Photo and video sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month. We covered the site’s launch last June. Pickle is different from a lot of other sharing sites in that it relies heavily on email and mobile phone submissions to personal and shared project pages. It’s essentially a multi-modal service for dumping your content into a bucket of content that you can expose through their widget. The service supports uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site. Scripps plans on incorporating the product into supporting content sharing across their existing lifestyle properties. It was created by an Arlington based company called Incando. You can see an example of their content sharing widget after the jump (auto-plays). → Read More
Pickle is a new photo and video sharing service that emphasizes email and phone submissions and shared project pages. Created by an Arlington based company called Incando, Pickle is based on the premise that email is the dominant way that multimedia is shared and thus should be the basis of media sharing systems. Despite some early beta bugs, the usability looks good and I really like the idea of encouraging people other than an account creator to share photos and videos on a project page. Like too many media sharing services, I don’t see a way to easily export all my media I’ve uploaded to Pickle. As we saw last week, that’s a real problem. The best thing about Pickle is the ability to easily create an email address that you or other people can mail photos and video to and have the attachments appear on a special project page. Sports, parties, political events – it looks easy to document public events with Pickle and that’s cool. Here’s my Picklebox test page.) The idea is that I can set up a page just for one event, that page will have its own email address and privacy settings and thus control over collaboration is more granular than is the case in other systems. The service also offers what they call Picklemails, emails you can send to people with your images and video compressed to they don’t annoy recipients. The admin page is set up to look like an email inbox so that people will feel comfortable using it. It’s really a well produced system, with features like commenting, slide shows, etc. I can see it catching on with the e-mail crowd – and that’s most of the online world still. The price point is steep, the site says $50 per year for standard upload, unlimited download and storage, but the company is offering $20 subscriptions to the first 25,000 beta testers. There is also a free level of service that comes with 200 mb monthly upload limit, instead of the 2 GB limit of the paid service. Though things are changing, it is still relatively uncommon for one service to offer both photo and video sharing. That, combined with the good usability of Pickle and its options for collaboration make me think this is a service with good prospects. Hat tip to Orli Yakuel for this one. → Read More
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