How to Launch a New Photo App: Wait for iOS 7 Launch, Try to Get Featured. Then Hope.

Another new photo-sharing app? In 2013? Really?

Yup, really. But say this for the team behind Memoir, which is launching today: While sharing photos is a component of what their app does, it's not solely a photo-sharing app. It's more of a photo-storage and filing service, with ambitions to move someday beyond photos into other personal data.

Which is good, because it sure seems like the photo-sharing app space is full up, though people are still trying to prove otherwise.

Memoir was co-founded by Lee Hoffman and Angela Kim, and is a pivot out of Veri, a TechStars education startup they launched in 2011. They raised $1.2 million for that project from backers including BetaWorks and SV Angel, and used much of that to move into Memoir; they're also finishing a new funding round.

You can get a sense of what they're trying to do with Memoir in the video below, but if you want a very short sentence, it would be: TimeHop mashed up with Photo Stream.

More sentences: Memoir checks the metadata for pictures you have on your phone, plus those you upload to Facebook and other services (if you let it), and organizes them by date and location; it will also try to figure out who you were with when you took the photo. Then it stores all the images on its servers, and lets you access them whenever you want; it assumes your photos are private, and will only share them with friends if you ask.

The service is free now, and the company hopes to introduce a freemium model that will give you access to goodies like higher-resolution images, etc. One day, Hoffman and Kim can see Memoir storing and filing things that aren't photos.

For now, they're just hoping to pick up some momentum from today's Apple's iOS 7 launch.

They've held the launch of their app until this afternoon, with Apple's encouragement, in the hope that they get featured in Apple's App Store. There's no guarantee that they'll get that attention, and even if they do, a feature slot at the App Store is no guarantee of success.

But it sure would be nice to show up today, when lots of you are going to be spending lots of time there.

Introducing Memoir from Memoir on Vimeo.

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos App Expands To Support Video Upload & Playback On Android

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, the photo-uploading utility that helps move photos from a mobile device into Amazon's online storage, may have to change its name. Now, the tool doesn't just support photo uploads, it supports videos, as well. Videos can be manually uploaded one by one, or users can opt to have videos auto-save from their devices directly into Amazon's cloud.

This automatic upload option was already available for photos through an update out at the beginning of the year, but videos within Cloud Drive Photos had not yet been supported, whether manually or through the auto-upload feature within the application.

Amazon says that videos are restricted to 2 GB in size or 20 minutes in length, whether they're being uploaded or downloaded from the Cloud Drive service - that's slightly longer than YouTube's default setting ahead of account verification. This is fine for the majority of users' personal videos, of activities, pets, kids or events, for example, recorded on their mobile devices.

After the files are in Amazon's cloud, the video can be played back to any device, including, of course, the Kindle Fire and other Android tablets. According to a post on Amazon's Web Services blog about the technical underpinnings to the new feature, Amazon's Elastic Transcoder service was used, which supports over 20 file formats and 40 video codecs. The team says its goal was to have videos transcoded within 15 minutes after uploading, but ended up achieving videos that are often ready within a minute or two. They also went ahead and processed all the videos stored in Amazon users' Cloud Drive libraries ahead of launch.

Though the company offers a version of its Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app on iOS devices, too, only the Android version has received the video support at this time. That makes sense because not only is the Kindle and Android-based tablet, and therefore Amazon's priority, the Android app was also the first to launch, back in November 2012.

The iOS version didn't arrive until this May, and it serves as a viable alternative to Apple's own iCloud sync and storage service, with reasonable pricing of 5 GB for free, then $10/year for 20 GB, $25/year for 50 GB and so on, all the way up to 1,000 GB for $500/year. Keep in mind that the storage goes up so high not because users need so much space for photos (and now videos, too), but because Amazon Cloud Drive is meant to serve as a competitor to Google Drive or Dropbox, with support for a variety of file types, including office documents and music, which can also be streamed back through Amazon Cloud Player.

In other words, this isn't the first time users could upload videos to Amazon's cloud. This is just making it possible to do so within the Cloud Drive Photos application.

The updated Cloud Drive app is available now on Google Play and Amazon's Appstore.

In Facebook's News Feed Redesign, the Focus Is on the Photos

If nothing else, Facebook knows this: Looks matter.

That has been the theme of Facebook’s revamped News Feed unveiled on Thursday morning — a heavy emphasis on fuller photos, larger check-ins and location displays, and an overall re-think of the way people experience the ceaseless barrage of information flowing through the feed. (Expect it to trickle out on the Web today, and across the mobile apps in the coming weeks.)

The company’s conceit for the new look takes a media-focused tack: “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world,” Zuckerberg said at an event at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus on Thursday. And design director Julie Zhuo said that this newspaper is populated with “stories,” or Facebook’s redesigned take on the status update.

But forget all of that. This redesign is about visuals, not the bland, black-and-white text that makes up the stuff of status updates. Photos are full-bleed. Check-ins and “Liking” brands puts more prominence on the photography and less on the words. You can even sort by different categories, including exclusively updates featuring only snapshots. (You’re able to sort by other types of content — like music — as well.)

This is all not entirely surprising. According to a source I spoke with recently, Facebook News Feed engineers see the most engagement from users on photography and visuals that appear inside the News Feed. And every time Facebook tweaks the algorithm to show the best content that users engage with the most, photos still float to being the most prominent inside the feed — so much so that Facebook must tweak the algorithm to show more text-based status update content, even if that isn’t the stuff people want to look at the most.

Zuckerberg acknowledges the importance of photos, and the ways people use them. “The types of stories that we tell when we communicate with a photo as opposed to text are completely different,” he said onstage.

But Facebook’s actions make clear that this is the direction it has gone in for some time. Look at the massive $730 million dollar buy of Instagram. Look at the slow “Pinterestification” of certain topics. Look at how much attention photos have received on the phone.

One outlier — how will Facebook integrate Instagram, the quintessential “visual” app of the day? Zuckerberg said it’ll be treated like any other app in the ecosystem.

Which is sort of curious, considering another one of today’s themes was “consistency” across platforms. Facebook’s News Feed redesign looks the same on the Web interface as it does on mobile now. But Instagram has a standalone Web site and continues to have a mobile app separate from the main Facebook app. Not sure how that’ll sync up across Facebook as a whole.

It’s a bit funny, too, if you look across the aisle at one of Facebook’s main competitors: Twitter. The microblogging service also revamped its product in a major way this year, adding more prominence to photos, videos and story links from outsiders. It also launched redesigned iPad and mobile apps, aiming for a “consistent” design across all platforms. Even Google+ is heavily invested in the photo-centric focus, blowing up images across all platforms.

So essentially, it’s a race across all platforms to look as pretty as possible. That’s where engagement lies, and how you’ll hook your user base in the long term.

After all, you need to give the people what they want.

Transfer iPhone Photos and Music to a Windows Computer

www.expertcomputerhelp.com – Transfer iPhone Photos and Music to a Windows Computer 1. Http 2. Install. 3. Close iTunes. 4. Plug your iPhone into your Windows computer. 5. Drag and drop your “photos” to your desktop or where ever you want to save them to and do the same for your “iTunes_Control” folder. Hope this helped! www.expertcomputerhelp.com – Where support is always free!
Video Rating: 4 / 5