Walking the aisles of disruption

There are two types of tech start-ups in the photo space: Those who enhance the photographic experience and those who use photos as a starting point. The first are your editing, filter, archiving apps and web services like Instagram, EyeEm or VSCO, the second are usually in the social media realm, like Facebook, Pinterest or G+.

Walking the aisles of Techcrunch’s Disrupt NY mostly confirmed this division. Most new photo/tech companies present offered solutions to the photographic flow, allowing users to better managed their ever-growing collection of images. We counted at least three start-ups offering very similar solutions around the storage, archiving and sharing of images. Sharalike, Minutta and Magisto all propose to take your images, mash them up in a slide show video, add music and give you a unique URL so you can share them with friends and family. Sharalike, created by two Frenchmen from Boston differentiates itself by offering an automated editing tool that matches similar images together and selects for you the best images to add to your slide show. It is also extremely easy to use, making it the most appealing of the three.

However, competitor Minutta, originally from Russia, comes with already 30 million users, having proven its value to the eastern Europeans.Their approach, while very similar, is to turn your slideshow sharing into an opportunity to sell photo merchandise. You like an image on a slide show you just received and you can easily have a t-shirt or coffee mug sent to you with that image on it. Magisto,on the other hand, thinks your resulting sideshows should be broadcasted to the world and transform you into a photo sideshow star.
In a space where Flickr and Dropbox have just launched two new products and where Google has been very active for many years with Picasa and G+, it is neither disrupting nor is it really anything new. We will certainly see other big players come out with new features or products that will certainly make it very difficult for these companies to be successful. At best, they might be bought and integrated into a larger entity.

On the photo as an entry point, we were interested in is Culturesphere. In an Instagram meets Linkedin, Culturesphere wants to be the visual portal for the enterprise culture. Here is how it works. Employees at a company take pictures of their lives at work and drop them in a central database. An admin user, like the VP of Human resource, selects the most appropriate images and post them publicly on Culturesphere who organises streams per companies and by sectors. So, if I want to see how life is at company A, instead of reading some dry canned description written 10 years ago by a balding copy editor, I can explore, via photos, what current employees are experiencing. It becomes much easier to find the company I not only want to work for but also that matches my style.
For the company, it is an exceptional chance to be discovered by future employees and break the walls of discovery. A pharmaceutical lab by describing what they do could be perceived as the most boring place in the world while, in fact, it has one of the most beautiful campus in the world, along with various activities and events that makes it a pleasure to work for. And did we mention free sushi wednesdays ?
CultureSphere is free to set up and use. Their business model is to offer recruiting services down the lines for companies that wishes to integrate the process more fully. Just imagine, instead of a stale job description, a vibrant photo job of the job itself. Chances of attracting the right candidate while avoiding the wrong ones become much higher. Linkedin, and other recruiting platform should be worried about these guys.

Finally, in a group of its own is Dublin-based Evercam. They offering is quite simple but offers impressive possibilities. Evercam makes it easy to connect a camera into any project. Think Stripe for Webcams. Made for developers who do not have time or resources to handle complicated camera integration into a lengthy project, it will soon have widespread implication. Imagine easily hooking up all security cameras at a hotel convention area and tell them to take pictures at a regular pace and post them on Twitter. Or for a wedding. Better even, someone can easily set a series of webcam in various places and get them to shoot at specified intervals. Or cell phones. The possibilities are endless, especially in our society where there is already a camera everywhere.  Evercam allows to do this easily. This company is going to be big.

There are much more to see at Disrupt NY but it finishes today. You can head down to the Manhattan Center if you are in New York or just follow Techcrunch for live updates and recaps.