Pixable – 2010 Year End Newsletter

We are at end of a very exciting and fruitful year and wanted to provide you with a proper recap of the year and share some news related to the main focus of 2011: Pixable Photofeed.

Overview

We started 2010 with only one product and a small team of four people in New York. We are ending it with a bigger team, new products like Pixable Videos and PhotoFeed, and more than 250K unique visitors and 100K registered users. PhotoFeed , to be launched in the following weeks, has become our new major focus, with the vision of becoming the web’s main social photo discovery engine.

Furthermore, we have gathered a Board of Advisors and Directors of the best pedigree and raised funding from one of the most successful investment firms in the world.

Social photography is a hot trend right now. You have an always-connected mobile camera in your pocket all the time and you can capture, edit (e.g., cool filters or cropping) and share any photo with a very minimal amount of time and clicks. Capturing, editing and sharing are not disjoint actions anymore and new startups like Facebook, Path, Instagram, Twitpic, or Picplz, are facilitating photo sharing and broadcasting. Facebook alone will pass 100 billion (yes, billion) photos this year. Additionally, these photos can be given immediate context with the possibility to tag people and places almost automatically. After the proliferation of photo broadcasting activity, photo consumption is the next big need and lots of companies will emerge in this space. Pixable Photofeed is at the center of this new wave of photo consumption.

We are in the right place, at the right moment, with the right group of people involved and the right product. Our mission is to become the primary destination to browse, search, edit and enjoy your social photos. We seem to be on track to making a dream come true that would not have happened without your involvement.

Investment

This past June we raised our Series A round of financing. The new capital was raised from Highland Capital Partners of Boston, MA for the purpose of growing an experienced team in NYC and to provide a budget to launch the new PhotoFeed product.

In conjunction with the raise of our Series A, Highland Capital partner Bob Davis, joined our Board of Directors. Bob was previously the CEO of Lycos and is a veteran in the internet industry, being part of the board of companies like Ticketmaster, Quigo, Turbine or Quattro Wireless. James Joaquin, former CEO of Kodak Gallery and previous advisor to Pixable, also joined the Board of Directors this past fall. Paul English, co-founder of Kayak.com and serial entrepreneur, and Douglas Alexander, former General Manager of Flickr, have joined the Pixable Board of Advisors bringing their expertise to further enhance our vision of becoming the web’s social photo discovery engine.

PhotoFeed

Halfway through the year, we realized that while we were enabling users to aggregate photos from across the web and automatically create personalized products, there was a larger problem waiting to be solved: the consumption of photos for the sake of enjoying them in a daily basis and not necessarily create photo products (e.g., popular photos of the week, photos with particular keywords in the title, or photos with girls). Today, the average Facebook user has access to between 75K and 400K photos of friends and there is currently no way to browse photos from across the web and your socialgraph in a smart way. Thus, for the past 6 months we have been developing PhotoFeed, a discovery engine for the web’s social photos. PhotoFeed uses machine learning algorithms to display the most interesting and relevant photos to an individual user and also allows them to subscribe to notifications of their friends’ photo activity.

Other products and coverage

Pixable Videos is our first product that is entirely digital and it was launched this past November. The application automatically turns your photos from Facebook and other online photos into a real video with your music, after-effects, and motion in seconds. So far, thousands of videos have been created and shared. Pocketpix was launched in October as a cool way to share all your social photos in one place. Also, back in March we launched Mosaic Me, a Facebook application that transforms your profile picture into a Mosaic made up of all your friends’ profile pictures with just one click.

Continuing the trend of last year, we have garnered the attention of some of the largest publications this year. 2010 has included coverage in the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, CNN, Techcrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, Inc. Magazine and being recognized as one of the coolest companies to work for in New York by Time Out Magazine.

The Next Steps

Pixable PhotoFeed will launch mid January, which we are very excited for and expect to take off. We will keep the momentum rolling by coming out mobile versions of PhotoFeed in early 2011.
None of these achievements would have happened without your continuous support. We wish you the very best for the New Year. Thank you again for all your support,

Alberto, Andres, Inaki and the rest of the Pixable Team
http://www.pixable.com
http://apps.facebook.com/pixable