Quick Pitch: Picplz is a photo sharing app for iPhone and Android that makes it easy to share your mobile pictures with just a few clicks.
Genius Idea: Recently, there's been a boom in iPhone-only photo sharing applications -- think Instagram and Path -- hoping to capitalize on ever-improving mobile camera technology. Picplz exists in the same space, but the startup designs to be far more than just an application, instead aiming to be a full-fledged service with a cross-platform experience, a community and a solid business model.
"We're not an iPhone app company. We're a service company," says founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell.
Picplz makes mobile apps for iPhone and Android that allow users to upload photos, apply filters, attach locations via Foursquare and share them with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Its feature set mirrors that of rival Instagram, but Picplz actually pre-dates that iPhone application and has been focused on building for Android and iPhone since day one.
In addition to mobile, the Picplz service also includes a full-featured website that allows members to upload photos and apply filters. The web-based filter experience is actually superior to the mobile one and allows users to preview each filter for their photo simultaneously before publishing. The web experience also ensures that anyone, regardless of mobile device, can use the photo-sharing service.
To date, Picplz is reporting slightly fewer than 100,000 registered users.
On the features side of things, the current filters aren't as strong as those of its competitor, but that will soon change, Caldwell tells Mashable. In fact, Picplz users can expect a host of service upgrades in the immediate future to include enhanced filters, new filters and revisions to the mobile applications' user interfaces.
The mobile applications make it easy for users to automatically follow their Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter friends, so most users will have little trouble finding a slew of friends to follow. The photo display gives users a glance at recent friend activity or popular photos. Photo comments and "likes" are also compelling elements that bring the user back.
Caldwell, who previously founded and sold music startup Imeem, says he picked the mobile photo space specifically because of his first-hand experience watching Imeem's mobile app install base skyrocket year over year.
The Imeem mobile apps were profitable and generating more revenue than the company was spending on them, explains Caldwell. Also, he says, "Page views on a mobile device are easier to monetize than on a website."
Caldwell believes he can use this knowledge and experience to monetize Picpiz, and soon. "Building a profitable [business] is the number one thing I'm out to do," he says. Though Caldwell was reluctant to share specifics, we should begin to see Picplz's monetization strategy develop in the coming months around new features currently in the works.
Investors are confident in Caldwell's ambition. The startup raised $5 million in a Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz just last week. The venture capital firm also has a much smaller stake in Instagram, but it invested when that company was still Burbn and before it pivoted to its current photo sharing purpose. Still, the $5 million investment in Picplz signifies that Andreessen Horowitz believes this service will have a fruitful future, perhaps on par with other portfolio companies like Zynga and Foursquare.
Image courtesy of Picplz, dalton
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark