Not that it should be a big surprise to anyone, but Radar, the social photo sharing site is entering the deadpool. An email sent out to users over the weekend confirms that May 26 at noon Pacific Time will be the end.
As I said, this shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that Shutterly bought Radar parent Tiny Pictures back in September of last year. Shutterfly is much, much larger than Radar ever was, so it makes sense to incorporate the best features of Radar into that product rather than keeping it alive as a standalone service. → Read More
Sharing videos on the Web is easy: Upload to YouTube or Facebook, send out a link. Sharing videos on mobile phones is still a pain. The iPhone tries to make it easier by letting you upload directly to YouTube, but what if you want to share a video privately? Sending videos between phones is cumbersome. A new service that just launched in beta called Thwapr seeks to solve this problem by letting you simply uploading videos from your phone to the Web and then texting or emailing a link to your friends.
Thwapr already works with 165 phones, from iPhones and Androids to Blackberries and Samsungs. After you sign up, you can email your photos or videos to Thwapr, and then share them from there to any mobile phone that supports links in text messages. As you add contacts to Thwapr, you can select them by name. The recipients get a text message with a link which opens up their mobile browser and takes them to Thwapr’s mobile website. They can see the shared photo or video and “Thwap” back a response, creating a conversation around the image. Each mobile video needs to be 20 MB or less for now.
Videos are delivered a variety of ways based on the type of phone the viewer is using. On the iPhone, they come as progressive downloads which open up in the Quicktime player. Other phones support streaming video. Older Blaackberries would get the video as a file download, and Thwapr can even deliver videos as rough animated gif images for phones which can’t handle anything else. Thwapr’s CTO Eric Hoffert worked on the original Q → Read More
Just a few months after Shutterfly bought Tiny Pictures, they’re already busy pumping out new products. The first is Wink, an iPhone app and web app that allows you to easily turn your pictures into photobooth-esque strips of pictures.
They key to this app is that beyond your regular camera phone pictures, it gives you easy access to both your Facebook pictures (via Facebook Connect), and your Flickr pictures. Once you have those, it takes just seconds to tweak them and send them off to Shutterfly to be printed and delivered to you (or friends) in a special photostrip case. And before that arrives, they send you an email preview of what the photostrips will look like. These strips can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter immediately. → Read More
After raising a total of $11.2 million since its founding in 2005, Tiny Pictures sold to Shutterfly on Friday for $1.3 million in cash and another $1.3 million in restricted stock to employees, which has some performance triggers. If you back out the earnout, investors only got back about a tenth of what they put in.
Those investors include Mohr Davidow, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and angel investors Reid Hoffman, and Joi Ito. The company’s last venture round was $7 million led by Draper Fisher in February, 2008. But Mohr Davidow, which held preferred shares, might have been the only investor to see any of those proceeds at all. Shutterfly disclosed the acquisition in an SEC filing, which only mentions Mohr Davidow as a recipient of some of the $1.3 million in cash.
It also mentions that Nancy J. Schoendorf, a managing partner at Mohr Davidow, sits on the boards of both companies. Although she did not vote on the acquisition, the connection raises the question of whether or not Mohr played a role in bring the deal to Shutterfly in the first place. → Read More
Mobile startup Tiny Pictures secured a $7.2 million series B financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Mohr Davidow Ventures, which led the A round, also participated. Previously, the company raised a total of $4 million, including seed investments from Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito. Tiny Pictures operates the mobile photo-sharing service Radar, which lets members comment on each others camera-phone snapshots. Radar serves up 15 million mobile photos a month worldwide. Last November, the company introduced advertising in the form of public photo streams that movie studios and other companies try to get people to pay attention to. Blacked Eyed Peas singer will.i.am recently joined the company’s advisory board. CrunchBase Information Tiny Pictures Radar Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
There are plenty of mobile apps that let you snap a picture and share it with your friends or the world—Zannel, Umundo, Mocospace, Pikki, MobyPicture, Yahoo Go—but one that does an especially good job at just sharing pictures among your friends is Radar. The service is run by Tiny Pictures, a San Francisco startup that has raised $4 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures. Whenever you snap a picture you want to share, you send it via e-mail to your Radar account. It appears immediately, and everyone you’ve invited as a friend can see the pictures and comment on them—either online or on their phones. The best way to use Radar is to download the application to your phone (it just added a custom iPhone app today). Whenever you log in, you see a stream of thumbnails of every picture you and your friends have posted. The commenting interface is pretty slick (you can plug it into AIM for instant notifcations of when a new comment has been posted to one of your pics). It the key to Radar because it turns each picture into a conversation starter. This only works, of course if you A) have friends on Radar, and B) they post pictures on a regular basis. Radar, which launched more than a year ago in the summer of 2006, has only 600,000 users worldwide. But that number has been doubling every month for the past three months. So we might be at an inflection point here, especially as more capable phones come onto the market that can take advantage of its Web-like features. Radar serves 250,000 pictures and videos a day. Eighty percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices (it also has a regular Website), and 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S. While most of the conversations and photos on Radar are private, you can choose to make them public. And today the company is also launching a public gallery, where advertisers can try to entice Radar members to subscribe to their photo streams. Right now, there are photo streams for the upcoming movie Hitman, pictures of frivolous but funny merchandise from iWoot, top video picks from Vimeo, and CEO John Poisson’s own Radar stream. There will soon be Radar channels from Hendrick’s Gin, iTunes, and the stealth Web video series Nowhere Men (which will focus on a group people “missing” since 2002 and → Read More
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