Just a week after winning Best Tablet Application at the Crunchies, Fotopedia is launching its latest iPad and iPhone app. The app lives up to its title Women of the World, showcasing photos of women in more than 75 countries. It was developed in partnership with the World Bank.
All of Fotopedia’s apps employ a similar design, creating a beautiful, color-rich interface for browsing high-quality photos from around the world. This isn’t the first time Fotopedia has partnered with an international organization — its first app, Heritage, was developed with UNESCO and displays photos from UNESCO World Heritage sites.
In this case, founder Jean-Marie Hullot (an Apple veteran who was also the CTO at Steve Jobs’ company NeXT) said the goal was to promote gender equality, in particular the World Bank’s Think Equal campaign, while packaging the information in a compelling way. To do that, Hullot settled on the photographs of Olivier Martel, which are paired with text about the situation of women in different countries (written by Fotopedia with data from the World Bank and elsewhere), as well as more general information from Wikipedia.
The Women of the World app also reflects Fotopedia’s new direction. Its initial apps were essentially photo libraries with enormous amounts of content. Now, it’s taking a more magazine-style approach — the photo library is still there, but each week the app highlights different pieces of content. That’s led to a dramatic increase in engagement, Hullot says — Fotopedia now says it’s seeing 200,000 visits a day, up 400 percent from the previous quarter. (The company says its apps have been downloaded 7.8 million times.) Hullot says he’s also moving toward an advertising-supported, free model, although some of the older apps still cost money.
You can download Women of the World here.