Q&A: Photo sharing upstart Linea raises $4 million to fix ‘broken photo libraries’

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It’s 2013 — nearly 10 years after the founding of Flickr and more than a year after Facebook bought Instagram — and yet we still can’t seem to find the perfect way to store and share photos. Well, here comes Linea, a new Seattle startup that just scored $4 million in angel financing from undisclosed… Read More…

Galleries HQ lets you browse fine art galleries with your iPad

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There’s not a whole lot you can’t find on the Internet these days, and now Seattle entrepreneur and UW alumnus Wayne Bishop is adding fine art to the list with an iPad app that allows artists to submit their work for enthusiasts to view. Minted in 2012, Galleries HQ is a mobile content platform available online and… Read More…

An app for your apps: WideAngle puts your photos in one place

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Say you’ve just returned from a weekend trip in Vegas. You and all your raging friends took many, many pictures — some of them are already Facebook, others on Instagram and the rest that no one else should see are saved in separate phone galleries. Seattle startup WideAngle is bringing all those images in one… Read More…

Madrona-backed photo storage service ThisLife reportedly in acquisition talks

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Shutterfly is reportedly in talks to buy Madrona-backed photo organizer ThisLife for as much as $25 million, according to a report in TechCrunch. Madrona led a $2.75 million venture round in the San Francisco area startup last June, and at the time we wondered how ThisLife would make headway in a market dominated by plenty… Read More…

Familiar keeps growing, tops 47M photos displayed in Nov.

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Photo sharing may be one of the most hyped parts of the consumer Internet world, tracing back to Facebook’s big buy of Instagram. But even so, people still love shooting and sharing photos from all sorts of gadgets. And that trend is playing right into the hands of Familiar, a Seattle startup led by former… Read More…

Bill Gates-owned Corbis buys crowd-powered photo newswire service Demotix

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Corbis is expanding its footprint in the arena of photojournalism, announcing today that it has purchased photo newswire Demotix for an undisclosed priced. Corbis had previously invested in London-based Demotix, which boasts more than 30,000 freelance photographer contributors. Many of those are citizen journalists — armed with smartphones and the Demotix mobile app — can easily upload… Read More…

Ignition-backed photo sharing app Batch pulls the plug

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Batch is latest casualty in the online photo sharing arena. The company, which was backed by the likes of Ignition Partners and Sequoia, told customers today that it is shutting down service with photos available for download through November 8th. “Just over a year ago we launched Batch, and the time has come for us… Read More…

Startup Spotlight: Gazeable’s iPad apps help travel nuts explore the world in photos

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Ram Singh loves to travel. And it’s that love that sparked the 42-year-old former Microsoft engineering manager’s latest pursuit: Gazeable. The company’s two iPad apps — Gazeable and TripRaves — essentially are pictorial guidebooks that help people answer questions like: “Which of my friends have been to Hawaii?” or “What are the most-liked photos from Spain… Read More…

Mobile photo sharing service Trover discovers the desktop

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Most companies start with a Web-based version of their service, transitioning to  mobile almost as an after thought. Trover is headed in the opposite direction. Originally started as a mobile app, today the photo sharing and discovery service is taking the wraps off a new desktop version that will allow users to find and share… Read More…

Photos: The Gorge, as viewed from a radio-controlled plane

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Like many of us, Seattle-area high school student Zach Sweetser took lots of photos over the Labor Day holiday. But his are way cooler. Zach, who already has his sport pilot’s license and flies a Cessna 162, also loves building and flying radio-controlled aircraft. He has made a habit of attaching a GoPro camera to his Multiplex… Read More…

Cosplay, crafts and more great scenes from GeekGirlCon

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[Editor's Note: GeekWire's Emily Shahan was among thousands of people who attended the first day of GeekGirlCon yesterday at the Conference Center in downtown Seattle. She captured a bunch of photos of the scene, with some celebrity sightings along the way. Click any picture below to open a gallery. GeekGirlCon continues today, open to all... Read More…

Digital photo organizer ThisLife lands $2.75M from Madrona

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There’s no shortage of places to store your digital photos, from Facebook to Flickr to Instagram to Google’s Picassa to Photobucket to a computer’s hard drive. And that’s exactly the problem that ThisLife — a Palo Alto, California upstart that’s announcing $2.75 million in funding today in a deal led by Madrona Venture Group —… Read More…

Facebook buys facial recognition startup Face.com

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In a deal that was widely anticipated, Facebook announced today that it has acquired facial recognition upstart Face.com. TechCrunch reports that the price tag was in the $100 million ballpark. “Our mission is and has always been to find new and exciting ways to make face recognition a fun, engaging part of people’s lives, and… Read More…

Voicepic: Add 5-second audio captions to your favorite photos

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A picture may often be worth a thousand words.  But for those instances when images alone can’t tell the story, there’s Voicepic. That’s the name of a new photo sharing app from Bellevue’s UIEvolution which allows users to easily add 5-second audio captions to personal photos. UIEvolution CEO Chris Ruff said the goal with the… Read More…

The battle to train a market: Instagram is what Facebook has been telling you guys to do for like a year, okay?

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By now, it’s probably been brought to your attention that Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars on Monday, valuing the two-year-old photo-sharing service at approximately $100 million per employee. Predictably, everyone is asking why. More than one reputable journalist has covered this story by referencing Facebook’s continued inability to create a compelling, intuitive mobile… Read More…

Meet the superheroes of Maveron: One hilarious holiday card

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We get a lot of holiday greetings here at GeekWire. Some are pretty traditional, with snowmen or santas or wreaths. But our favorite of the year is the digital greeting from the Seattle venture capital firm Maveron. You don’t see venture capitalists let down their hair in this way, let alone don Batman or Spiderman… Read More…

iLike vets launch Familiar, turning your computer screen into a digital picture frame

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Marcus Womack, Josh Hepfer, Mike Bohlander and Ray Fortna were core members of the team at iLike, the Seattle online social music service that sold to MySpace in 2009. Today, they launched the first public trials of Familiar, a new online photo service that turns your computer into a “social picture frame.” What that means… Read More…

On the scene at GeekGirlCon

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Editor’s Note: Hundreds of people attended Day 1 of the inaugural GeekGirlCon at Seattle Center yesterday — sitting in on panels, learning crafts, showing off their best cosplay, playing games, meeting new people, and celebrating women and geek culture. Here’s a gallery of photos by GeekWire photographer Annie Laurie Malarkey, and video of the day… Read More…

Cheezburger opens a new chapter: Beautiful photos

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Cheezburger, the oddball Seattle based network of humor sites, is best known for its captions on funny cat photos and videos of vomiting hang gliders. But it’s not all about the laughter over at the Cheeburger world headquarters in lower Queen Anne. The company just introduced a new site called Five Minute Getaway which isn’t funny… Read More…

UW computer science project automates time-lapse pictures

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Inspired in part by people who take pictures of themselves every day, showing how they change over a period of time, computer science researchers from the University of Washington have come up with technology that automatically creates time-lapse portraits from a large collection of photos. If it sounds familiar, it’s because their research provided the… Read More…