Photo editing focused company Aviary has had the best six months ever in the tech space, snatching partnership deals with companies like Yahoo! and Flickr and most recently Twitter. What is becoming apparent is that there is an absolute need for a solid photo editing experience in many apps, and Aviary’s tools are there to serve the need. That’s a really good place to be in. It’s much more than just “filters.”

Today, Photobucket announced a partnership with Aviary to bring those tools to its users, which have uploaded over 10 billion. If you remember, Photobucket is the company that parted ways with Twitter as it set out to do its own photo service along with Aviary. Additionally, Aviary announced a new CEO in late December, Tobias Peggs, and the company doesn’t seem to be missing a beat. The company says it currently has over 2,500 partners, 25M+ monthly users and 2B edited photos.

In a blog post, this is how Aviary described the partnership with Photobucket, as far as which tools it would be integrating:

Photobucket turned to Aviary to provide robust and consistent cross-platform photo editing capabilities for its users. We carefully design our SDKs to be native to each platform we offer — iOS, Android, Windows Phone, HTML5 — so the product is strong, the deployment is simple, and users get a seamless and intuitive photo editing experience no matter where they are. Today, you’ll find Aviary on Photobucket’s website, and soon, on its iOS and Android apps.

Its previous CEO, Avi Muchnik, told me in December that the company is trying very hard to “democratize creativity.”

Aviary’s new CEO sat down with us to speak about how the transition is going and how the Photobucket deal came about:

TC: How have you settled into your new role, was the transition pretty seamless?

Tobias Peggs: The transition seems to have gone very well.

I’ve known co-founders Avi and Iz for a while, and we’ve always enjoyed thinking through business issues or product problems together – so that helps a lot. Plus they had put a fantastic team together in NYC – which made things even easier for me when I joined.

And, of course, Aviary has got tremendous momentum right now – crazy growth, big-name partner announcements, etc.

So my job has really been to transition in and simply try to help everyone in the company do even more, even faster.

That’s quite different to some instances where a new CEO comes in and has to kick start or reboot the business. In that regard, I feel very fortunate.

TC: How did this partnership with Photobucket come about, did they reach out to you?

Tobias Peggs: It’s actually a funny story. When Avi asked me to join the company last Fall, the first thing I did was talk to some friends in the photo space to get their insight and opinion. One of my good friends, Doug McCuen, runs Engineering at Photobucket. So I had a beer with Doug and talked about Aviary. At the end of that beer, I decided I’d be a fool not to join, and he decided Photobucket should really be partnering with Aviary. By the time I started full time in December, our combined BD and Engineering teams had worked their magic, and the integration was half way to completion. It’s great to see it ship today.

TC:What are your thoughts on becoming the standard photo editing software driving the space? Is that a conscious goal?

Tobias Peggs: That is a goal, yes. Today we have over 2,500 partners offering their users a fantastic photo editing experience powered by Aviary. In 2012 we edited 2bn photos across that partner network. And we’re only speeding up so far in 2013.

TC: Are you working on more partnerships currently?

Tobias Peggs: Yes – right around the clock. Literally. We’re working on new partnerships in Europe, Japan, China as well as the US. NYC is the city that never sleeps, and that’s certainly true in our office

We also chatted with Photobucket’s Chief Product Officer, Kate Hare, about why it was important to provide photo editing tools like Aviary offers to its own users. Photobucket has gone through a radical transformation itself recently, rededicating itself to providing a sticky experience for its users on the web with new features like “Stories”:

TC: What made you decide to offload photo editing to aviary?

Kate Hare: Photobucket has used 3rd party editors previously so we can focus on areas where we add value and differentiate ourselves from the competition. Aviary provides an extremely flexible, scalable solution that meets our users’ wide variety of needs. Aviary’s editor is powerful enough for our power users, yet intuitive enough that beginners can jump right in. And most importantly, Aviary offered Photobucket a stronger mobile solution and alignment with our business model.

TC: Are you able to focus on other features for the site and your users by not handling the load that Aviary can?

Kate Hare: We are seeking to deliver a best-in-class user experience across the entire image lifecycle to drive growth and efficiency. Partnering with Aviary allows us to focus on evolving the all-new Photobucket to deliver a unique value proposition — what we’re best at — enabling our users to upload, create and share their life’s stories…simply, easily and everywhere they want.

TC: What was it about Aviary that impressed you the most.

Kate Hare: Aviary shares our commitment to delivering a great customer experience. In addition, Aviary is a partner-first company that provides native SDKs, so we could easily ingest and deploy their tool set across multiple platforms. They also have the scale and roadmap of new features that will help Photobucket meet & exceed the evolving needs of our users.

———

The perfect part about Aviary’s model is that as a company it can focus on making world-class photo editing solutions that power other popular apps. In a way, it’s the equivalent of Facebook’s Social Graph, in that it powers many other applications. With that focus, the work is paying off, as I’ve heard from other companies who have photo components that Aviary is starting to be asked for by name by its users. That’s a sign that you’re creating something valuable, especially in an age when everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times.

When you think about how many photos that you take and store online, the answer to what comes next isn’t always to simply take more photos, because with tools like Aviary, you can breathe new life into photos that you’ve already taken. By placing their SDK in your app, you’re assuring your users a fantastic experience that will bump engagement quite a bit. If users spent three or four minutes making their photos prettier, they’ve bonded with your service that much more, and you’d have Aviary to thank for it.

Depending on the size of the app or company, Aviary has a free solution all the way up to an “enterprise” option, which is priced on case-by-case basis. With photos never going out of style, Aviary is here to stay. Remember when the only way to edit photos was by learning and using Photoshop? Technology has certainly come a long way.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Vine, in case you missed it, is a standalone iOS app from Twitter that lets users create short, 6-second videos that run on a loop.

Users record by holding their thumb against the screen, and stop by releasing. The short clips can then be threaded together and shared on Vine itself, Twitter or even Facebook.

Here’s how a silly video-sharing app (which has been done before, by the way) makes Twitter a stronger social network.

Content Generation

Since Twitter launched, it’s never had a non-text platform for media creation. Sure, you can take photos within the app, and Twitter tapped Aviary to add Instagram-like filters to that process, but this is Twitter’s first standalone product that lets users share in some way other than a tweet.

Twitter is a network based around media. Despite its brevity by nature, a lot of content passes through Twitter’s network, including, but not limited to, pictures, videos, websites, etc. The vast majority of that content is not Twitter’s, though it’s that same content that places such a high value on Twitter’s ad revenue stream through Promoted Tweets, trends, etc.

Rather than let Facebook’s Instagram push all the juicy content through Twitter’s real-time network, the company has decided to build its own, new Instagram. Vine is Instagram for video.

This has been done before by companies like Socialcam and Viddy, but the numerous companies who’ve dipped their toes in the cinematic pool have found the water a bit chilly. Twitter, a trusted and massive brand, is sure to pick up more of an instant user base, thus making Vine more attractive to even more new users. No one likes an empty room, and every video-sharing app until now has been just that.

Creation Vs. Consumption

Twitter’s ads are valuable because of the number of eyes on its network at any given time. Eyes come for the content. Sometimes that ends up being tweets (usually about real-time, live events). Sometimes it’s pictures from Instagram or videos from YouTube. And then, of course, there are the links to wonderful articles (sometimes about technology).

When Instagram turned off Twitter Cards integration, essentially eliminating Twitter’s ability to embed Instagram photos directly into the stream, a huge chunk of Twitter’s visual appeal went out the window. Sure, Twitter has its Photos feature, with Instagram-esque filters powered by Aviary, but does that compete with Instagram’s level of engagement? No.

By adding Vine content to Twitter directly, I’ve actually found that Twitter’s a slightly nicer place to be. Yes, it’s been just one day and most of the Vines are pretty bad, but it’s something I’ve never seen before on Twitter. It’s a video — a cute, quick-cutting, clearly amateur video of my friend, or my friend’s dog, or my friend’s hand. I can’t explain why I’m drawn to it, just like I can’t explain why I spend an astounding amount of time looking at pictures of food on Instagram. All I know is that my eyes like it.

What I don’t like, however, is browsing through Vines in the Vine app. It’s loud! (Users have the ability to include sound or mute sound in their Vines.) It’s also old. Vine uses an almost identical UI/UX to Instagram, complete with the stream, likes, and comments, and I already have one of those. In fact, I’m already on plenty of social networks and am somewhat offended each time a company asks me to join a new one.

But this actually works in Twitter’s favor. People only need to use Vine for sharing, not necessarily for browsing. They have Twitter for that. Want to share a video instead of Instagram a photo? Just hit up the Vine app and share via Twitter. You don’t have to go back to Vine until you want to share something else (or you want to check your likes, you narcissistic bastard!).

And perhaps more importantly to Twitter’s revenue stream, Vine works like Instagram in that it actually coaxes a bit more information out of its users than Twitter. People are much more likely to share their location alongside a photo (like on Instagram) or a video (like on Vine) than they are with a simple text tweet. In essence, Vine makes people more comfortable sharing location, which is just another (very powerful) metric Twitter can use to target ads.

Photos Are So Over

There is no such thing as a social network without photos, and if there is, it shouldn’t exist. The human fascination with photos is a powerful thing. Even a non-revenue-generating Instagram is worth $1 billion.

But Twitter was late for this very important date with photo destiny. After failing to acquire Instagram for $500 million, the company turned to Photobucket for serving up pictures and video. But the content was never owned by Twitter. Meanwhile, Facebook upped the ante and bought Instagram, thus owning this generation’s library of photography.

So Twitter was like, “Let’s just build our own Instagram!” They launched Photos, which let users take and share photos from right within the app. They even let Aviary power filters for Photos, so it felt a little more like Instagram. To this day, I’ve never used an Aviary filter in Twitter. The short version of the story is that Twitter was way late to the photo-sharing game, and quite possibly missed the boat.

So instead of spend a lot of time and energy and money on either building or buying yet another photo-sharing venture, Twitter up and decided to skip that fight entirely. It’s been thought for a while now that the human fascination with photo-sharing would eventually make the logical step to video. It was all a matter of when.

Instead of fighting a battle they’re already losing, Twitter is starting a brand-new war over video, and they’ve already set up camp near the battleground and polished their weapons. Are you ready for a fight, Facebook?

More UGC = More Eyes = More $

Vine isn’t expected to replace Instagram’s presence on Twitter, nor is it meant to replace YouTube or Flickr or anything else. That’s why it’s a relatively new form of media — a self-made video rather than another filtered photo.

As it stands, it doesn’t generate any revenue either.

Rather, Twitter is giving its users yet another way to push cool stuff through the network. Any user-generated content, including Vine videos, Instagram pics, etc. is very valuable in terms of advertising. If a social network has a high volume of user-generated content, it’s generally believed by advertisers that said social network has an engaged, attentive audience. In turn, any ads on said social network increase in value as more UGC is shared.

It’s beautiful Silicon Valley math at its finest.

Twitter already has tons of UGC flowing through its network, which is why it’s supposed to bring in over $1 billion in revenue over the next year. The only problem is that almost none of that UGC is Twitter’s, as I mentioned before. Vine simply acts as an aid to Twitter’s greatest weakness: being a true social network as opposed to being everyone’s favorite platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Somewhere out there, a woman named Sarah Perez is probably very frustrated by technology. No, not me, a different Sarah Perez. She signs up at websites to receive information, and it never comes. Friends invite her to gatherings, and she never hears about it. She tries to reset her password, but the password reset never arrives. You see, Sarah’s problem is that, since around 2008, I’ve been getting her email.

I don’t know how the problem started exactly, but the other Sarah Perez can’t seem to remember her email address. It’s not sarah.perez@, as she mistakenly believes. The dot doesn’t matter – the email still comes to me.

This isn’t the only person whose email I’ve mistakenly received. There are also a couple of other Sarahs, who do know their email address, but whose friends can’t keep it straight. For example, when I received Sarah E. Perez’s email, I looked down in the thread and found her actual email address, and forwarded it. She apologized. It never happened again.

Then there are those who are less tech-savvy. One time, Sarah J. Perez’s mom sent me a photo slideshow, so I emailed her back to tell her I wasn’t her Sarah, and to please let her daughter know that this my address. She then did so, cc:ing me. Her daughter replied all: “I was only in Tampa for a short time,” she wrote her mom. I scratched my head over that one for a minute, but then figured it out. You see, I’m in Tampa. And her mom told her that someone else had her email address in Tampa, so Sarah thought that we had both been assigned the same email because we had both lived in Tampa. Like email was a phone number that had been reassigned.

Oh, dear. Poor Sarah J.

That was in April 2008. Five months later, Sarah’s mom sent me another photo slideshow.

But outside a couple of odd incidents, the bulk of the misdirected email seems to be for someone (or multiple someones?) who think they are sarah.perez@gmail.

This began in 2008. I began receiving email during a time when some Sarah Perez was attempting move from New York to Connecticut. At first, I assumed the emails from the apartment searchers and movers were spam. But upon closer inspection, I realized that the companies were emailing me with very specific information – searches that matched a narrow set of criteria, estimates on moving costs, etc. At one point, I emailed one of the companies back to inform them that I was the wrong Sarah. After a couple of tries, it worked. The email stopped.

Not too much later, a friend of Sarah’s emailed me a photo of black chiffon dress she found on eBay. Then things were quiet for a while.

In 2009, I received another note for Sarah. This time a realtor was emailing her details about a condo she was looking at. Wrong Sarah, I told him. Oh sorry, he said. “I forgot to put a ‘.’ between the first and last names,” he replied. I didn’t bother responding. The dot doesn’t matter. Sigh.

A month later, a friend of Sarah’s invited me to Facebook. Two months later, Sarah’s aunt Nancy emailed. Great, now Sarah is giving out the wrong email address to family and friends, I thought. I get enough email as it is, I don’t need someone else’s.

In October 2009, the woman who thinks she’s sarah.perez@ started getting invitations to her Bible study group. I responded again to the sender: wrong Sarah. Oops, came the reply. But in November, I was invited to attend again.

Sarah’s friends may have started catching on at some point because that same month, someone sent out a feeler emailer, saying “just to check and make sure this gets through.” Nope, wrong Sarah, I wrote again. OK, came the reply, I’ll let her know.

2010 rolled around. Sarah’s church friends emailed again, another friend sent her an Evite to a party, and in April, the same friend who had promised me she would let Sarah know that I’ve been getting her personal email, emailed me a second time. This time, she was sending Sarah information about where she could get free healthcare, since she didn’t have any health insurance.

Well, now I was worried. I hope Sarah is OK, I thought. I secretly hoped for more misdirected email after that – you know, just to be sure.

In June 2010, Sarah Perez received a small $500 scholarship from The Red Cross, but I think that might have been for a different Sarah. Maybe a student. In July, Sarah’s friend invited her to a museum outing. And in December 2010, I got an email about the family reunion.

By March 2011, I guess Sarah gave up. She clearly couldn’t remember her email address, so she created a new one. I got that email too, this time, from Google. Apparently, Sarah somehow associated her new email address with her old one. (I have no idea.)

Congratulations on creating your brand new Gmail address,
[redacted]@gmail.com.
Please keep this email for your records, as it contains an
important verification code that you may need should you ever
encounter problems or forget your password.

You can login to your account at http://mail.google.com/

Enjoy!

The Gmail Team

Oh Sarah, will you never learn?

Yes, I suppose I could have emailed her at her new address, but I didn’t have time to do so when the notification first came through, and based on the numerous password reset requests I’m getting now, I don’t think Sarah can access that new account currently. I missed my window.

Despite the new address, the emails kept coming. I was invited to a bridal shower in summer 2011. In July 2012, a funeral. I did not bring a salad or dessert as requested, but I’m sure somewhere out there Sarah Perez was sorry for your loss. (I just hope she heard about it.) I couldn’t help but glance at the Mission Trip photos attached to the email that arrived last month, but I ignored the “Hey, what’s up” email from Sarah’s boyfriend (?) Jesus and the open house invite in March.

This summer, I guess I gave up, too. I just archived all those password reset emails that came in during August, September and October. Sorry, Sarah, I hope you got back into your new email account. Maybe you should just start over again. May I suggest Hotmail?

In late September, Sarah Perez signed up for Photobucket. I received her account welcome email, and so far, about seven emails confirming her photo uploads. Fortunately for her, Photobucket is password protected when I click through. That’s too bad, because after all these years, I was hoping to get a glimpse of the other Sarah Perez.

But I’m glad she’s well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, the San Francisco-based startup Pixelpipe is adding a new feature called “Pipelines” to its file transfer service Pi.pe. The feature automates file copying between cloud services, similar to the way IFTTT automates other tasks on the web. Now available as a public beta, Pi.pe first launched in April of this year, offering users a quick and easy way to move media between a dozen online services, including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, SkyDrive, Instagram, and others. Today, Pi.pe supports 20 services, including new addition Amazon Glacier.

A number of utilities have popped up in recent months to help users migrate files between various cloud storage or photo-sharing services, but none have been as complete a solution as what Pixelpipe provides via Pi.pe. Many of these alternatives initially generate a little buzz, but when you go back to your saved bookmarks, you’ll find they have disappeared. Others just never grow beyond some very basic functionality. Pi.pe, however, has been steadily improving.

With the debut of its Pipelines feature, Pi.pe now allows you to specify an input service, several destination services, and lets you configure the interval at which it should check for new content. For example, you could have it check your Facebook Photo uploads once a week, and have them backed up to your Flickr account. Or you could automatically have your Picasa photos moved to Dropbox every day, perhaps. Also, thanks to the addition of Amazon Glacier, Amazon’s newly announced cloud storage solution, Pi.pe now puts a consumer-friendly front end on what’s one of the best storage deals on the web: $0.01 per GB per month. Glacier, generally intended for business data archiving, hasn’t really been an option for consumers until now because it didn’t have an accessible user interface. Pi.pe changes that.

Currently, the Pipelines feature offers a fairly comprehensive lineup of services for automated export, including 500px, Box, Dropbox, CX, Evernote, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Flickr, Picasa, Google Drive, Shutterfly, SkyDrive, SmugMug, SugarSync, Photobucket, Orkut, Myspace, Russia’s VK, and YouTube. For import, the selection is limited to 12 services: 500px, Facebook and Facebook Pages, Flickr, Google Drive, Instagram, Myspace, Picasa, Shutterfly, SmugMug and VK.

Since Pi.pe’s debut, it has transferred over 8 million files, including photos, videos, audio and office files. CEO Brett Butterfield says that one user even moved 49,000 files in a single transfer! Initially, the company believed users would just use Pi.pe for file migration, but found that many were also using it for data backup and storage, which led the company to add the automation.

Now the team is working on adding Pixelpipe’s sharing features into Pi.pe. “Pixelpipe features will just be absorbed into Pi.pe – this will be our new platform,” says Butterfield. “We’ll be plugging the mobile applications into it. Basically, it will have all the features of Pixelpipe, but just under a different domain, and a new look on the website.” He explains that the current mobile apps will continue to work, and the Pixelpipe domain will remain up as well – it’s just the website and branding will look different. This is all further down the road, however.

Why the change? “We do a lot more than pixels,” Butterfield says.

Pipelines is available now on Pi.pe, and because the service is still in beta, it remains free.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hey, remember that $325 million fund we said Trinity Ventures was raising last week? Well, the firm says it finished raising the fund yesterday.

General partner Fred Wang tells me that the target for the fund, Trinity Ventures XI, was $300 million (the same as its last fund), but there was enough interest from limited partners (LPs) that it raised an extra $25 million — there was a hard cap at $325 million.

Even though that’s a sizable amount, Wang says it was a deliberate choice not to raise even more, because one of Trinity’s points of pride is its partner-to-capital ratio. (The firm’s website lists seven general partners.) In Wang’s words, that ratio reflects a willingness to be a hands-on investor, providing “heavy lifting and elbow grease.”

“We don’t tend to chase those companies marching up and down Sand Hill Road, doing a beauty pageant of venture firms,” he says. “We like to date before we get married.”

Trinity plans to continue investing in cloud and mobile infrastructure, digital media, software as a service, social commerce, and entertainment, with roughly a half-and-half breakdown between consumer- and enterprise-facing companies. Wang notes that the firm has also been doing more seed investments in the past couple of years, and that it opened an incubation space called Dolores Labs in San Francisco. Both moves are responses to the fact that entrepreneurs can now build companies with much less capital, he says.

The new fund comes largely from LPs who had invested in Trinity’s earlier funds. However, Wang says he’s hearing that a lot of VCs are trying to raise more money this year, and that those LPs are “pruning” the firms that they work with.

Success stories from Trinity’s portfolio include Aruba Networks (public), Blue Nile (public), Extreme Networks (public), LoopNet (public), Photobucket (acquired by News Corp.), Speedera Networks (acquired by Akamai), Starbucks (public), and Sygate Technologies (acquired by Symantec).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Correctly anticipating that Twitter’s API crackdown would reach photo sharing services, Twitpic is actively talking to at least two potential acquirers and has received offers over the past few weeks, said one source familiar with the discussions. Founder Noah Everett is said to have wanted to sell and move on to new projects.

Twitpic may have hoped to get a sale brokered before the hammer dropped, but today The Next Web noticed that Twitter removed the option from its apps to select a third-party image sharing service, killing off  Twitpic’s main distribution channel.

Now that Twitpic won’t be hosting nearly as many photos tweeted from mobile just as Buzzfeed heard, you can expect a traffic drop. That means fewer views of the ads Twitpic places next to user photos. It likely saw this coming and got acquisition talks started, but now that it’s been ejected from Twitter Mobile, it may be more difficult to find a buyer, or the price it could command may be reduced.

Details about who’s made offers, the potential price, and what assets would be sold are scarce. We have heard Everett was in discussions with two different companies regarding the sale and may have pitched others. My source says Everett would not necessarily come along with a sold Twitpic, as the founder hopes to explore fresh ideas. We’re waiting to hear back from Twitpic about these questions.

An acquisition could be lucrative for Everett, as his company is bootstrapped and did $1.5 million in ad sales in 2009, keeping $1.05 million of that. One report from 2010 said he was looking to sell the service for $10 million.

One potential acquirer could be Twitter itself. The microblogging platform partnered with Photobucket in June last year to host photos posted directly to Twitter.com so users didn’t have to upload them offsite and paste in links. Photobucket helped it launch Twitter Galleries last August.

Still many think Twitter’s image service could be a lot better. Our hardcore Twitterer Drew Olanoff noted that discovery, image quality, tagging, hashtagging could all improve. Meanwhile, Twitter could offer photos for direct messages (aka private photos), filters, effects, watermarks, or slideshows too. Buying the startup that handles these features better could give Twitter a jumpstart. Plus Twitter clearly has lots of leverage since it shut Twitpic out of its mobile apps today.

Other possible buyers include media companies, like Say Media which could add it to its network of properties, or CNN which could be attracted to Twitpic as a citizen journalism tool: Twitpic hosted the famous and extremely popular early photo of the the plane that emergency landed in the Hudson River in 2009. UberMedia or Hootsuite could buy Twitpic to beef up their Twitter tools.

In any case, Twitpic would be disadvantaged in negotiations after a tough year. A study by analytics firm Sysomos found that in May 2011 Twitpic was hosting 45.7 percent of the photos tweeted, compared to Yfrog with 29.3 percent and Lockerz with 17.4 percent. But then Twitter partnered with Photobucket. By November, Twitter/Photobucket had become the No. 1 photo-sharing service, handling 36 percent of shares, with Twitpic slipping to 30 percent, according to Skylines.

Since then, Instagram usage has skyrocketed, meaning more photos are being published from other apps rather than being uploaded and tweeted right through Twitter where some users defaulted to Twitpic hosting until today. While it may be a hard time for the company to convince acquirers to pay a high price, things might only get worse once data comes in on just how hard Twitter’s platform tightening squeezes Twitpic.

Expect more companies scorned by Twitter’s API changes to pivot or sell. Twitpic might be one of the first, but it won’t be the last.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Photobucket is one of the oldest sites dedicated to photo and video sharing — and, at 100 million users, and 3.5 billion images served per day, and 10 billion photos stored — one of the biggest. But with the rise of other photo sharing and storage options from Facebook (955 monthly active users), Twitter (500m registered users), Instagram, Yfrog and so many more, its position as a go-to place for storing and sharing images has eroded. Now the company wants to tacle that head-on with a new redesign that upgrades the user experience with new look, better uploading and a new social feature called Photobucket Stories that creates Timeline-like narratives that friends can use collaboratively to create image-based recollections of an event.

The changes could not come a moment too soon. It was only a week ago that Photobucket landed in the news with a story about how dodgy “fuskers” were using sneaky programs to mine private photos on the site and nude ones to Reddit and other sites. If that wasn’t bad enough, the follow up question that this story raised, “Remember Photobucket?” kind of says it all about how some regard Photobucket’s relevance today.

And with a possibly reinvigorated Flickr coming onto the scene, and a Facebook redoubled with an Instagram acquisition, the time is ripe for Photobucket to update.

Tom Munro, Photobucket’s CEO, points out that there is now a gap in the market that Photobucket wants to fill: the world now has too many ways to take pictures and too many places to store them. People now need a site that can provide some kind of “defragmentation” function.

“Everyone has a phone in their pocket, many also still use cameras, and sometimes more than one,” he points out. “But only half of us back up pictures on a regular basis.” And when we do, it’s often in a mish-mash of places: our hardrives, the cloud-storage services provided by third parties like Facebook and Instagram, and more.

He cites a recent study from InfoTrends that showed that 45% of respondents said they have lost digital pictures, “and that number has been climbing every year. Management is becoming a big challenge.”

The idea behind the new Photobucket is to take away some of that hardship. New desktop uploaders have been created that complement an automated uploading service that is already available on Photobucket’s mobile apps.

While users will still have to make the decision to upload pictures to Photobucket, and then manually select which ones to upload, there is still a lot left to human laziness and disorganization. So where Photobucket’s unification principle might come into play best is in the new Stories feature.

Stories will only get turned on in September, after the launch of the beta, but it’s an interesting idea: users can collaborate together on a communal pinboard — or “canvas”, as Photobucket calls it — contributing their own pictures, video and text, to form part of larger narratives with those of their friends. Again, the aim is to bring good pictures out into the light and bring them together with other people’s relevant pictures.

“Our phones have become the equivalent of a shoebox,” he says, referring to how people have stored printed pictures for years before the move to digital devices, where the vast majority no longer get printed. “We take so many, but we may share one or two and the rest we forget about. This is about trying to bring these out and together,” says Munro.

These pictures can come from any other source — your own phone or camera, or another third-party site — but with the Stories they all get consolidated into one place, and under one theme or event. Munro notes that any pictures from the Stories automatically get copied into a user’s photo database as well.

These Stories will also be another way for Photobucket to extend itself outside of its own walled garden. People will be able to post Stories, for example, on their Facebook Timelines. For now, the idea is that clicking on these will take you to the Photobucket site, but Munro notes that it is currently working with Facebook on ways of either consuming them in-line in the Timeline — and possibly creating a separate Facebook app to improve the experience even further.

Photobucket is different from many other photo-sharing sites in that it has built out its own server infrastructure — it doesn’t rely on Amazon or anyone else. That was one unique selling point when Photobucket won its deal with Twitter — the site powers all of Twitter’s photo and video clips (the traffic that this deal generates is confidential and not calculated as part of Photobucket’s stated traffic numbers). Whether that is the best way forward is another question. “We might have done things differently if we were creating the service from scratch today,” Munro admitted.

But that has possibly also given the company a lot more flexibility in how it’s approached its monetization model. To date, Photobucket has been a primarily free site, and that will not change in the upgrade. In fact, the consumer-facing site makes most of its money from advertising that runs alongside the photo service, so it needs all the traffic it can get. But it is also starting to introduce more paid, tiers now, too.

“Photobucket has been a free site,” Munro says, “and we will continue to have a great free service for users, but when a certain threshold is hit users will have to subscribe.”

The site will have a 2 gigabyte threshold for free images, which Munro says was decided based on historical use of the site — most users store less than this. Photobucket will charge a fee of $29.99 annually for more pictures up to 20 gigabytes. Tiers above that, he says, are “competitively priced.”

Photobucket has also given TechCrunch some codes for the new beta version. The first 50 to click here get in without having to queue.

And as for the fuskers, Photobucket still doesn’t seem to have put any new controls in place to prevent this, but it is trying to make more of an effort to communicate to users how they be more proactive in making sure their images don’t get abused in this way. The problem is more, it seems, about legacy, neglected uploads than active users, although if this redesign works as Photobucket hopes, it will have significantly less dormant users in future than it perhaps has today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Howdy all. We’re a month away from the fourth annual TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon.

To meet the demand, we’re releasing more tickets to the public. If you haven’t already gotten your ticket, go get one now. This will be sold out.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3689591668

It will be a great weekend of hacking and learning, culminating in minute-long presentations with hundreds of the Bay Area’s best on Sunday afternoon. To add to the pressure cooker, we’ve handpicked a crew of the industry’s best to lend their wisdom and good looks to the event. You’re bound to recognize some of these heavy hitters.

Kent Brewster
Web Guy
http://kentbrewster.com

Kent Brewster won the Ship It Now award at three different Yahoo! employee hack days. (Sadly, none of it ever shipped.) He built the iPhone app for Netflix using nothing but stone knives, bear skins, and open APIs, and is currently the guy whose fault it is if the Pin It button is broken on Pinterest.

You can follow Kent on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/kentbrew

Josh Elman
Principal, Greylock
http://bit.ly/joshelman

Currently a VC at Greylock, Josh has spent 15 years building products in Engineering, Product Management, and Platform roles. He led the team for RealPlayer and RealJukebox at RealNetworks, early growth at LinkedIn and launched LinkedIn Jobs, and led product at Zazzle. More recently, Josh led the launch of Facebook Connect at Facebook and helped user growth at Twitter grow by over 10x. Josh has a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford.

You can follow Josh on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/joshelman

Bradley Horowitz
VP Product, Google+
http://www.elatable.com

Bradley Horowitz is vice president of product for Google’s social products, including Google+. He has also led product for Google’s consumer application division which includes Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Google Voice, and Calendar. Before joining Google in February 2008, Horowitz was Yahoo’s vice president of Advanced Development where he drove the acquisitions of Flickr and MyBlogLog, launched the Brickhouse incubator and developed new products like Yahoo! Pipes. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree in media science from the MIT Media Lab.

You can follow Bradley on Google+ at: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871

Peter Pham
Co-Founder/Partner at Science
http://www.science-inc.com

Co-Founder and partner at Science in Los Angeles. Built a few startups in the past like Photobucket, BillShrink and Color. Now at Science is behind companies like Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee, DogVacay, Eventup, and Uncovet.

You can follow Peter on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/peterpham

Vivek Ravisankar
Co-founder
http://rvivek.com

Vivek has a Bachelors degree in CS and graduated in India in 2008. Following that, he worked at Amazon for a year in the Kindle team. He started Interviewstreet in 2009, had three failed ideas, got rejected by YC twice and finally built a tool that helps companies screen programmers and was a part of YC last summer.

Currently, the team is building HackerRank – a fun social network for hackers to solve and learn interesting programming concepts.

You can follow Vivek on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/rvivek

David A. Shamma
Research Scientist, Yahoo!
http://shamurai.com

David Ayman Shamma is research scientist at Yahoo! Labs where he runs the Human-Computer Interaction Research group. He investigates how people interact, engage, and share media experiences both online and in-the-world. He is also the co-editor for Arts and Digital Culture for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on MultiMedia. When he’s not wearing a lab coat, Ayman has been known to choreograph dance & technology performances, design electronic fashion, and make mallets for hitting touchscreen devices.

You can follow David on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/ayman

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How timely. After launching a year ago at Disrupt NYC 2011, Tracks is today releasing one of its biggest updates to date. The service is much like Color, but without the creepy factor as any and all members of a specific photo-sharing group must be invited. I like to think of it as the place where Color and Google+ Circles intersect, but I far prefer Tracks than either of the former.

Thus far Tracks has offered iOS, web- and real-world versions of your tracks (the collection of photos shared with a specific social network, which can be both geo-temporal or last forever). Today, however, the service gets much more beefy, with the ability to shoot and send real-time video and the addition of new filters, Instagram-style. There are now ten filter options on the app, and they’ll all work on both photos and videos.

But that’s not all. The update brings with it the ability to add friends to various tracks from Facebook and Twitter, as well as a new custom camera with multi-shot capability and locks for exposure and focus. Animations have also been added.

Tracks has seen great success since its debut at Disrupt last year, launching an iPhone app officially in October and raising a $1 million round in December. The company also enticed Photobucket’s founder Alex Welch to join the board.

Speaking of Mr. Welch, here’s what he had to say about today’s Tracks update:

Since joining Tracks as both an investor and board member last year, I have worked very closely on product and strategy with Vic and team. I continue to be impressed at the overall vision, as well as the dedication and execution of this team. As simple as it may sound, the challenge of having a single mainstream service that can span both experiences and interests with different groups of friends and family, has not been solved at a large scale. The Tracks approach is the right one.

The idea of a private social network is one of the few new social ideas that I can jump on board with, and it’ll be interesting to see how the company builds out this offering with behemoths like Facebook and Twitter still growing at a solid pace.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Pixelpipe, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a ‘content distribution gateway’ that allows people to upload text, photos, videos and other files to a variety of social networking and media sharing sites at once, is debuting a new service today, called Pi.pe that aims to help move content across services. We have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers to use the service; you can enter the code ‘techcruncher’ here.

While Pixelpipe allowed is focused on getting media off of phones or desktops onto your social services, Pi.pe service is all about moving content from your Flickr account to Facebook, or from your Instagram account to Dropbox. The startup has made it fairly simple to copy one to thousands of items in just a few clicks between services.

On Pi.pe, you can authenticate your accounts with 12 services, including 500px, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Flickr, Instagram, Kodak Gallery, Myspace, Photobucket, Picasa, Shutterfly, SkyDrive and SmugMug. Once authenticated, you see your files from these services on Pi.pe and click which ones you’d like to transfer to another service. The startup says the back-end has been built to scale to hundreds or even thousands of transfers a second.

You then authenticate with the storage or media service that you want to import the photos to (these include, 500px, Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and others). For example you would be able to back up all of your Instagr.am photos to Dropbox, print them at Shutterfly or post to 500px. Or your could import photos to Facebook, and Pi.pe will parse the EXIF information and insert the media into your timeline on the date it was captured.

As founder Brett Butterfield (the former director of R&D at Kodak) explains to me, Pixelpipe was more of a broadcasting service and Pi.pe aims to help users solve the distribution problem they may have when photos are collected across a number of services. Building the ability to import and export has been technically challenging, he says, but he believes having a central repository where you can easily pull and push files will be inherently useful for consumers.

Butterfield says that the company will be working on adding the ability to import and export audio into Pi.pe, and will also support other types of files in the future, such as documents and more.

Pixelpipe, which has 1 million users and has distributed 40 million photos and videos, has raised $2.3 million in funding from investors including James Joaquin and Russ Siegelman.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch