Flickr’s iOS App Is Still Playing Catch-Up

flickr-iosA blog post from Flickr about new updates to its iOS application went relatively unnoticed yesterday. The post announced a series of incremental improvements to an app which has so far barely managed to catch up to the competition after months of abandonment, but has yet to really impress. The latest build brings a few now-standard features like the ability to save photos to your Camera Roll, communicate with @ replies, and more.

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Wedding Party, The Mobile App That Lets Guests Contribute Photos To Gorgeous, Shared Albums, Scores A Million-Dollar Seed Round

WeddingParty_tc1Wedding Party, the mobile app that allows wedding guests, friends and family to contribute to a shared, digital album of photos and notes which can later be posted directly to the couple’s Facebook timeline, has raised $1 million in seed funding in a round jointly led by NEA and Felicis Ventures. Also participating were a number of angel investors, including early Dropbox investor Pejman Nozad, plus Ullas Naik, Darian Shirazi, Rich Chen, Zeki and Haroon Mokhtarzada, Doug Pepper, Mark Jung, Kumar Malavalli, Chris Hobbs, Hamid Barkhordar, Sam Ferdows, and Merced Partners. The app, which first launched this summer on iPhone only, was being bootstrapped by Ajay Kamat, Himani Amoli, Gordon McCreight and Dan Perez, three of whom had previous social community building experience from an earlier project called MicroMobs. Dan, meanwhile, came from Coupons.com. Since its original debut, Wedding Party has expanded to Android, where it’s now available in beta. The Android version isn’t yet feature-complete compared with the iPhone app, says co-founder Ajay Kamat, so that will be an immediate focus for the company’s product development efforts. Longer-term, the team is thinking about ways to bring the experience of viewing the collected and photos to the iPad’s bigger screen. “It’s very obvious that the consumption of the content on a tablet would be gorgeous,” Kamat says. “It’s definitely something that we’re thinking about.” Currently, wedding guests and newlyweds can revisit their digital album after the fact either via Facebook (if they choose to publish there) or through an album on the Wedding Party website itself. In addition, thanks to a partnership with MyWedding.com, the album can also be integrated into the couple’s main wedding website. When the team first created the app, they thought of it as something the couple would ask their guests to use on their big day, but they soon found that their users had other ideas. “The biggest surprise for us was that, almost immediately, we saw that people were using us months and months in advance of their wedding,” says Kamat. “They were using it to get their friends and family involved in the wedding experience early on. We’re seeing things like cake tastings, dress fittings, rehearsal dinners,” he adds. To support this slight shift in focus, Wedding Party has been updated with features designed for all the expanded use cases. It now offers things like upgraded guest pages with collages of all the photos the guests were involved in, plus

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Automatic Album Maker Moment.me Arrives On Android, Adds A “Manual Mode” Mode To Boost Engagement

momentme-android3Moment.me, a startup that debuted its automatic, social albums application for iPhone this past fall, has made its way to Android. The app allows users to combine not only photos, but also video, as well as updates from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Google+, into one album. These albums are also augmented with content shared by friends and others who posted content at that same place and time.

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Crash Debuts An Online And Mobile Guide To Local Tourist Attractions

iP5_LA_03Crashworks, a new Idealab-backed travel startup, is today coming out of its semi-stealth mode with a fun mobile application called Crash and accompanying website for unique, crowdsourced tourist attractions. The difference between what Crash offers compared with more robust travel guides, is that it’s not focused on recommending hotels, transportation, restaurants or bars – it’s only about the photo-worthy tourist spots in the city you’re visiting.

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Google+ Photos Get Pan And Zoom Functionality, Letting You Really Explore High-Res Photos

7306916118_5d392f3eb2_oGoogle+ is coming out of its holiday slumber with an addition to its Photo section of the service, today. The team has added pan and zoom functionality, which lets you explore small areas of high-resolution photographs. This comes after a hot and heavy feature push right before the holiday season. Google’s social feature-set has attracted artists of all types, especially professional photographers. Uploading photos is super easy and sharing with Circles have been a way to get feedback on those pics of the mountains that you just took on a hike before sharing them with the public. Here’s what Google’s Dave Cohen had to say about the release: Google+ is full of amazing photos, and today we’re introducing the ability to pan and zoom when viewing photos from your desktop. To give these features a try, simply open a large photo in the lightbox, then: – use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out – click and drag to pan right, left, up or down Higher resolution photos will offer more to explore, so we’re excited to launch pan and zoom just weeks after launching full-size backups of your Android photos (http://goo.gl/KRpjE). The experience on an Apple laptop is pretty neat, or any laptop with a touch or trackpad. Afte you click on a shared photo, simply use two fingers to zoom in and out fluidly, as you hone in on specific pixel areas. For huge panoramic photos of the outdoors, this can unlock photos in an all new way for followers. The new Nexus devices with the latest version of Android support these types of photos, in case you’ve forgotten. The box in the upper left-hand side of the screen allows you to see where you are on the picture itself, so that you can simply pan over to different areas to see what you’d like to see. This is an advanced feature, not something that would appeal to mainstream consumers, but one that will be enjoyed regardless. Basically, this wasn’t a must-have for Google+ Photos, but the team clearly felt like it was time to include it. This is going to be a huge year for Google’s social evolution, as you’ll start seeing this functionality trickle out to other Google products as the months go on. No, Google+ isn’t a social network, but Google is indeed now a social-focused company. Incrementally, feature by feature, piece by piece,

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Dropbox Acquires Snapjoy And Puts Photos Into Its Focus

snapjoylogoLess than one week after Dropbox acqui-hired Audiogalaxy to beef up its cloud music ambitions, today comes news of another acquisition, this time focused on another form of media, photos: the cloud-storage giant is buying Snapjoy — like Dropbox, a Y Combinator-alum — which lets users aggregate, archive and view all of their digital photos from their cameras, phones and popular apps like Flickr, Instagram and Picasa, and then view them online or via an iOS app.

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With New Profiles, ‘Following,’ Search & HD Photos, 360 Is Starting To Look Like The Panoramic Instagram

Screen shot 2012-12-17 at 9.37.11 PMAs great as the allure of its filters may be, Facebook didn’t spend $1 billion on Instagram for its digital photo effects. No, it was because Instagram was mobile-first, growing like a weed, had just launched on Android, and because it had created (with a small team) the first good-looking, mobile-centric social network for photos — location-tagged photos to boot. Launching a major redesign of its panoramic photo-sharing Android app, 360, today, Silicon Valley-based TeliportMe wants to do for the panoramic view what Instagram did for your regular old mobile photos.

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Kleiner-Backed Stipple Lands $3M To Help Brands Turn Tweeted Photos Into Micro-Storefronts

Screen shot 2012-12-13 at 8.16.57 AMStipple, the startup that helps publishers and marketers monetize their images, announced this morning that it has raised $3 million in follow-on funding from Sands Capital. This bridge round follows the $5 million series A the company raised in May from Floodgate and Relevance and the $2 million in seed it nabbed in 2010. All told, Stipple now has $10 million in the bank from a laundry list of recognizable names as investors, including Sands, Mike Maples’ Floodgate, Relevance, Kleiner Perkins, Justin Timberlake, Matt Mullenweg and Naval Ravikant — to name a few.

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