Imaging tech juggernaut Kodak is pretty keen on utilizing social media to connect with current and potential customers, boasting a presence on such sites as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.
The fact that it doesn’t own the @Kodak handle on Twitter hasn’t stopped them from being active on the popular micro-sharing service either, where marketers of the company and several employees from its international office locations share all sorts of Kodak related stuff with their followers.
Of course, it’s only natural for a company like Kodak to share pictures with the community, and if you look closely you’ll see most of the Kodak accounts on Twitter use TweetPhoto to do so (e.g. @JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak). That’s not a coincidence.
First launched back in April 2009, TweetPhoto has been steadily building out its service with multiple useful features and that has worked out well for the startup. According to Compete, TwitPic is still the leader of the pack, but the graph below shows TweetPhoto (blue line) is close to overtaking ImageShack’s Yfrog while TwitPic’s traffic appears to be in a downward trend for the past few months.
TweetPhoto is now the default photo sharing app on TweetDeck for iPhone, one of the most popular Twitter clients for the platform, and it is also integrated with many other mobile applications, including for Blackberry devices (already on Ubertwitter and coming later this week on SocialScope).
The service may look like a dog – a redesign is in the works – but they must clearly be doing something right.
Now the fledgling company is announcing that it has struck a partnership agreement with Kodak, under which the two companies intend to collaborate on initiatives focused around real-time photography and photo sharing on the web. Basically, that means they will be co-developing, testing and launching new products and services together, centered around the nature of the realtime web and image sharing.
The first lovechild of the two companies has already been born: meet the real-time Event Photo Stream, which essentially functions as an aggregator for both photos and tweets around a conversation using a given hashtag. The photo stream was originally released at the 140 Conference last month and will be demoed this week in Los Angeles at the Underground @ PDC event.
TweetPhoto has also let us know it has engaged in initial talks with angel and institutional investor about a potential seed funding round – the startup has been completely been bootstrapped to date.
Keep an eye on this one.