Radar, the real-time photo sharing company, gets boost

February 12, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

updated

radarlogo.bmpSan Francisco start-up Tiny Pictures allows you to take and send photos to your friends’ phones. The photos can be shared almost instantly and with groups of friends, who can then comment.

The company’s product, named Radar, will get a boost tomorrow, when Danger, which powers the Sidekick mobile device, will announce Radar’s software is available to be downloaded via a user’s carrier. The first carrier, Suncom Wireless, will likely be announced tomorrow. The two companies plan to announce others.

We haven’t written much about Tiny. It received $2.7 million from Silicon Valley venture firm Mohr Davidow Ventures in March 2006. It is one of a handful of companies that automate the photo-sharing process. All you do is take the photo, hit another button to create a message (where you can write in a subject line if you want), and then hit send. It then goes to your chosen group of friends, where they can comment. It also now does videos.

An advantage of being installed on the Danger device is that the user can remain notified in real-time when new photos or videos have arrived or been commented on. Previously, when used on a regular phone, a user would have to switch over to the Radar application.

KyteTV, which is offering real-time transmission of photos over Java-enabled phones, can be considered a competitor — when it launches.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • micke johansson
    This is lame.
    why do we need such an application/device centric approach? This should be done all open platform style, i.e. background sync of pictures with a server and RSS feeds telling the community that there are updates. Otherwise, when sending each pic by a message one could as well use MMS (which has been around for a while).
  • @Micke: Build it. Go on, try. :)
  • Jari
    I think Micke has a point, what is the added value if compared with MMS??
  • Tim
    Micke's right. The online world needs a universal sharing platform that is independent of device, community and media type to manage your personal media. We invested in www.share2me.com which we think is on the right track
  • MMS is a one-to-one transport mechanism: a way of delivering a piece of content to one person. Radar is an entire user experience around instantly sharing pictures and videos with groups of friends and engaging in an ongoing conversation around that content.

    To your comment, Micke, Radar is in fact completely independent of device and carrier: you can already use Radar with any cameraphone worldwide, both to post pictures and videos and to browse your friends' content. To do this, we make use of some universally supported mechanisms, whether they're "standards" or not: posting through MMS and email, and browsing and commenting through our WAP and web site.

    What's different here is that we're launching a range of highly integrated clients that move the functionality well beyond anything afforded by the one-to-one mechanism of MMS, and that move the user experience far beyond what's possible in WAP.

    Value add for our users and partners both.
  • steve campbel
    i use www.create-ringtone.com to create and send FREE custom ringtones, wallpaper, mp3 and video files to cell phones around the world
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