Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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Holiday shopping season is a fun time of year for a company like Daily Grommet. The Lexington, MA-based Web startup finds unusual consumer products and tells a story about one such “grommet” each day through videos and text.

This week I touched base with founder and CEO Jules Pieri, who shared some info with me on the top-selling grommets of the season so far. As someone who hates holiday commercialism, but likes warm puppies and weird gadgets as much as the next guy, I found the range of items available on the site pretty enlightening.

So in case you’re looking for an unusual-yet-personal gift for that special someone, you might want to browse around the Daily Grommet site, which includes product categories like home, food & drink, health & wellness, and green & eco-living. Sounds pretty standard, but the products you’ll find there are anything but.

Here are some examples of bestsellers (and links to the story behind each item):

—Sugru, a kind of hacking putty for real-world stuff (“fastest Grommet out of the gate, in history,” Pieri says).

—Urban Cheesecraft, which sounds like slang or euphemism but is actually just a handy cheese-making kit.

—Soggy Doggy, a super-absorbent doormat/shammy for dogs.

—Picture Keeper, an elegant way to grab and store photo libraries from your computer.

—Ila Security, a small, portable security-alarm device, like a personal panic button (good for long board meetings).

—Drawer Décor, a custom drawer organizer for kitchen supplies and other goods (mundane but useful if you don’t like clutter).

Good luck with the shopping, readers. I’ll probably see you online.

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Bedford, MA-based Zink Imaging said this week it has closed $35 million in Series B financing led by Genii Capital. The company, whose name stands for “zero ink,” is developing technology for inkless digital printers that can be attached to or integrated with cameras, consoles, and other devices.

Zink’s technology was conceived at Polaroid Research Labs. It uses special “paper” consisting of dye crystals encased in polymer film. The technique essentially puts color-producing materials in the paper itself, which get activated by thermal print heads, like those used in fax machines. The result is a small color printout of a photo or document, say. The company has partnerships with Polaroid, Dell, and other firms to manufacture devices for consumers.

Zink also announced it has hired former board members and Polaroid veterans Mary Jeffries and Ira Parker as co-CEOs. They succeed former CEO Wendy Caswell (also a former Polaroid exec), who led the company for almost six years since it started in 2005.

My colleague Wade wrote an in-depth profile of Zink back in early 2008. At the time, the startup was about to debut its mobile photo printer at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

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Rand Fishkin, the CEO of Seattle search-marketing software company SEOmoz, is known for his extensive blog posts that lift the curtain on running a startup company. But the amount of transparency he showed recently wowed even longtime observers, as Fishkin laid out an extremely open tale of a possible new round of venture capital. We rounded up the whole thing with this interview and Storify timeline, and wrapped it up yesterday, after Fishkin disclosed that the deal had fallen apart under somewhat odd circumstances.

Steve Jobs‘ abrupt resignation as CEO of Apple led to a long round of remembrances and anecdotes, a remarkable outpouring rarely seen for a corporate executive. I stumbled upon one tale of a close encounter with the man himself via Twitter, where Seattle PR executive Kevin Pedraja mentioned the time Jobs responded to Pedraja’s irate customer message with a weekend phone call. It’s a tale previously told, but worth revisiting.

Zillow (NASDAQ: Z) reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company, showing an honest-to-goodness profit for the first time. It wasn’t a huge profit—$1.6 million in earnings, on $15.8 million in revenue. But growth was strong, and the profit was a big positive. CEO Spencer Rascoff also went into detail with analysts, including Zillow’s prediction that the national housing market won’t reach bottom until next year.

We rounded up the equity deals for Washington-based companies from July, and no surprise here: the $37 million round for traffic-data company Inrix easily led the way, accounting for more than a third of the venture money raised last month in the state. Varolii, Lucid Commerce, PayScale, and Yapta rounded out the top five.

Xconomy’s Wade Roush took us on a tour through the sea of photo-storage services on the Web, wondering why Flickr has given up so much ground as others have tried to push the boundaries: Google+, Apple’s iCloud, and a startup called Snapjoy. What about Facebook, which has the lion’s share of our online photos? “Facebook doesn’t actually care about photos. It only cares about the people who appear in them,” Wade writes, pointing out that tools for processing and displaying the images are secondary to tagging and sharing functions.

Finally, a bit of personnel news: Maveron, the consumer-focused VC firm co-founded by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, has promoted former Zynga executive Andrew Trader to partner. Trader had been an entrepreneur in residence at the firm, which has offices in San Francisco and Seattle, since last fall.

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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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That dang Rich Barton is one busy dude. Fresh off the public-market debut of Zillow (NASDAQ:Z), the Seattle uber-entrepreneur (he also founded Expedia) is trying to boost the user base of another one of his ventures, the location photo-tagging startup Trover.

Yes, indeed—another location/mobile/photo/social play.

As we saw with yesterday’s news that Seattle’s PhotoRocket had downsized, the zone has quickly become flooded with apps and Web services trying to hit a sweet spot with all of those smartphone-enabled tricks. Do it right, and you could theoretically attract a huge user base of people sharing tons of data about what they like, where they are, and who they know.

Most infamous of them all is Color, the Silicon Valley photo-sharing startup that landed $41 million in venture capital and reportedly turned down a big buyout offer from Google before it even had a serious app in the field. It didn’t turn out so well. And there are plenty of other players.

Trover’s pitch is that it’s tying together the location-tagging features of a Foursquare, the photostream sharing idea of an Instagram, and the crowd ratings of something like Yelp into one package. Users are supposed to leave a trail of virtual breadcrumbs behind for others to discover as they explore different locations.

So, if I had used it while writing this story, I’d have taken a picture of the BBQ pork sandwich I was enjoying at Xconomy’s Ballard bureau and described its finer features for my pals to check out later if they come by this same spot.

Trover has been in a beta mode for three months, testing out its product with about 70,000 users. That’s not a huge pool, but CEO Jason Karas says the experimental users have been responding well, including some self-policing of newbies who post photos of non-locations, which Trover actually bans to keep the activities focused.

“That was always our challenge—no baby pictures,” Karas says with a laugh. “We’re doing a lot just from a social engineering standpoint about what Trover’s used for. … That’s been painstaking, but successful.”

Is that enough to survive, much less stand out, in a forest of mobile photo applications? Who knows. There’s clearly something in the behavior itself that people are glomming onto—Instagram famously has about 1.25 million users per employee right now.

Trover is funded in kind of a weird way. It spun out of TravelPost, an earlier Barton startup that Karas worked for, which was a website where people could share travel experiences such as hotel reviews.

TravelPost raised $9.8 million last year from investors including General Catalyst, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital. But there doesn’t appear to be much going on over at TravelPost right now, and Karas says the leaders took “a sizable chunk” of the money to work on Trover, which is technically owned by TravelPost. TravelPost is technically still alive, but most of the resources are being poured into Trover now, a spokeswoman says. Whew.

Trover was just open to people with Facebook logins during the trial period, but as of today the whole shebang is being opened up—people who want to try it out can sign in with Twitter accounts, email addresses, or download the iPhone app.

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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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Between 30 and 40 percent of all files on the Web are images, and even pages dominated by text usually have a few photos. Yet most of these photos aren’t linked to anything interesting, the way text can be. San Francisco startup Stipple sees this as a waste—and an opportunity. Last fall the company rolled out a system that allowed publishers to add a new layer of information to online photos: “dots” that reveal details about people, places, or things when you touch or mouse over them. The details can include links, and if those links lead to e-retailing sites, the traffic they generate can turn into affiliate commissions—-creating one more much-needed revenue stream for publishers.

But as it turned out, there were three problems with Stipple’s original system, CEO and co-founder Rey Flemings told me recently. First, the publishers who adopted it weren’t always willing to put in the time to tag new images with useful information. Second, the tags they did create weren’t always accurate or consistent; the same black chair might be identified as one model in one picture, and as another model in the same picture on a different site. Third, publishers didn’t always have the proper licenses to use the images they were tagging—and while publishers might be able to get away with posting unlicensed images, the copyright holders are likely to come calling once they start make money from those images.

So Stipple, which has venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Floodgate Fund, Parkview Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, and a number of prominent angel investors including singer/actor Justin Timberlake, went back into the darkroom to develop some new features. Late this spring the company introduced a “2.0″ version of its system, divided into four components to solve the problems publishers were encountering and to get a new faction directly involved: namely, the makers of the products shown in Web images. Now Stipple comes in the form of products aimed at different audiences; Flemings calls them Lens, Pipeline, Network, and Want.

“I believe this new suite of products finally creates an image ecosystem,” says Flemings. “We think there is a great business to be built in providing accurate information to users when and where they want to see it.” And so far, Web users seem to be eating up the information on Stipple-enabled sites. When there’s a “people dot” on an image, about 5 percent of all visitors touch it, Flemings says, and when there’s a “product dot,” 12.5 percent of visitors touch it. Those engagement rates far exceed the fraction of people who click on traditional banner or text ads, which is typically below 1 percent.

Flemings walked me through a basic description of the startup’s new products and how they fit together. (You can see the system in action at Stipple’s blog.) It starts with Lens, an ever-growing collection of licensed editorial images from many of the country’s leading photo agencies and ad agencies. “The purpose is to assemble all of the editorial images that matter—the ones with really large audiences of people concerned about who’s in them and what’s in them,” says Flemings. For each incoming image, Stipple creates a permanent digital fingerprint. That way, dots created for a given image—say, a dot describing the dress Katy Perry wore at the Grammy Awards—will stay associated with the picture wherever it ends up on the Web. The idea, over time, is that publishers who subscribe to Stipple’s service will get more and more of their images through Lens, solving the unlicensed-image problem.

The second product is Pipeline, where the dots actually get created. Basically, Stipple’s solution to the workload problem is to … Next Page »

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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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Seattle startup Lockerz, which is positioning itself as a unifying platform for the online lives of teens and young adults, has raised $30 million out of a possible $45 million investment round, according to a new SEC filing. The company declined to disclose the investors, pending further fundraising.

That’s a pretty big chunk of change for the Seattle tech scene, and it comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that the company had added Amazon.com veteran Mark Stabingas as chief operating officer. Lockerz is led by founder and chief executive Kathy Savitt, who worked with Stabingas during her previous gig at Amazon. The funding news was first reported by TechCrunch.

Lockerz is trying to establish itself as a destination site for young people by throwing together several key elements: social networking, game mechanics, and shopping discounts. Users—Lockerz says there are about 18 million—earn points by interacting with content and other people on the site. Those points can then be redeemed into actual savings through online purchases. Lockerz also seeks to be a middleman for other social networks, allowing users to send uploaded photos over to their Facebook page after first earning Lockerz points for that action.

Another very interesting element to Lockerz’s plan is the fact that it actually has some original programming—a leap that Netflix and other digital platforms have been making lately, and one that got the startup a nice hefty mention on The New York Times last month. Lockerz also acquired online photo-sharing service Plixi in January. The company says it now has more than 70 employees at offices in Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego.

As GeekWire points out, the $30 million being reported today is in addition to an earlier $30 million round, making Lockerz a notably well-financed startup in the Seattle area. The company’s previously announced investors included Liberty Media Corporation and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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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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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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Animoto would have knocked my grandfather’s socks off. A freelance photographer, he spent countless evenings assembling his Ektachrome transparencies into multimedia slide shows—but back in the 1970s and 1980s, “multimedia” meant a pair of carousel slide projectors with a dissolve unit controlled by time codes embedded on a musical cassette tape. At Animoto’s site, by contrast, you can upload a few dozen digital photos and video clips to the Web, select some music, get back a professional animated video within minutes, then share it with your friends via e-mail, Facebook, or YouTube. It’s one of the slickest and easiest ways to package and share all those photos and clips from your last trip or party—and sharing, after all, is what photography is all about.

“It really is digital storytelling,” says Brad Jefferson, co-founder and CEO of the New York- and San Francisco-based startup, which is expanding into a gleaming new office on Kearny Street. “My co-founders come from the film and TV industry, and at the end of the day what we are trying to do is help people create short-form documentaries from the photos on their SD cards and computers. We like to call it ‘Hollywood production with the click of a button.’”

And just as in Hollywood, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. It was around 2007, when Animoto was founded, that cloud-computing platforms like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were beginning to make it possible for companies to offer such services online without having to build their own huge data centers. In fact, Animoto has always used EC2′s computing power for most of its hard-core rendering work—taking users’ photos, adding fancy motion graphics, dissolves, and other effects, and putting it all to music. But it was always a bit of a stretch, because Animoto was trying to get Amazon’s plain-vanilla CPUs to act like graphical processing units (GPUs), which are specially designed to speed the mathematical operations behind 2D and 3D rendering.

Now there’s an alternative: in November, Seattle-based Amazon Web Services announced that EC2 users could rent access to actual GPUs as well as CPUs. And that has allowed Animoto to take a big leap forward. Starting yesterday, Animoto upgraded its standard videos from 240p or pixels of height—the size of a small embeddable box on a blog page—to 360p, the size of a standard YouTube video.

Premium users previously had the option of upgrading their videos beyond that to 480p, which is DVD quality. But now they can also scale beyond that to 720p, or HD quality. And on top of all that, videos handled by Amazon’s GPUs are rendered about 10 times faster than before—and at lower cost.

“We knew that the direction our video rendering had to go was GPU, but the problem was that [until recently] there were no cloud providers with GPUs,” says Jefferson. “We looked at buying a bunch of servers and putting them in a colo [a colocation center]. But it was not having to invest in hardware that made us very nimble and allowed us to focus on what we’re good at, and we still don’t want to. Using Amazon GPU instances is the next evolution of that vision.”

There’s one caveat: Animoto offers 24 styles of videos, from abstract to cutesy, and so far HD videos and faster rendering are available for just one of them, the “Animoto Original” style. (For a look at that style, see the 2-minute Animoto video below, which I created last night using photos from a trip last weekend to California’s Sonoma County.) The reason is that Animoto has, in essence, …NEXT PAGE>

… Next Page »

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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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Here’s an interesting snapshot of a small startup working with a tech giant to change how people check out local establishments on the Web—and also how those establishments advertise online.

The startup is Newton, MA-based EveryScape, which creates 3-D panoramic tours of restaurants and other businesses from photos of their interiors. The tech giant is Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which has been ramping up its efforts in local search (among other things). Today, at a Microsoft Search Summit in San Francisco, Bing and EveryScape are announcing that they’ve teamed up to deliver “immersive imagery” for businesses across all of Bing’s local search results.

The partnership is a major extension of the collaboration the companies announced last June, which involved creating 3-D views of Boston-area restaurant interiors on Bing. The new deal makes EveryScape’s virtual tours available in Bing’s local search results for all establishments that EveryScape has catalogued—which amounts to “thousands” of businesses worldwide, the company says.

What this means is if you search for a nearby restaurant on Bing, say, and if EveryScape has stitched together the necessary imagery, you can click on the “step inside” button (see lower part of screenshot below) and get a virtual tour of the inside of the restaurant. Presumably this gives you a better feel for the ambience, and can help you decide whether you want to go there for a business meeting, private dinner, lunch date, or what have you.

Financial terms of the Bing partnership were not disclosed; EveryScape declined to comment on whether it will receive technology licensing fees and/or a cut of advertising revenues.

From a strategy perspective, EveryScape is now pursuing an interesting mix of big distribution partnerships (Bing for example) and consumer-focused software—its iPhone app, released last summer, provides visual restaurant guides for several U.S. cities. But the company seems to have shifted more of its sales focus to local advertisers. “The deal with Bing is an important step in our strategy to bring immersive advertising and search into the mainstream,” says Jim Schoonmaker, EveryScape’s CEO, in an e-mail. “Bing is a fantastic anchor tenant that provides an important source of local search traffic.”

EveryScape was founded in 2002 by chief technology officer Mok Oh. In 2008, the company raised $7 million in Series B financing from Dace Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic, and Launchpad Venture Group.

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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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On Sunday, San Francisco startup Path launched its photo-sharing app for the iPhone, and by Tuesday night it had already climbed to the number 5 spot in the Lifestyle section of the iTunes App Store. iPhone users seem to appreciate the new app, which is designed to let users share candid photos and a few bits of context (“Lunch at the office,” “Sunset at the Golden Gate Bridge”) with a small network of friends—no more than 50, in fact.

“I don’t want to share my life with the public or all the ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ I have on Facebook or Twitter,’” one user commented in the review section of the store. “Those services are good for other things. For sharing personal memories, this app is perfect.”

That’s exactly the kind of reaction the creators of Path must have been hoping for. Dave Morin, formerly Facebook’s senior platform manager, co-founded the company earlier this year with Napster creator Shawn Fanning and programmer Dustin Mierau, with investment support from early-stage venture groups like First Round Capital and well-known individual investors such as Ron Conway and actor Ashton Kutcher. Morin told me in a conversation Monday that Path’s mission is simple—”making the world a happier place”—and that one of the easiest ways to spread happiness, nowadays, is to share personal moments with friends via camera-phone pics. But not just with any friends.

Path’s premise is that the moments you’ll share will be more meaningful if you know they’re only going out to a small circle of actual friends—your “personal network,” to use the startup’s lingo, rather than your Facebook-sized “social network.” Path is far from the only photo-sharing app available to iPhone users (alternatives like Instagram and PicPlz have also been getting a lot of ink in the tech blogs lately) but it’s definitely the one with most highfalutin theoretical grounding. In an essay for the Huffington Post on Monday, Morin argued that personal connections lose their joy and authenticity in groups that exceed Dunbar’s Number (150), and that for this reason, neither Facebook nor Twitter are great places to cultivate a trusted circle of close friends. “The personal network isn’t vast (we actually limit it to a subset of Dunbar’s number)—but it is powerful,” Morin writes.

Of course, whether it’s feasible to build a successful venture-funded mobile startup 50 people at a time has yet to be seen. Xconomy was the first company on Path’s list of media calls Monday morning, and I got a chance to put a few of my own questions about the company to Morin and Path’s vice president of business development, Matt Van Horn, who previously ran business development at Digg. I’ve transcribed our conversation below; Morin joined the interview near the end.

It was clear from the talk that Path is about more than just the iPhone, and more than just photos. Morin and Van Horn seem to see big possibilities in helping people share experiences within small communities. Expect Path, over time, to broaden its definition of “experiences” and the ways they’re captured and shared.

Xconomy: There are plenty of social photo sharing apps in the iTunes app store and plenty more on other platforms. What made you guys feel there was room for another photo sharing app, and what is the unique vision that makes Path stand apart from all those other apps?

Matt Van Horn: I think one of the key things we’re going for is we’re not trying to be another photo blogging site, but we’re interested in building what we call the personal network. Our first stab at that is photos, and that’s the mechanism that we’re using to share and capture moments right now, and adding context around that. But our ambitions are still to build a more personal network.

X: So would it be a mistake to say that Path is mainly about photo sharing?

MVH: Obviously it’s about photo sharing right now. You share photos on Path right now with the closest friends in your life. We see our service as very complementary to the other services in the space. I don’t think we’re directly competing with anyone else doing similar things in the space.

X: But I think you’re implying that the idea of a moment is something you could capture in any number of ways—and right now it’s in the form of photos, but there are any number of ways you could create a documentable moment and share that. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?

MVH: We’ll explore any opportunity or any idea that comes our way. Right now, it’s just photos. But long-term, who knows what spaces we could … Next Page »

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Ex-Facebooker Dave Morin’s much-anticipated Path service has launched on the iPhone. It’s built around photo sharing, and it’s being billed as a “personal network,” with an explicit limit of 50 friends, as opposed to Facebook’s 5,000. The news went out in a note to journalists tonight from Path’s public relations representatives.

Using the free Path app, iPhone owners can snap a photo, tag it with their current location and the names of any people or objects appearing in the photo, and then send it to everyone in their network. Path calls these tagged photos “moments.” If friends’ phones are set up to transmit instant notifications, they’ll see the moments within seconds, and this fact will be transmitted back to the original picture-taker.

It’s all designed to promote a sense of real-time co-presence within a group of close friends. In fact, the Path blog post introducing the service seems deliberately worded to draw a distinction between Path and Facebook, which has grown so large, and is so dogged by public concerns over privacy protection, that it’s rarely seen any more as a site for intimate sharing or even much authenticity.

“Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal,” reads a post on the company’s blog. “Path is a place where you can be yourself.” (Emphasis in original.)

At the same time, the company is careful to say that it isn’t attempting to go up against Facebook directly: “The personal network doesn’t replace your existing social networks—it augments them.”

Path was co-founded by Morin, formerly senior platform manager at Facebook, along with Napster creator Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, who wrote a Mac Napster client called Macster. The 13-employee startup, which is based in San Francisco, has backing from venture groups Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, and Betaworks. It also boasts a star-studded list of individual investors: Steve Anderson, Marc Benioff, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Ashton Kutcher, Dustin Moskovitz, Keith Rabois, Kevin Rose, and Gary Vaynerchuk are among the best-known names backing the startup.

Path says it chose to limit friends to 50 per user because that’s the rough maximum number of people with whom any one person stays in regular contact, according to research by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. Dunbar is the originator of the “Dunbar Number” of 150—the theoretical upper bound on the number of social relationships one person can handle. Path wanted to stay well within that limit, so that users would feel comfortable sharing. “No following, no friending…just sharing with the people who matter most,” the company’s post says.

Users can invite friends into their Path network directly from their iPhone’s contact list, and they can browse moments posted by people in their circle either on the main timeline screen or on a world map. The post says Path is launching “first” on the iPhone, suggesting that versions for other mobile platforms such as Android may be on the way. The startup’s business model, Morin told Wired’s Steven Levy, will revolve around premium services, not advertising.

Competing with Path in the photography section of the iTunes App Store are a number of other social photo sharing apps such as Instagram, Picplz, and Best Camera. And in the social networking sphere, there’s also a faction of young “anti-Facebook” startups offering private group discussion functions, including The Fridge and MicroMobs. What’s clear is that Silicon Valley serial entrepreneurs (and their investors) think there’s a lot of mileage left in social networking, mobile media, and in Path’s case, the overlap between them. But many of these startups are walking a tightrope—trying to capitalize on the Facebook-inspired wave of enthusiasm for social networking while at the same time pointing out Facebook’s shortcomings.

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