Seattle-based SwingVine has launched a photo-sharing app that marries a little bit of Flickr and a little bit of Foursquare. It lets you take, share and geotag photos or check-in with photos tied to a specific place.
Instead of having to sync your phone or camera to your laptop, you can access and display your photo libraries on the web and your phone at the same time.
"If you look at what's going on with Flickr. It's run by Yahoo, and they're in shambles," said co-founder Ling Bao, who worked at Microsoft for about five years before starting the company. "This space is ripe for disruption."
He added that smartphone cameras were progressively improving and that consumers would want to add more layers of information over their photos, including location and social functionality.
The app, while great in concept and attractive in design, still has a few user interface kinks to work out. To location tag photos, you have to dive into a separate menu after posting a photo, for example.
Swingvine is bootstrapped and has two people behind it. It launched a real-time discovery engine last fall that analyzed popular content across the web but found that it would be difficult to construct a business model behind it (as many real-time startups similarly discovered).
