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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Pictarine
Quick Pitch: Pictarine is a website that lets you enjoy and share all your photos in one place.
Genius Idea: Mix and match photos from different services to create shareable albums.
Today’s digital photo sharer snaps and posts shots to myriad social sites and photo applications. Those photos often end up haphazardly scattered across web and mobile sites and devices.
Paris-based startup Pictarine gives modern photo sharers a way to clean up the photo chaos and bring together all of their shots littered across web and mobile for viewing, sharing or one-click download.
CEO and co-founder Guillaume Martin says Pictarine was envisioned after a weekend getaway with his partner. “Both of us took photos, but we couldn’t share them in an easy way,” he says. “So, the first idea was to share Flickr photos with other friends, like Facebook friends.”
An early version of Pictarine first offered users a simple way to collect and share all their photos fromFacebook, Flickr, Picasa and the desktop. Today, Pictarine now includes Instagram and Twitter — TwitPic, Yfrog, Lockerz and Twitter Photos included — integration. These new features where released Tuesday to further round out its online photo repository.
After first-time users authenticate each of their photo site accounts, Pictarine collects their photos, and auto-sorts them into albums by service, while also maintaining third-party site album structure. The service even grants users viewing access to their Facebook friends’ photos, Instagram friends’ photos and Flickr friends’ photos, making Pictarine a window to nearly all of the photos the users’ friends are posting to the web.
Pictarine’s most fetching feature is its highly malleable virtual photo album. With Zests, as they’re called, you can construct albums from your Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and desktop photos, as well as mix in photos from friends’ albums. You can then choose to share Zests with Facebook friends, Google contact groups and email contacts either publicly or privately.
Founded two years ago, Pictarine has been quietly available to the public since May of this year and has more than 3,000 users. The bootstrapped startup hopes to raise funding to support development of mobile applications.
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