July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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How much would you say a photo sorting algorithm is worth? How about $4 million?

Photo sharing app Linea is raising that very amount to launch its newest creation: an algorithm that automatically frames photos based on their strongest focal points. With the feature, Linea says it can determine what the most aesthetically pleasing parts of your photos are, focus on them, and then combine the photos in a way that’s, arguably, better than if you had done it yourself.

According to Linea, the approach is a combination of big data and what it calls “summarization technology”, which together, Linea says, do something that no other photo sharing app has been able to before. The company’s goal, it seems, is to replace the slideshow with something smarter and more data-driven.

Based in Seattle, Linea is just one entrant in the very, very crowded market of photo sharing apps, and remains to be seen whether its approach will help it get an edge on its competitors.

Instagram has reached 100 million users, a nice, round number for the Facebook-owned photo app.

Rumors of Instagram’s decline have been swirling around the web ever since the service was bought by Facebook — a deal that was first announced nearly a year ago.

Since then, the service has also gone through a PR poo-storm due to changes to its terms of service, a move that some said had already cost Instagram 25 percent of its daily userbase.

Both the acquisition and the TOS kerfuffle did see plenty of users straying to other photo-sharing pastures. But in spite of these rumors and persistent user backlash over the associated changes, Instagram said it wasn’t seeing any signs of slowing. “We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram,” read a statement back in December.

And now, the service is putting the proof in its pudding with a celebratory blog post announcing it’s reached 100 million users — that’s monthly active users — up 10 million souls from this time last month.

In addition to that figure, the company also stated last month that Instagram brings in an average of 40 million photo uploads per day. Those photos get 8,500 Facebook likes per second and more than 1,000 photo comments per second.

Reflecting on the milestone, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom wrote, “Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco, and even to events in our own backyards.

“Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of. For this reason, we feel extremely lucky to have the chance to build this with all of you. So from our team to the hundred million people who call Instagram home, we say thank you. Thank you for sharing your world and inspiring us all to do the same.”

Photo via Buster Heine/Instagram

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Flock, the stupidly simple app for dealing with group photos, has finally make its way over to the Android platform.

Basically, Flock recognizes the photos on your phone that were taken with your family and friends. Then it automagically creates a single album in the cloud and shares it with everyone in that set of pics.

It all happens in the background. All you have to do is download the app; the rest is set-it-and-forget-it simple.

The app comes from Bump, the startup that brought you its flagship bump-phones-to-exchange-contact-info app.

“Android has been growing at unprecedented rates, and even those folks not using Android have friends and family who are, so we expect this launch to make the Flock experience better for everyone,” said Bump CEO Dave Lieb in a blog post on the news.

“As with our iOS version, we’ve taken care to make sure that Flock for Android is a great experience for people, and we’re experimenting with a few new UI ideas that are well-suited for Android.”

Here’s a demo video showing how Flock works:

The Flock team says the average active Flock user will get around 26 photos each week — pics snapped by other people, and pics that they would never have seen otherwise because they’re not being publicly shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, or other social services.

You can download Flock free in the Google Play store.

Bump was founded in 2008 in Chicago and is currently based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s raised roughly $20 million in venture capital to date. Flock’s competitors are few and mostly reside in the private-photo-sharing space — for example, Kicksend.

Top image courtesy of NinaMalyna, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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One of the most important factors for whether Microsoft’s next OS, Windows 8, will be a success is its app ecosystem. But if the company’s stand-alone Photos app is any indication of what’s to come, the company could see major success.

The new Win 8 Photos app greatly exceeds what Microsoft has done before with photos inside Windows. Instead of browsing the images that are locally stored on your machine, the app will let you see files from the web and your machine all in the same place, creating a giant and easy-to-access scrapbook of your memories.

“We realize the myriad places you have to go to see all of your photos, so we decided to bring them all to you in one place,” Windows Live group program manager Brad Weed wrote in a detailed blog post. “Because you can connect your Microsoft account to services like Facebook and Flickr, you can get to all of your photos and all of those memories just by signing in to Windows 8 with your Microsoft account.”

Microsoft emphasizes that the app will work best if you connect it with its cloud storage offering, SkyDrive, and its Windows Phone OS. (Although, the experience looks solid even without connecting to these.)

“Of course, the Photos app works best with our SkyDrive service, and with Windows Phone, you can automatically send all the pictures from your Phone to SkyDrive,” Weed wrote. “This makes the Photos app in Windows 8 a great way to show off your photos without having to huddle around a phone.”

From all the pictures we’ve seen of the app, it actually does look quite good. It gives you many ways to view, organize, import, and share photos, and it creates an engaging experience for looking at years of memories in a fluid manner. Fingers crossed that we’ll see more apps like this before Windows 8′s launch.

Take a look at the gallery below for more views of this awesome-looking app:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Photo-sharing mobile application Instagram released a major update to its iPhone, iPod touch and iPad apps today, finally increasing its image size to the maximum allowed by the various Apple devices.

Instagram is a hugely popular photo-filter app that has more than 9 million users and 250 million shared photos. In addition to the increased image size, this 2.0 update adds four new retro-tastic filters, the ability to see how filters look in real-time, and instant tilt shift controls. The app is faster, image borders can be turned on or off, and you can quickly rotate photos after you take them.

“We’re super excited about the new filters, and think live filters change the way we’ll all look at the world,” Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom told VentureBeat of his favorite new feature.

Instead of snapping a photo and then picking a filter, live filters let you preview the available effects, including tilt shift, while composing an image.

The feature that will be most welcomed by the Instagram faithful, however, is the increased image size. Previously, Instagram photos were saved as a paltry 612-by-612 pixel image. This update bumps the size up to 1936-by-1936 pixels on the iPhone 4, and 1536-by-1536 on the iPhone 3G.

One concern with both of these new features is that they could slow down the app. Systrom says this is not the case, and that “it’s definitely going to be faster no matter what.” Filters that used to take up to 5 seconds to render will now appear in 5 milliseconds, said Systorm.

Instagram 2.0 is available for Apple devices running iOS 4.2.1 and higher. At this time, Instagram is still not available for Android devices.

Photo-sharing apps are flourishing in the age of the 5+ megapixel smartphone camera. To stand out, though, an app needs a unique angle. PhotoRocket‘s appeal is what its designers call “radical simplicity.” Last week, PhotoRocket strenghtned its hand by adding a feature that allows consecutive photo shooting unfettered by the calls to edit or share that are common in popular rivals like Instagram.

The app, which launched at the DEMO conference in Spring 2011, is not alone in this development. Apps like Hipstagram also allow uninterrupted photo taking. But PhotoRocket’s edge is to let users share bulk photos to a number of outlets (Facebook, Flickr, email, etc.) at once.

In practice, PhotoRocket’s camera function is mind numbingly easy. After you finish taking pictures in a camera roll, just click done. You can also switch the iPhone camera to its outward or inward facing positions, turn flash on and off and view a film strip of previously taken photos. The only drawback is the roughly 2-3 second wait time between photos.

PhotoRocket is particularly convenient for the average event-goer. Take yesterday’s gay pride parades. Most shutterbugs don’t want to do deep editing on the spot, a feature not available on PhotoRocket, but the app saves them the task of arduously locating and individually uploading photos via, say, the Facebook app and then repeating the process for e-mail. PhotoRocket allows you to shoot all of your pictures in-app and consolidate them onto a roll to be shared. If you’re like me, that means 200 photos uploaded to your social community and sent to your chosen contacts all at once. (You still have to be careful about sharing shots so colorful they violate terms of service.)

When asked about competitors, Anna Collins, a Microsoft veteran who recently joined PhotoRocket as president, gave an interesting answer. “When it comes to sharing photos, six to seven out of ten times, consumers use e-mail. We consider ourselves a competitor with e-mail.”

That’s one tough competitor. Because in essence, PhotoRocket is competing with habit. People are used to receiving attachments. PhotoRocket, however, gives you the ability to send hundreds of photos to an e-mail address sans attachments and sans login. One of its main value adds, Collins says, is the focus on user and receiver experience. The app has what Collins calls the, “Grandma factor.” Easy for you to share, easy for Grandma to open.

PhotoRocket plans to release an Android app, but has no update on timing.

Got six minutes to launch your game changer? We’re finding top shelf thinkers from around the world ready to showcase their products at DEMO Fall, on the same stage where companies like Netscape, TiVo, E-Trade, and Java got their start. After you sweat out your six minutes of fame, head off the the DEMO pavilion to chat with potential investors, partners and show off the goods.  Apply for your spot here. Demo Fall 2011 is located at the Hyatt Regency in Silicon Valley, September 12-14.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The past few months have seen the launch of two hot San Francisco startups with mobile photo-sharing apps — Instagram and Picplz. Today, Picplz announced that it’s catching up with the competition on the social networking front, by adding support for photo-sharing site Flickr as well as blogging services Tumblr and Posterous.

I’m not sure if it’s fair to paint the two startups as being in a head-to-head rivalry, but both apps seem to be built around the same basic idea: Users take a photo, add a filter, add location information, then share the photo within the app and other social sites. The startups even share an investor in Andreessen Horowitz, though partner Marc Andreessen has said that he will take a more passive role in Instagram.

Picplz has the advantage of working on both Android and iPhone, while Instagram seemed to be ahead in support for social networks. Now the tables have turned, with both apps allowing you to post to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare, and only Picplz supporting Posterous.

At this point, the exact laundry list of services probably isn’t that significant, but I think it’s important for these apps to have a wide social reach — the selling point of an app like Picplz is the ability to share your photos anywhere, not just within the Picplz community.

Picplz was co-founded by Dalton Caldwell, who also founded music-sharing service Imeem. The company recently raised a $5 million first round.