PixSense, offering auto-storage of mobile photos & video, raises $5.4M
PixSense, a service that lets you automatically save and store your mobile phone photos — without the pain of syncing with a PC — has just raised $5.4 million in a first round of funding.
The company offers the free photo storage service from its Website. You sign up, giving PixSense your phone model, and it sends you an SMS, which you open and it triggers a download. That way you don’t have the hassle of saving stuff on your PC. See demo here.
However, there’s a cost, because you use your data plan minutes to use the service. The service is more likely to fly in Asia and Europe, where many young people carry phones but don’t have their own PC — and so they’d presumably be more willing to pay for the service. The company says it will announce deals with two carriers in Asia and Europe during the first quarter, whereby the carriers would use Pixsense’s compression technology to let customers store mobile media directly with the carriers.
PixSense is growing like a weed. We last mentioned Pixsense here, when it said planned to hire 150 by next year, up from 30 earlier this year.
Faraz Hoodbhoy, founder and chief executive, said most of his employees are in China, Japan and Pakistan.
ATA Ventures and Innovacom are the lead investors.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
