Application screenshots:
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January 23, 2007 SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – A free, downloadable application that enables users to both automate photo sharing and organize their digital photos, was introduced today by PowerSnap Inc..
The application, PowerSnap alpha 2.0, may be downloaded from www.powersnap.com.
“Until now, photographers – including everyday folks taking pictures on their cell phones – have had to juggle numerous different environments and passwords just to send, receive and manage their photos,” says Santosh Jayaram, founder and CEO of PowerSnap. “There has been no easy way to manage and share what are becoming mountains of unorganized photographs buried in people’s computers.
“Now, for the first time, PowerSnap puts the user’s entire photo experience in one place. In the process it creates the first communities based upon images, rather than words.”
Thanks to the rise of digital photography, millions of people are taking billions of photographs every year and sharing them through the internet. These pictures are stored on computers and shared with friends using email or online photo sites, such as Yahoo! Photos, Flickr, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak Easyshare Gallery.
PowerSnap alpha 2.0 enables users to automate photo sharing and organize their digital photos within a single application. For the first time the user can manage all their photographs, automatically sending and receiving pictures from friends in near real-time, and synchronize their uploaded albums with their desktop. Instead of struggling with multiple sites and applications, photos can be shared automatically using just a few keystrokes. Users can easily find both their own photos, and pictures shared by their friends, all within one easy-to-use application.
The average user will quickly find that PowerSnap immensely improves his or her ability to communicate visually with friends and family. PowerSnap not only creates the first true peer-to-peer network for photo sharing, but also offers all of the tools needed to manage the entire photo experience: sending, receiving, managing and synchronizing. The result is a seamless, intuitive experience, comparable to sending email amongst different email providers – and experience that until now was not possible with digital photographs.
PowerSnap alpha. 2.0 does its online sharing in conjunction with Flickr, a leading photosite owned by Yahoo!. For the 400+ million subscribers to Yahoo! services adding PowerSnap is only a click away. But PowerSnap is not limited to just Yahoo! users, it is available to all users worldwide – anyone that uses or touches digital images.
PowerSnap is currently extending its connected vision to other photosites. The company is now integrating with Yahoo Photos, AOL Pictures, Sony Imagestation, Webshots, Buzznet and Smugmug. PowerSnap plans to announce further partnerships in the coming weeks. A Macintosh version of PowerSnap is also in development.
Key Markets:
The most likely initial users of PowerSnap include:
- Parents of young children have traditionally been one of the largest segments of the photographic industry as they love to be able to share their children with Grandparents and friends. These audiences share pictures with recurring themes on a regular basis and will benefit from PowerSnap’s Automated Photo Sharing.
- Web 2.0 pioneers: Individuals who are web savvy; who know, and appreciate the power of mash-ups; and who are looking for new vehicles to build their own communities.
- Young people who may snap a dozen or more photographs each day with a camera or cellphone and who don’t have the time or tools to quickly and easily share more than one or two with their network of friends.
- The photographer who takes more than 1000 pictures per year who needs to take better control over the giant files that result. This used to be the domain of only professional photographs, but now includes hundreds of thousands of amateurs as well.
Sample Applications
- A teenager sits in the back of her mom’s station wagon, dreading yet another endless shopping trip to the supermarket. So, to beat the boredom, she takes out her cellphone, makes a face and takes a picture of herself. She tags it “Ivana”, “bored” and “shoppingsucks” and emails it to Flickr. Thirty-two of her friends, who have all subscribed to her pictures bearing the tag “Ivana” instantly get the photo in their PowerSnap in-box.
- A young businessperson, who attended the division Christmas party, not only took forty-three photos, but was also snapped by at least twenty of his workmates. Because they all subscribe to PowerSnap, all get to see each others’ photos the moment they are uploaded – something that has never happened before.
- A new mom, weary from taking care of baby Molly, simply doesn’t have the time or energy to answer every request from relatives and friends around the country for pictures of the new baby. So she sends all of her friends and family members free subscriptions to her PowerSnap photos within the album “Molly”. Now, every time she or her husband take a picture of Molly, they merely have to load it onto their computer and it is automatically sent out to every subscriber.
Key Features
- Mass tagging, captioning and commenting.
- Sophisticated filtering to set and determine permissions on photos.
- Real-time notification to subscribers when new photos have been uploaded
- Automated timeline organization and viewing of all photographs on file.
- Open platform for other photosites, besides Flickr, to allow automated photo sharing. PowerSnap will shortly be releasing integrations with Yahoo! Photos, AOL Pictures, Sony Imagestation, Webshots and Smugmug.
About PowerSnap
PowerSnap Inc. was founded in 2006 by Santosh Jayaram, former founder/CEO of Mietus, Inc, a supply chain consultancy and a recent graduate of Oxford University’s Said Graduate School of Business; Ayush Gupta, a technologist who has worked for Cisco, Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems, Autodesk and Xerox; and Supreet Singh, a user interface pioneer who has worked on product design and usability for such clients as Ford, IBM, HP, ESPN Star, SAP Labs, MTV Europe and British Telecom |
