Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Reboot‘s organizer, has launched a new photosharing site. It’s called 23people. It’s functionally is very close to Buzznet and Flickr so apparently there’s no real innovation.
Nevertheless, it has a very nice user interface. I really like the way it eases the moblogging process by creating an email for you to send pictures too your gallery. You can also make zip and email them in one-shot. That’s what users will value more. Simplicity of usage.
I was able to start moblogging from my T630 in just 5 minutes.
The service has just launched so as soon has we were creating our accounts, our photos were all over the Latest Photos banner on the homepage.
I have been looking into this type of services in the last few weeks trying to understand business models, interaction models and social networking models. 23people seems quite simple and effective on what it does for sharing photos, mainly mobile. Has for their business model for now you get 1Gb on a free account to play around but I have read that the paid accounts will be around 29 euros / year for unlimited capacity and I can’t see any other revenue source for now.
The market opportunity is great. The digital photo market is huge worldwide with more that 325 million camera phones and digital cameras sold in 2004 and only about 5% of households with digital cameras utilize photo services.
I don’t know about 23people funding but french company Photoways got 24 million euros of Venture Capital just last week. And they have a much more tradional share-and-print photo service oriented for digital cameras.
So in the end being mobile-oriented 23people position themselves uniquely and I think they’re ‘getting’ the market by letting users play with photos the way they want. Thomas is having a tremendous opportunity on this one and I wish him all the luck.
Update: interesting (and now hot) discussion with Thomas on 23 being different from Flickr.
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