ShoZu Your Photos to Flickr

I've documented the problems of MMS many times and two of the central problems always come back to ease of use and cost.

ShoZu might just solve these issues, making it much easier to upload your photos as you take them on your camera phone and share them with friends and family.

ShoZu is a simple application you can download to your phone. Once installed, it offers to upload a photo to your Flickr account every time you take one. It's as simple as that.

Assuming (and it's a big assumption) that your phone's internet settings are correctly enabled, that's all there is to it. No complicated installation or software to learn. And no costly MMS charges - just the cost of the data transfer one time and you can share photos on the web and via email.

I don't know what the business model here is. It's a free-to-download application currently, so maybe the plan is to sell this once the product has moved out of beta stage. I'm also a little surprised they don't offer a choice of the more popular photo-sharing sites - Flickr might be the darling of the chattering classes, but there are others like the insanely popular WebShots, as an example.

It's also interesting that they've gone for a B2C model, unlike Cognima, who have focused on providing white label services that do pretty much the same thing. Cognima raised $12 million in the Summer to expand.

I'd say the value in the chain here is a B2C play, if they can make it happen. B2B invariably gets commoditised, squeezing margins until someone comes along with a way to make it happen cheaper than you're prepared to do it.

Comments

[Carlo Longino]

It will be interesting to see how this plays out between ShoZu and Cognima Snap. I played around with Cognima at CTIA and was pretty impressed, but there's nothing more frustrating to me than finding a cool service, only to discover it's only being sold through carriers.

[Yanamandra]

Just noticed that ShoZu is powered by Cognima.

[Russell Buckley]

Thanks Yanamandra. I missed that.

So, that makes ShoZu's business model even more curious. Anyone have any ideas?

Russell

[Chris]

Keeps people talking about Cognima? Gives them hard figures about usage, which is great when talking to operators? Showing rather than talking?

It's all good.

[Thomas Madsen-Mygdal]

Doesn't it look like this is an offering from Cognima?

[Carlo Longino]

Makes sense to me. Why wait only on carriers when you've got a decent base of advanced users that would be interested in something like this?

Support beyond Series 60 and UIQ would be nice, though.

[Andy Tiller]

Yes, ShoZu is based on Cognima Snap.

Cognima's main business model is still to license our Snap technology to carriers (and other licensees) as a white label offering, which includes more advanced functionality than is currently available in ShoZu.

But we are also interested to create a very visible demonstration that the right user experience on the phone can generate much higher levels of usage than the standard approaches to image upload and phone-to-blog synchronisation. Flickr is a great place to do this, with its tech-savvy user community and an open API that allows us to do interesting things like adding tags from the phone.

We already support Snap on Microsoft-based smartphones and (some) Java handsets, and we are looking at introducing these for ShoZu.

Hope that helps clear things up.

Andy Tiller, CTO Cognima Ltd.

[Russell Buckley]

Thanks for the comment Andy and clearing things up.

Russell

[Andy Tiller]

One further point of clarification: Cognima plans to maintain a free version of ShoZu, with the current level of functionality, even after the beta trial is finished.

We've started a Flickr discussion group at ShoZu beta - everyone is welcome to join.