Eyecon Technology is a company that bridges the gap between media and connected entertainment devices, and it’s looking to the mobile sector as another channel to pontoon.  With the introduction of the Eye-C iPhone app, Eyecon puts a new spin on curating content spanning our social streams.  Combining a social news reader with a media player, Eye-C “plays” your streams.  Create playlists by hash-tagging media shared in a status update, and incorporate contributions from others that do the same.  Eye-C’s looking to innovate around aggregating and filtering shared media, crunching massive amounts of data in the process.

Eye-C is targeting influencers with its new mobile app, providing a living mechanism for interactions with end users.  With a series of custom denotations for curating your content, you can engage dozens of users for a collaborative playlist, or hand-select users worthy of your Eye-C stream.  You can pick which media types you’d like in your playlist–music and videos, or music only? Photos hash-tagged #cutepuppy or clips marked #hasselhoff?

In an era where content comes on-demand and anything with a cord attached is expected to connect to the Internet, the idea of pushing a media stream as a broadcast tool is a broadening concept.  You’ll find Rhapsody on set top boxes, Facebook streams alongside CNN in Flipboard’s iPad app, and all sorts of disconnected media links shared in a tweet.  Eye-C centralizes that dispersed data and enables media consumption in a single player.  Creating collections out of shared social media, Eye-C is juggling a few different trends right now, all geared towards consumer engagement.

“We looked at different interface and media layback options to see what would bring a fun discovery mechanism, without transferring to a different screen or device?” says Eye-C’s Alec Marshall.  “We really focused on the interface and what provided the most ‘lean back and consume’ experience with a social feel was Twitter.  The cool thing is you can follow sources and topics.  And that’s something that hasn’t been brought to the media playback space at all.”

Eye-C takes advantage of the new features in iOS 5 including deeper integration with Twitter to publish Eye-C taglists directly into users’ Twitter timelines.

Hashtags have emerged as a primary discovery tool for the latest news, music, artists, events and entertainment. Yet even with the reported 84 million #nowplaying tweets per day, the multimedia experience has so far remained limited to links sending you out to content. Eye-C takes it to the next level with an elegant experience, similar to Twitter, that turns your timeline into a personal TV channel, radio station, or photo gallery.

Eye-C allows you to play content on your iPhone or iPod touch, as well as your HDTV via AirPlay and Apple TV just by tapping “Play on” on your device and it automatically streams what you’re watching to nearby screens connected to Apple TV via AirPlay.

Riding on a wave of curated media, Eye-C dives head first into a trend that engulfs Facebook’s Timeline and newer ventures like Evri’s latest iPad reader app.  As the space becomes more capable of leveraging data, gleaning behavioral and sentiment patterns, we’ll see more diversity in social media curation, and eventually some consolidation under mainstream communication channels.

Contributors: Mellisa Tolentino