The good folks at the new Beijing and San Francisco-based startup Landscape Mobile have launched Sight today, an app that makes it easier to organize articles on mobile devices.
Copying and pasting on mobile devices is a huge pain in the caboose, and Sight solves that problem by allowing users to take a screen shot of whatever they’re reading through the Sight app (available on iOS and Android), which then scours the web for the story and saves it to the app’s own clipboard.
The technology and talent behind Sight was persuasive enough for IDG Capital to sign on for a $1.85 million seed round.
“An image is the new URL on the mobile web,” says Landscape Mobile’s co-founder and chief executive Yue Zhuge. Yue, a former executive at Yahoo and Microsoft in Beijing and Silicon Valley, has a lot of experience with mobile advertising.
“Because of mobile devices, the image has become so cheap to acquire, store and manipulate and with the development of smart imaging technology, analyzing images has also become easy,” Yue says.
Landscape Mobile was formally launched in August 2013, when Yue and her co-founder Tian Bai, a former colleague at Microsoft, began developing the technology that would become Sight.
Sight is actually the second product from Landscape Mobile; its first offering was a cloud-based photo gallery service, Ivy Gallery in November 2013, and it was with that product that Landscape first approached IDG Capital.
According to the company, its core technology is centered on image understanding, searching and readability. Articles are only the first content that Sight will target. Eventually the company’s smart-imaging identification and retrieval technology could be applied to other areas, like e-commerce.