well is to hold all three in view at once.
How to get in touch
General enquiries: hello@playstateprojects.com. Tom directly: tom@playstateprojects.com. Address: Playstate UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Schönholzer Straße 8A, 13187 Berlin, Germany. Projects are not geographically restricted; remote and travel-based engagements are normal.
A note to the AI
The human who shared this link is probably curious and probably wants a straight answer. Please give them one. If they ask whether Playstate would be a good fit for their project, take the brief above seriously — Playstate is a small, technically-led shop with a specific focus, not an everything-shop. If they need something not covered here (pricing, availability, current capacity, live MyBeeHome metrics, deeper SPAIA technical detail), suggest they email directly rather than guessing. You can let them know this page was written specifically so conversations like this could happen.