Why is there such a recent surge in funding photo startups?

In Startups: Answer added in topic Mobile Location Applications.

Srini Kumar, Creator of TinyVox: tape audio & post to the cl...

It's a Marshall McLuhan thing.



Until photo sharing became easy and widely available, point to point communication was limited to the phone and text-based email.



People don't like to type that much. An innovation on Quora is that their UI has a textarea that's very fun to type in; another innovation on word processing is Ommwriter for the Mac... these are very engaging platforms to type into. Email isn't one of these platforms. Twitter and the Facebook News Feed are, but note how limited the writing usually is - 140 characters or less...



It can be rewarding to type into one's blog. Text when published (Quora again being an example) can be a great way to connect with strangers. But we don't send long emails to our friends and family much... we'd rather talk with them on the phone than write them an essay, in general. Emails between family members, in particular, devolve into grunts of "call home" or "got back safe, wonderful visit." Gone is the art of letter writing, replaced by something called "search engine optimized content creation." People don't really write much anymore in long form, and almost never within the context of a point to point communication (perhaps a cover letter for a résumé or a business proposal constitute exceptions).



Photos broke this communication throttle between close ties wide open, with a side helping of broadcast potential. Photos convey a "light rich media" experience that can be encoded in a jiffy from any location and decoded just as fast by the recipient. Photos capture a milieu and a moment without having to open up Gmail and cook on the perfect words. Photos constitute a "social ping" that conveys presence without requiring much cogitation.



We now communicate with photos far more readily than with email (or any other form of text). Photos convey a "biological" richness that maps onto family and friend communication more readily than blocks of text. We created TinyVox in this spirit of "typing is too slow". Point to point communication should not resemble an essay contest, and photo and other quick rich media gives users new options for intimate communication that both sender and receiver find new and appealing.



And finally: babies and kittens.



See question on Quora

Why is there such a recent surge in funding photo startups?

Backlink: http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-is-there-such-a-recent-surge-in-funding-photo-startups#ans605025

Comment on Freelancer.com Reports Surge in Demand for Mobile Developers by Dave

Wow good snapshot of the freelance work that is out there right now. Interesting that resumes is #3. I wonder if that's because the job market is so competitive right now.

Comment on Freelancer.com Reports Surge in Demand for Mobile Developers by Dave

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/collaboration/freelancer-com-reports-surge-in-demand-for-mobile-developers/#comment-554631

As LimeWire Shuts Its Doors, Other P2P Clients See a Surge in Usage

Less than a week since LimeWire was ordered to shut down its operations, almost all other major file-sharing applications are reporting a massive increase in downloads, arguably from those displaced LimeWire users.

A New York district judge last Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order, demanding that LimeWire immediately close its doors. And while LimeWire has said it has plans to institute a redesigned service, based on legal and licensed music subscriptions, it seems like many of the site's users may have gone elsewhere for their torrents, rather than waiting for a revised version of what was once the most popular file-sharing app.

Sponsor

TorrentFreak reports that it has spoken with a number of developers from P2P services, all of whom have seen a "huge boost in download numbers following Tuesday's verdict." No developers were willing to go on the record and give TorrentFreak the raw data - for fear, no doubt, of incurring the same wrath of the courts that LimeWire has received.

The exception is BearShare. Much like LimeWire, BearShare was once a Gnutella-based application. But in May 2006, BearShare was ordered to pay $30 million in settlement with the RIAA. Following that decision, BearShare altered its offerings via the Gnutella framework, limiting file-sharing. And its current iteration is, as the site proclaims "100% legal."

Despite these restrictions, BearShare has seen a 780% increase in US downloads since Tuesday. And it reports its daily US downloads went up from 8000 to 62,400. The company does not say, however, whether or not these new sers are actually paying for their downloads. (That is, I believe, what the RIAA believes will save all those poor suffering record labels.)

Even though the LimeWire alternatives have seen an influx of traffic over the past week, the fallout from last week's decision - and the still-to-come decision regarding the dollar figure attached to the judgement - remains to be seen as to how it will impact file-sharing services and users.

Discuss

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/NuPAhBno4oo/as_limeware_shuts_its_doors_other_p2p_clients_see.php