There are plenty of art and photo-sharing websites and apps on the market, but New York startup Lascaux Co. believes its free app Mixel offers a fresh angle by letting users share images to create collages. The company was co-founded by Khoi Vinh, former digital design director with The New York Times, and Scott Ostler, co-founder of image chat community dump.fm. The Mixel app, released in November on the iPad, lets users edit and combine images by using the tablet’s touch features.

Vinh says Mixel is a way for the average person to turn their photos into art. After pictures are posted with the app the images can be borrowed—in whole or in part—by other users. Mixel is the first app released by Lascaux, which raised $600,000 in seed funding this month from Betaworks, Polaris Venture Partners, and Allen & Company. Vinh also put a $100,000 TechFellow award he received last December from Founders Fund and New Enterprise Associates toward founding the startup.

Lascaux currently operates out of Dogpatch Labs in New York and is named for the site of cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Currently Vinh and Ostler are the only cave artists in the startup, though they plan to hire up to four others over the next six months. “We’ve been able to do a lot with a little and I love the model of staying very lean,” Vinh says.

Mixel is geared to appeal to laymen, says Vinh, who in the past loved to doodle and create photo books to share with others. In addition to cropping, reshaping, and mashing images together, Mixel users can follow each other’s work based on the collages they are interested in.

Vinh says while there are other art apps on the market, he believes many users do not work with them regularly. “They play with them a little while and then forget about them unless the user is confident in their … Next Page »

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Put high-quality cameras into devices with broadband wireless connections. Add powerful smartphone operating systems like iOS or Android and app-store ecosystems like iTunes and the Android Market. Mix in some sloth and disinterest on the part of established photo-sharing destinations like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Under these conditions, it was probably inevitable that entrepreneurs would create a slew of new mobile photo-sharing startups like Instagram, Picplz, and Path. Instagram, with somewhere north of 12 million users, seems to be the winner in this space so far; it’s getting smartphone owners used to the concept of snapping photos on the go, applying optional faux-vintage filters, and sharing instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, or Foursquare.

Now comes the next logical step: video sharing apps and startups. All of the latest smartphones shoot high-definition video as well as photos, but so far, Instagram doesn’t let users share video clips—at least, not yet. That’s created room for even newer iPhone apps like Socialcam from Justin.TV, Vlix from Spotmixer, and Klip, from the Palo Alto, CA, startup of the same name.

All of these free apps let users record and edit short video clips and share them with friends. None have a gigantic following yet, and I don’t know which one will dominate. But if the contest were being decided on sheer elegance, the winner right now would be Klip.

I sat down recently with Alain Rossmann, the veteran computing and mobile entrepreneur behind Klip, and got a tour of the app and a glimpse of the thinking behind its design. (See the video below.) If there’s a single theme that differentiates Klip from the other video sharing apps, it’s Rossmann’s obsession with refining the user-experience details.

That’s a skill he says he began to develop at Apple, where he was on the marketing team for the original Macintosh in the early 1980s. One thing Rossmann says he learned from Steve Jobs—whose “genius was there even then, but also the difficult side”—was that “the last 10 percent of refinement gets you 90 percent of the market share.” Which explains why Klip includes seemingly obscure but aesthetically important features like face detection—to make sure that the profile photo that shows up alongside your uploaded videos is cropped properly. “When you see your friends, you want to see their face,” Rossmann insists. “To get that on a phone with retina-display resolution, you have to do face detection.”

Here’s a short video of Rossmann demonstrating Klip. Story continues after video.

Rossmann has five startups under his belt prior to Klip. Three went public, and two were acquired. That’s “more than any one man, or his wife, should have to bear,” he jokes. But he can’t seem to resist.

After Apple, Rossmann co-founded Radius with a group of other Macintosh team alums; the company made graphics cards and external displays for the Mac. Next came C-Cube Microsystems, which built the first chips for handling MPEG video compression. EO, which made a pen-based wireless communications tablet (like the iPad, but about 16 years ahead of its time) was next. Then there was Unwired Planet, which helped give birth to the Wireless Access Protocol for Web browsing on feature phones and ultimately morphed into OpenWave (NASDAQ: OPWV). And finally there was … Next Page »

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The mobile Web is fostering a remarkable renaissance in traditional art forms such as photography—surprisingly, right alongside the explosion of videos, games, gossip, tweets, and other distractions. And if there’s one organization that has figured out how to use the Web and the latest mobile gadgets to showcase great images, it’s Paris- and San Francisco-based Fotonauts, creator of the online photo curation community Fotopedia and seven related mobile apps. I’ve been following this company for three years now, and I think they make the most elegant photo apps available for tablets and smartphones, including the marquee Fotopedia Heritage and National Parks apps and the more self-contained travelogues Above France, Dreams of Burma, Memory of Colors, North Korea, and Paris.

Today Fotopedia is announcing some big news—the company is branching out beyond its online presence and its one-off mobile apps to introduce a tablet-based photo magazine within the travel section of Flipboard, the popular social media reader for the Apple iPad. Starting today, Flipboard users can add the Fotopedia magazine to their favorites list and explore photo stories consisting of a series of images and captions on a single theme. The company plans to update the magazine with new images several times a day, drawing from its database of images contributed by the community of 30,000 professional, semi-pro, and amateur Fotopedia members.

With the Fotopedia magazine on Flipboard “the goal is to push the stories everywhere, so that we extend our ecosystem in a huge way,” says Jean-Marie Hullot, the Apple veteran who founded Fotonauts in 2006. “I think we are the only one in the industry equipped to deal with thousands of pictures, absorb them, make sense of them, curate them, give them the right structure, and distribute the product.” Even as it makes its Flipboard debut, the company is rolling out other publishing and business-model changes designed to make the venture-funded startup into “a photo platform for the 21st century,” in Hullot’s words.

Though the Fotopedia collaborative photo encyclopedia has been around for three years, most people probably know the company through its Heritage app for iPads and iPhones, which Apple recently named one of the top 50 iOS apps of all time. Heritage is a collection of 25,000 photos of UNESCO-designated world heritage sites, all used by permission of the Fotopedia members who contributed them. Apple likes the app so much that it’s installed it on iOS devices in every Apple store in the world, the better to show off the gadgets’ photo display capabilities. Cumulatively, Heritage and the six other Fotopedia apps have been downloaded 4.8 million times, according to Hullot.

As with all of the Fotopedia apps, the photos in the Fotopedia stories on Flipboard can be expanded for an immersive, full-screen view. Already, Fotopedia has 500 stories in the queue for the Flipboard magazine, on themes ranging from shipwrecks to ghost towns to body piercing. People without iPads can check out the stories on the Fotopedia website, a redesigned version of which is being unveiled today.

“The idea is to have all sorts of interesting, enriching stories spoken in pictures,” says Hullot. The stories will have “the same combination of immersiveness and the ‘Wow!’ feeling we always try to create with the Fotopedia apps,” he says.

Though Hullot is currently based in Paris, he’s also been a fixture in Silicon Valley, where he was chief technology officer under Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer and then CTO of Apple’s Applications Division. Fotonauts has collected $6.3 million in venture funding from … Next Page »

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The earthquakes and storms stayed on the opposite coast last week, leaving the Bay Area to focus on what it does best—churning out new ideas and new startups. To wit:

—Y Combinator, the famed venture incubator in Mountain View, CA, held its semi-annual Demo Day. (Demo Days, to be precise, since the 63 startups had to give their presentations three times to accommodate all the alumni and investors who wanted to watch.) I summarized the on-the-record presentations in two parts: Aisle50 through MongoHQ in Part 1, and Munch on Me through ZigFu in Part 2.

—Hipmunk, a travel search startup that emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2010 session, shared some good news to mark its first birthday: it has crossed the 1-million-searches-per-month threshold. I interviewed CEO Adam Goldstein about the company’s progress.

—I profiled Flite, the San Francisco startup formerly known as Widgetbox. CEO Will Price told me the remarkable story of Flite’s pivot from running a platform for Web widgets to running a cloud-based rich media advertising service.

—Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple shook loose a torrent of anecdotes and analysis last week. Curt Woodward, my Seattle-based colleague, spoke with Seattleite Kevin Pedraja, who had a telling story to share about a customer-support call from Jobs himself.

—Flickr was once the hottest photo sharing service on the Web, but many users (me included) feel that it’s lost its mojo as part of Yahoo. My Friday column asked “What Comes After Flickr?” and surveyed some of the newest cloud photo sharing options.

—I was too busy last week to keep up with all the funding news, but I did make note of a $3 million funding round for iScience International and a $15 million round for Sentilla.

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It’s unclear how much damage Hurricane Irene will deal out as it travels up the Eastern Seaboard this weekend, but in the British Virgin Islands, it’s already caused one notable loss. Lightning from the storm sparked a fire that destroyed the home of Sir Richard Branson, who lost thousands of irreplaceable photographs in the blaze.

That’s the strongest case I can think of for storing all of your photos in the cloud. (It sounds like Branson’s photos were prints, but he probably could have afforded to get them scanned.) There are other big reasons too—once a photo is online, it’s obviously much easier to order prints or share it with friends or family. But the cloud’s power as a giant backup drive is probably its best selling point. After all, photos are the next best thing to memories, and if you lose your memories, you lose a part of yourself.

The question, these days, is which cloud photo service to use. I’ve been a Flickr member virtually since the service’s founding in 2004, when it was still owned by Vancouver, BC-based Ludicorp. I have nearly 13,000 photos and videos stored there, and they’ve racked up some 168,000 page views over the years. But I’m very concerned about Flickr’s future within Yahoo. Its founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake are long gone, longtime product head Matthew Rothenberg (a veteran of the Butterfield days) departed in March, and it doesn’t appear that the 46-member Flickr team is being given much room to innovate these days.

Flickr did roll out a nice redesign last summer, but such updates seem to take years, while features that are in dire need of improvement, such as the apps that let you upload photos from your Mac or Windows machine, go completely neglected. Flickr has been outmatched by Facebook when it comes to social photo sharing; it hasn’t put out an iPad app; and it completely missed the boom in photo sharing on camera phones, leaving it to startups like Path, Instagram, PicPlz, and Color. (One former Flickr architect wrote on Quora that Yahoo wasted years in the early iPhone days on internal debates over the implications of the mobile revolution for photo sharing.)

I’m not saying that Flickr is dead or even dying—it’s just not clear that Yahoo understands or values the service anymore. In a December 2010 layoff notice explaining that Yahoo was “cutting investment in underperforming and non-core products so we can focus on our strengths,” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz pointed to e-mail, the Yahoo homepage, search, mobile, advertising, and content as strengths, but she didn’t mention photos.

You might ask why I’m focusing on Flickr as the incumbent, when the biggest photo sharing service in the world, by far, is Facebook (it stores about 100 billion photos, compared to Flickr’s 6 billion). Well, here’s why: Facebook doesn’t actually care about photos. It only cares about the people who appear in them. If it were concerned about the images themselves, it would offer better tools for creating, curating, and viewing photo albums; instead, it’s poured most of its photo-related development efforts into tools for tagging the people who show up in photos. That’s key because tagged photos show up in the news feeds of the tagged individuals, which helps to keep the whole endless conversation that is Facebook rolling. The images themselves might as well be piled up in a giant shoebox, for all the effort the company puts into helping you organize or discover them.

So what’s left, if you’re looking for a serious cloud photo service beyond Flickr? As it happens, there are some very interesting new options. I want to touch on three of them today: Google+, Apple’s iCloud, and a brand-new service called Snapjoy. They each push in a different direction—you might call them Web-centric, device-centric, and cloud-centric, respectively. I have no idea which one will prove most popular. But at least we’re living in interesting times. It almost feels like 2004-2005 again, when Flickr itself was new.

Google+

Back in 2004, Google bought a Pasadena, CA, startup called Picasa and started giving away the desktop photo editing software it had developed. A couple of years later, in 2006, it bolted on Picasa Web Albums, which allowed Picasa users to … Next Page »

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The Y Combinator startup incubator program in Mountain View, CA, is getting so big—63 companies presented at Demo Day this Tuesday, about half of them on the record—that we couldn’t squeeze summaries of even the on-the-record subset into a single article. Part 1 of our YC S11 debrief appeared yesterday and covered the first half of the alphabet, from Aisle50 through MongoHQ. Today we cover the second half, from Munch on Me through ZigFu.

Each listing includes a link to the company’s website, the names of its co-founders, the tag line provided by the company, and my summary. As a new element this time around, I’m also including my quick personal take on each startup.

Munch On Me

Jason Wang, Richard Din, Tony Li

“Get your Nom On.”

Munch on Me is a Groupon-inspired daily deals startup focused on specific restaurant dishes. The company argues that deals from Groupon and LivingSocial aren’t ideal for restaurants, since many deal buyers are bargain hunters who don’t contribute to repeat traffic. Munch on Me works with restaurants to pick a single dish and promote it for an entire week. The startup says that 75 percent of members who redeem an offer end up buying something else at full price, and that 100 percent of its early testing partners have stuck with the service. Munch on Me offers deals in six cities right now, and plans to expand to 30 over the next year.

My take: I was a little surprised by how many YC companies this year were simultaneously criticizing and imitating Groupon.

Opez

Chris Tam, Paul Chou

“Yelp for individual service professionals.”

Once you know that “individual service professionals” means bartenders, realtors, musicians, sales associates, and other people whose success depends on the quality of their interactions with customers, you understand what Opez means when it says it’s the equivalent of Yelp for these workers. At the Opez site, customers can leave reviews for specific professionals rather than their employers or venues, allowing them to build up a following that can boost their careers. Professionals might also be able to distribute promotions to their followers, “turning them into miniature Groupons,” in Opez’s words.

My take: Clever, but how often do you get the name of your bartender and remember to (or want to take the time to) write a review of him when you get home from the bar? Also, LinkedIn has a pretty big head start as a repository for professional references.

PageLever

Jeff Widman, David Turner

“Analytics to help marketers be more successful in social.”

Facebook provides owners of fan pages with an analytics dashboard called Insights that can show trends in things like how many people visited a page or contributed content. But by grabbing other data available through Facebook’s public application interfaces, PageLever says it can assemble much richer analyses that help companies attract and engage more fans—for example, by advising them on when to post a newsfeed item to reach as many fans as possible. Disney, Starbucks, MTV, Nike, Target, and YouTube are already using the tool, and the startup says it’s bringing in $25,000 per month in revenue.

My take: With so many startups offering social media analytics tools for marketers, it was only a matter of time until one came along focusing specifically on Facebook fan pages. For companies with the kind of brand recognition that can bring them hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, I’m sure the extra data is worth the modest cost ($34 to $94 per month).

… Next Page »

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Seattle photo-sharing startup PhotoRocket, stocked with veterans of high-profile companies like Amazon, Microsoft, aQuantive and Qpass, has cut its staff and changed CEOs as it tries to build up the product, including adding new features to make PhotoRocket stand out in a forest of mobile photo apps and services.

In an e-mail to Xconomy, founder Scott Lipsky said the PhotoRocket cuts are “less than 40 percent” of the staff, which had been above 20. That includes CEO Anna Collins, the former Microsoft advertising general manager who joined the startup in April. Lipsky writes that Collins “chose to cut herself,” and that PhotoRocket co-founder Michael Cockrill will now serve as CEO, while Collins remains an adviser. The changes were first reported by John Cook over at GeekWire.

Lipsky was pretty frank about the reason behind the changes. The company’s market, for online and mobile photo sharing, become much more competitive lately.

“For over a decade, there were only the ‘Web 1.0′ photo sharing sites. Then, over the past 12 months, there has been a huge flurry of new activity and development in the photo, mobile, social, and local spaces, which leads to consumer confusion and overload,” Lipsky said in his e-mail.

That clogged market made it really difficult to raise money, he said, leading to the need for PhotoRocket to cut its spending and re-focus on its technology and product. The lighter staff is heavier on engineering and development people, for instance.

“What we are doing now is focusing on evolving our core differentiating features, and focusing on product development—rather than on spending our dollars on marketing and buying users,” Lipsky wrote. “Anyone who downloads and uses PhotoRocket gets hooked and never needs to use email again to share photos—so we know we’re definitely onto something big.”

I had some skepticism going in as a test-user when I wrote about PhotoRocket earlier this year—how could another photo-sharing service be needed? I will say that, once I got down into the details, I could see the convenience of the application’s ability to send stuff quickly across lots of platforms and store it online.

A real marquee strength of PhotoRocket has always been the pedigree of its top people. Lipsky was a very early employee at Amazon and also co-founded aQuantive, the advertising company purchased by Microsoft for $6.6 billion. Collins also worked at aQuantive. Cockrill is a member of the “Qpass Mafia” of well-connected Seattle entrepreneurs, and was previously a managing partner at Atlas Accelerator. Another co-founder, Gary Roshak, was a vice president in mobile advertising for Yahoo.

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With an eye for bringing family and intimate friends together, New York’s Proust.com is unveiling its new website today, in a bid to take its online social scrapbook from beta to center stage. While other types of social networks encourage users to amass large and sometimes unwieldy lists of followers and friends, Proust is aiming for highly personal groups, says cofounder Tom Cortese. But Proust will have to find the right balance of popularity with the public and closeness among its users to make its mark in this competitive field.

Proust is named for French writer Marcel Proust, who’s best known for his seven-volume novel “In Search of Lost Time.” The site seeks to conserve its users’ time partly by laying out its information in a storybook format rather than a flow of status updates found on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Proust users write personal accounts of important times in their lives such as road trips, engagements, and weddings. They can upload photos and videos to accompany the stories that they can choose to share with other family members and friends using the site. The website creates a personal timeline for each user that displays significant dates. “We wanted to create one snapshot of your life that you could see from birth until today,” Cortese says.

Proust (the company) was born in February 2010, at the blessing of its parent, Internet company IAC (Nasdaq: IACI), which owns a bevy of subsidiaries including online dating sites Match.com and OkCupid, video sharing website Vimeo, and … Next Page »

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Newton, MA-based online travel giant TripAdvisor said today it has acquired Where I’ve Been, a social travel software company based in Chicago. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the entire product team from Where I’ve Been will join TripAdvisor, according to the press release. Where I’ve Been is best known for its Facebook application that lets people create travel maps and share stories and photos from their trips.

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Let’s count the juicy consumer-Internet trends piled up in Seattle startup Lockerz: Social networking, photo sharing, gamification, deals, and original content. That’s a mouthful, and investors apparently like what they see—Lockerz’s $30 million venture round is by far the biggest equity deal in Washington state for the month of April, according to data compiled by research firm CB Insights.

Lockerz is led by Kathy Savitt, a veteran of Amazon.com. Also in April, Lockerz added another former Amazonian, Mark Stabingas, as chief operating officer. The site claims 18 million users, who earn points for watching videos, uploading photos (Lockerz previously acquired Plixi) and other social-networking interactions. The aim is to redeem those points for deals on consumer products. Lockerz is very well-financed for a Seattle tech startup—it previously had raised $30 million.

There was a tie for second-largest equity financing in April, with two companies raising $6 million each. One was Decide.com, a stealth-mode startup that says it is focusing on online consumer electronics shopping. The company was co-founded by University of Washington professor and Internet search expert Oren Etzioni. It’s led by CEO Mike Fridgen. The pair worked together on Farecast, the airfare-prediction startup that was acquired by Microsoft.

The other $6 million startup in April was Spokane-based ReliOn, which makes commercial and industrial fuel cells based on “proton exchange membrane” technology. The company has been around since 1995, but went through a name change in 2004, according to the corporate website. ReliOn says it has about 3,500 kilowatts’ worth of cells worldwide, and serves public and private customers.

Coming in fourth was Xeround, which raised $4 million. Xeround, based in Bellevue, WA, offers cloud-computing software to help businesses, primarily in the telecommunications industry, to help them manage their data. The company says it has developed an “intelligent data grid” that allows customers to put all their information in one place instead of having it scattered across multiple databases.

Rounding out April’s top five was Mpire, a Seattle-based advertising company that raised $3 million. That wasn’t the end of the company’s news last month: Mpire also named a new CEO, and changed its name, switching over to AdXpose—adopting the moniker of its marquee product. That was the completion of a switchover that the company started about a year ago, when it announced it was ditching its previous Widgetbucks advertising network to focus on the AdXpose technology, which is dedicated to “optimizing” ad spending online.

Check out the table for the rest of the month’s Washington equity deals, and a few debt financings to boot.

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New York City-based Pixable, an online photo-management startup with roots at MIT, says it has raised $3.6 million in Series B financing led by Menlo Ventures. Previous investor Highland Capital Partners also participated in the round. Pixable (not to be confused with Cambridge, MA-based Pixability) was founded in 2009 by three MIT alums including CEO Inaki Berenguer. The company focuses on helping consumers discover, organize, and aggregate photos and videos from content-sharing sites and social networks.

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Palo Alto, CA, startup Color, founded by Lala.com creator Bill Nguyen, has raised $41 million in venture financing from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank for a new photo-sharing app for the Apple iPhone and Android phones. The Web has been ablaze with chatter over the startup and the size of the round since TechCrunch broke the news Thursday night; a Forbes commentator praises the app for its “awesome possibilities” while Business Insider calls it “a strange experience, not worth $41 million.” There’s already a parody slide deck and a roaring debate at Hacker News over whether the funding, which automatically shares photos between smartphones based on proximity, is the definitive sign that a perceived bubble in Silicon Valley tech financings is about to burst.

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Shutterfly (Nasdaq: SFLY), the Redwood City, CA-based photo sharing giant, said yesterday that it has agreed to acquire Tiny Prints, a Sunnyvale, CA, startup offering personalized greeting cards, invitations, announcements, and stationery. The cash-and-stock transaction, valued at $333 million overall, includes a $141 million cash payment and 3.9 million shares of Shutterfly common stock. “Shutterfly and Tiny Prints share a common passion: providing customers with innovative, high quality premium products, stylish designs and exceptional customer service,” Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold said in a statement. “We believe the integration of our businesses will create near-term and long-term opportunities for enhanced merchandising, accelerated product innovation and significant scale efficiencies in manufacturing, customer service and marketing.” Tiny Prints had raised venture backing from Summit Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures.

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There’s a slew of tools like Apple’s iMovie for turning your raw photos and videos into fun multimedia slide shows that you can share with friends and family. The problem is that none of them are drop-dead simple—except perhaps Animoto’s. The startup, which is based in San Francisco and New York and backed mainly by Seattle investors (and led by Seattle natives), offers the easiest tool I’ve found for uploading photos and short video clips and setting them to music.

A lot more people are likely to stumble across that tool now that Animoto is making the technology available to outside partners such as photo-sharing sites. Kodak Gallery, American Greetings, and Aviary.com are the first three companies participating in Animoto’s new partner program, announced today at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX.

Up to now, the only way to create an Animoto project was to go to the startup’s website or download its iPhone app. But thanks to the new software bridges Animoto has built to partner sites, people who store their digital photos and videos at Kodak Gallery, make free e-cards at American Greetings, or use Aviary.com’s editing tools will be able to make full Animoto videos from their own media without leaving those sites.

That could eventually translate into a lot more visibility—and income—for Animoto. “I think it’s conceivable that in the future, not only will the majority of Animoto videos be created outside of Animoto.com, but also the majority of our revenue will be driven from outside Animoto.com,” says Brad Jefferson, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

Building the application programming interfaces, or APIs, needed to pull this off preoccupied half of Animoto’s developer staff for most of 2010, Jefferson says. The company has been testing the service since last September; it was rolled out today at Kodak Gallery and will be available within a few weeks at Aviary.com and American Greetings.

Partners are interested in adding Animoto to their sites in part because it offers them a way to make money from consumers’ video clips for the first time, says Jefferson. “At least one in five online photo albums has at least one video clip,” he says. “But there’s not a lot of products that allow [photo-sharing sites] to monetize video clips. Their products are mostly tangible things like photo books and prints. Animoto gives photo-sharing sites the ability to offer a product that incorporates video clips and creates a lot of value.”

At Kodak Gallery, users can create their first high-resolution Animoto slide show for free during the month of March, and after that Kodak will charge users for each show they make. That’s similar to the arrangement at Animoto.com, where it’s free to … Next Page »

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Sharing your latest digital snapshots with family, friends, coworkers and the rest of the world is nothing new. But Scott Lipsky, a veteran of some of Seattle’s biggest tech success stories, thinks it’s still way too annoying.

His proposed cure is PhotoRocket, the startup photo-sharing utility that’s finally making its full public debut at Monday’s DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA.

PhotoRocket has been varying degrees of coy about its service for the past year or so. The service has been in invite-only alpha testing for several months—you can check out this short promotional video of how it works—and has been slowly emerging for different computing platforms.

But with the covers finally coming off, Lipsky and CEO Gary Roshak called up to give Xconomy a little tour.

The one thing PhotoRocket mentions a lot is that they’re “not another photo sharing service”—which, of course, they are. But here’s what’s different: PhotoRocket isn’t necessarily trying to be the destination for your photo habit. Instead, it wants to position its technology seamlessly at all the points where you’d access your latest photographic genius and make it easier to push those images out to whomever you want, however you want.

So rather than existing mostly as a website that you have to access and set up an account for, PhotoRocket works as an application on your computer or mobile device. Once embedded, it offers a pretty simple mechanism for distributing photos over e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Shutterfly, and Flickr (they say more options are coming.)

That gets rid of the sometimes laborious process of browsing for photos, uploading them to a site, changing the size if they’re too large, and doing it all over again if you want to switch to a new distribution system. And your audience can view those photos without setting up any account of their own, making it less annoying on both ends.

“You can PhotoRocket a photo in five seconds to people and Facebook simultaneously. If you want to e-mail that photo, it’s five or 10 steps,” Lipsky says. “If you want to get a photo uploaded to a photo-sharing site or Facebook, it’s 10 or 20 steps.”

That may be an exaggeration, but I will acknowledge that it sometimes can take a lot of clicks and data entry and load-time waits to move your photos around, which at times doesn’t feel very 21st Century. I tested the PhotoRocket app on my iPhone and—while I’m no photo-app power user—it did seem like an easy and intuitive way to push images to multiple channels.

So that’s great. But is there a big business here? Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterfly and … Next Page »

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Palo Alto, CA-based photo management startup Cooliris said today that it has raised $9.6 million in Series C venture financing from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the T-Venture group of Deutsche Telekom, DAG Ventures, and The Westly Group. The company, known mainly for its desktop browser-based “3D Wall” interface for browsing photos, also released an upgraded version of LiveShare, its private group photo sharing app for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 platforms. “With over 35 million downloads of our iconic Cooliris 3D Wall, we’ve established a good beachhead in media browsing, and now with our newest release of LiveShare we are transforming the group media sharing experience,” said Cooliris CEO and co-foundeer Soujanya Bhumkar in a statement. The Cooliris round comes on the heels of similarly-sized financings for competing mobile photo sharing ventures, including Path, Instagram, and PicPlz.

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Just hours after rival Path announced its own $8.65 million funding round, San Francisco-based mobile photo sharing startup Instagram announced on its blog that it has raised $7 million in new venture financing. Benchmark Capital led the round, with individual investors Jack Dorsey (of Square and Twitter fame), Adam D’Angelo (Facebook and Quora), and Chris Sacca (Google and Lowercase Capital) joining. Seed-stage investor Baseline Ventures also chipped in. Instagram says almost 2 million people have signed up to use its iPhone photo editing and sharing app since the company launched four months ago.

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In a blog post this evening, San Francisco-based Path announced that it has added video capabilities to its photo sharing app for the Apple iPhone. “Wonderful personal moments can be captured and shared with a photo. But, they would be infinitely better with video,” the company writes in the post. The addition of the video feature, which allows users to share clips up to 10 seconds long, could help to mollify critics who’ve argued that the Path app lacks key capabilities; the company’s decision to limit photo sharing to a “personal network” of 50 people provoked the ire of critics such as Om Malik, who wrote that “the idea of a restricted, personal network has the utility of a toy poodle.”

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There was way too much news from the Bay-area infotech industry last week for one correspondent to keep up with, so I focused in on just a few key developments, with some help from my colleagues around the Xconomy network.

—Path, a San Francisco company co-founded by ex-Facebooker Dave Morin, launched a new photo sharing app for the iPhone. Morin and Path vice president of business development, Matt Van Horn, argued in an interview that by limiting Path users’ networks of photo-sharing friends to just 50 people, the company can help users feel comfortable enough to share personal “moments” in the form of lightly annotated photos.

—San Francisco-based Stipple collected $2 million from Floodgate Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Justin Timberlake, and a range of other prominent investors, for a Web-based system that can help publishers monetize their digital photos by adding an interactive text layer, including links to e-commerce sites.

—Facebook unveiled its new messaging system, which unifies e-mail messages, instant messages, SMS text messages, and Facebook messages in a single inbox. Xconomist Sim Simeonov commented that the new system would be a “mission critical” application—at least for high-schoolers, who already use Facebook extensively to collaborate on homework.

—In a state superior court in Boston, Skyhook Wireless pressed its case that the court should enjoin Google from setting geopositioning standards for the Android mobile operating system that would, in Skyhook’s view, unfairly exclude its own location finding technology. Erin reported from the courthouse.

—Mountain View, CA-based payment processor PayNearMe said that it had raised $16 million in Series C funding from Khosla Ventures, August Capital, True Ventures, and Maveron. The company also introduced a new way for consumers to buy things online without credit cards by going to any of 6,000 7-Eleven stores, confirming their identities through mobile phone calls, and paying cash.

—I bought an Apple TV set-top box, set it up alongside my Roku Player, and had fun writing a comparative review designed to help reformed cable TV subscribers choose between them.

—We published an e-mail interview with Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz about the pros and cons for startups considering taking early-stage funding from individual investors. Next week I’ll be interviewing Moritz live on stage at San Francisco’s Kicklabs (register here).

—Thomas Korte, co-founder of San Francisco’s new AngelPad startup incubator, said in an interview that there should be “hundreds of incubators” serving each sector of the economy.

—Intel Capital announced a bundle of 18 new venture investments totaling $77 million, including Bay Area companies Verismo and YuMe.

—As I mentioned in a mini-news-roundup on Friday, Hipmunk struck a deal with ITA Software to use its QPX flight search service; Vudu released a new version of its software for streaming high-definition movies over the Internet; and JiWire released a survey showing that the Android operating system is the only one gaining market share among users of public Wi-Fi networks.

—In other deals news, ToxBox raised $12 million, Coraid raised $25 million, Optimizely raised $1.2 million, Marketo raised $25 million, Altius Education raised $19 million, and Meebo raised $25 million.

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A San Francisco startup called Stipple has raised $2 million from big-name investors to help make images on the Web more interactive. Specifically, the company wants to help publishers who puts lots of photos online to turn them into gateways to various kinds of interactions, including online purchases.

When you think about it, images on the Internet are weirdly static. The Web is dripping with them, of course, but they lack the interactivity that we expect these days from audio, text, and video. Stipple’s technology lets anyone with his own website layer interactive labels atop each image, including captions and what it calls “dots” offering details and links about specific people, places, or things. The information is invisible until a Web user mouses over the image. (Check out the images on Stipple’s home page for a taste of how this works.)

“Generally speaking you’re doing the same thing on the Web with images today that you were doing 10 years ago,” says Stipple founder and CEO Rey Flemings. “They are the forgotten media type on the Web. There hasn’t been a tremendous commercial focus on making it super-easy for people to discover what’s in photos. That was the initial idea of Stipple.”

That idea resonates with customers who’ve been using Stipple’s technology since the company’s August 2010 launch, including blog hosting company Six Apart, the E.W. Scripps newspaper chain, and record labels JIVE Label Group and Atlantic Records. And it appeals to the startup’s eclectic group of investors—it’s not too often you see singer/actor Justin Timberlake and staid Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers backing the same company.

Other contributors to the $2 million round include Mike Maples’ Floodgate Fund, Parkview Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, Global Brain Corporation, and individual investors John Ferber, Rick Marini, Eghosa Omoigui, and Naval Ravikant. In a press release announcing the investment today, Maples offer this buzzword-ridden yet succinct summary of the startup: “By marrying the ubiquity and engagement of photos with a business model and user experience that harnesses the power of community and network effects, Stipple has created the underpinnings of a company with disruptive potential in a massive market.”

Massive indeed: there are well over a trillion images on the Web, yet the only data available about most of them is their file names—and that’s usually something cryptic like “IMG_7149.jpg”. (Some images also come with metadata tags using the exchangeable image file format, or EXIF, but this usually only covers technical details like the date and time the picture was taken, or the settings of the camera used.)

Companies like Munjal Shah’s Riya have tackled the problem of making images more discoverable using computer vision techniques. Such algorithms are getting better at recognizing faces and certain kinds of objects, but aren’t yet able to … Next Page »

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