Twitpic might be in a bit of a pickle. In what looks like a cruel joke, its main competitor, ImageShack (the company behind the yFrog Twitter photo hosting service), went ahead and filed to trademark the name “Twitpic” before Twitpic did. According to filings from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (via Trademarkia), ImageShack filed for the Twitpic trademark in August of 2009. Twitpic filed for the same trademark only in October of 2009. Both Twitpic and yFrog serve the same purpose: they are image sharing sites for Twitter. But it’s hard to see how Imageshack can justify its claim to the Twitpic trademark. → Read More
ImageShack, one of the largest media hosting sites on the Web, updated its iPhone app ImageShack Uploader (iTunes link) this morning, unlocking features that enable users to easily share both videos and photos using either ImageShack services and third-party sites like YouTube and Twitter.
ImageShack Uploader 2.0, which is free of charge, lets you record videos and shoot pictures using the iPhone’s camera, and gives you the option to upload them directly to ImageShack servers.
Thanks to further integration with its real-time photo sharing service yfrog, users can also opt to share pictures and videos straight to Twitter, including media that was already stored on the device. Finally, there’s a direct YouTube upload option for videos as well. → Read More
ImageShack, the oft-forgotten and underestimated venture capital backed media hosting company, has quietly launched an alternative to the image sharing tools for Twitter already out there, like TwitPic and Twitxr. The tool is called Yfrog and like its counterparts it allows for immediate posting to your Twitter stream any image you upload or link to.
Evidently, the image is hosted by ImageShack, so this is just another way for the company to get more people to learn about their media hosting wares. Once the image is up (example showing a guy eating a yfrog), you get the usual stuff like embed codes, custom thumbnails, a direct link to reblog and retweet the material, etc. We should note – and I’m getting tired of having to say this every time – that you have to enter your Twitter credentials to use Yfrog so that’s up to you. → Read More
Yesterday, I reported a strong rumor that Sequoia Capital had invested in image-hosting site ImageShack. Today, I spoke with CEO and founder Jack Levin. He would not comment specifically on the funding rumor other than to say that over the past few months he’s been in discussions with a variety of VCs. So he may still be in the late stages of discussions, or he may have closed the round. He really wouldn’t say. But at the very least, he is definitely looking for funding. He was, however, very forthcoming on other aspects of his business. And outlined a grand ambition befitting an early employee of Google (his claim to fame is the clustering architecture that Google is based on). Levin did want to correct a few things from the original post, in which I said he has self-funded the startup until now. “I never put a single dime into the company,” he says. Unless you count the $80 for the first month of server hosting back in November, 2003 when he was still working at Google. But that month the company made $200, so it has been profitable from the start. His secret: We were profitable for the last three years. The most different thing about our company is that it would take 7 to 8 million dollars in opex [operating expenses] per year to run a media hosting company like ours if you were using traditional non-off-the-shelf clustering technology, where we use a tiny fraction of that amount, which allows us to be profitable and take risks other companies can’t. Because of the way he designed his back-end architecture, he can serve two terabytes of images from a single $1,000, Linux server. So he spends only about $200,000 a year on capital expenditures and now has about 500 servers. He was also able to leverage his industry connections to get really cheap bandwidth rates. Also, subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenues. Most of the revenues come from advertising on the site. ImageShack serves about 10 million ads a day, mostly to people who go to the site to upload their images. Although the site also attracts 500,000 brand new visitors every single day. Levin also notes that it is “unlikely we will ever modify the image” with ads because “that would be like spamming the Internet.” Rather than put ads in or around the images it → Read More
Update: See follow-up post here with comments from ImageShack CEo Jack Levin. If you had to name the top five image-hosting services on the Web, would ImageShack be one of them? It turns out that it is No. 5 in worldwide visitors, with nearly 28 million last March, according to comScore. (Ranked above it are Facebook Photos, Flickr, Picasa, and PhotoBucket). You might be more familiar with ImageShack’s familiar frog logo, which appears on many of the photos it hosts across the Web. Sequoia Capital is familiar with ImageShack and its frog. Although it hasn’t been disclosed anywhere, a reliable source tells us that Sequoia recently invested in the company. Sequoia’s investment is believed to be in the $10 million range. Up until now, ImageShack was entirely self-funded by founder Jack Levin, who built the service himself with his brother and a few part-time employees. The company claims it is already turning a profit (it charges an $8 a month subscription fee for unlimited image uploads). Levin was employee No. 25 or 26 at Google. He was the engineer who built Google’s early server clusters and self-healing architecture. At ImageShack, he has taken a similar approach to creating a site that serves 2.5 billion images a day. Placing ads on just a fraction of those images could become a much more lucrative business than trying to upsell subscriptions, and that apparently is why Sequoia invested. Figuring out how to put ads in or around images on the Web is a big opportunity. It is a problem that Google (another company Sequoia invested in) is working on. Just earlier today at the Google Factory Tour, for instance, the company noted that hundreds of millions of image searches are done on Google every day and that it is experimenting with both display and text ads paired with image search results. But it is having a tough time. Someone is going to figure out how to serve relevant ads on all those billions of images on the Web. Sequoia is betting that person will be a former Google employee rather than a current one. CrunchBase Information imageshack Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
