Vizrea Makes Photo-Sharing Automatic

To me, the biggest underlying theme at the recent Demo 2006 conference was the sharing of user-generated content — especially photos, and especially cell phone photos. Why? Because camera phones outsell digital still cameras at least four to one, with about 300 million of them to be sold this year. All told, one billion camera phones are now estimated to be in circulation. That’s a lot of freaking fotos, friends. And the market continues to grow impressively.

The stat I heard at Demo that really made me sit up straight, however, was the estimated percentage of those one billion people that now share their photos: less than one-third. That’s why several companies at Demo see the sharing of photos as one big market opportunity (though that’s not the only type of content they can help you share).

One company at Demo, Vizrea, was founded specifically to address the difficulty of sharing cell phone photos. Mike Toutonghi, CEO and founder, told me at breakfast on Wednesday that, after taking some time off from Microsoft, he decided there had to be a better way, and then set out with some colleagues to develop a solution. Mike was GM for Microsoft’s .NET platform, and was VP of the Windows e-Home Division, which developed Windows XP Media Center Edition. The thing that’s really cool about Mike, though, is that he was skateboarder in his earlier life, and even tried a bit of surfing, too — so I like him despite his being a Microsoftie. 🙂

The company says its Vizrea Snap™ service is a complete photo service for camera phone users. Steve Toutonghi, VP product development, put it this way: “It takes the work out of shooting and sharing, the whole end-to-end process.” It’s actually three apps: one for your PC, one for your cell phone, and one for the web. What’s very cool is that, when you shoot a phone photo, it’s automatically moved to your PC (wherever it is) or the web, or both. And soon file types will include movies, audio notes, blog posts, even podcasts you do from your phone — all getting shared via the web and/or organized on your PC, all automatically. How cool is that? [I’ve told my friend Steve Borsch, who does really great, professional podcasts on technology, that I just couldn’t see my self doing podcasts — too much trouble. This may change my mind, beause it’ll be as easy as leaving somebody a voice mail. Are you kidding me?]

Vizrea got a huge boost when Walt Mossberg ran a column on them in the WSJ the day after Demo wrapped up, causing online signups to surge. The company had announced a free trial at the conference. And Mike told me later in an email from Europe that “we’re already learning a lot from the trial, which was exactly our intent.” He promised more good stuff is on the way: “In the next month or two, when we release our full service, it will be much better as a result.”

Biggest drawback to me so far? It doesn’t work on the Mac, or with my Moto RAZR. The initial release only supports phones that use the Nokia Series 60 operating system (which aren’t very many here in the U.S.) But Mike also told me Vizrea had “a lot of business development related interest” at Demo, so one could only wonder if, for example, Steve Jobs will come calling. This appears to be one area where Apple lags, even though its iPhoto software was certainly an early innovation (and I love it). Mossberg, who’s always quick to point out when any Windows software products are not as good as good or easy to use as things Steve Jobs has brought us, strangely didn’t even mention the word Apple in his column.

Watch for more on the other cool stuff from photo-sharing and content-sharing companies that presented at Demo: GarageBand.com, SharpCast, SmileBox, TagWorld, Tiny Pictures, and peer-to-peer company Zingee.

Tag: Demo 2006

[Written from Minneapolis, MN.]