Animoto analyzes the provided photos and music, automatically generating a trailer like video. According to Animoto website, its engine analyzes users’ photos and music and takes into consideration music’s genre, rhythm, and tempo to generate a video that takes into the song’s nuances. The site claims no two videos are ever the same.

As of Auguest 2008, 250,000 users in over 200 countries have registered with Animoto.com with 4 million videos and 50 million views.

Slide, Rock You and Photobucket are among competitors for Animoto. Animoto’s founders have produced shows for MTV, Comody Central and ABC.

History

Animoto was founded on August 2006.

Amazon funded Animoto in May 2008 with an undisclosed amount. Animoto is based in New York with an office in San Francisco.

On March 2008, The Animoto Videos application launched on Facebook and became a popular way for users to showcase their photos on the social network. It was integrated with YouTube, allowing users to export Animoto videos directly to YouTube easily. As of Aug 2008 nearly 50,000 videos have been uploaded to YouTube.

On June 2008, Animoto introduced DVD-quality upgrades for users to view videos in televisions.

By end of 2008, Animoto for Business and Animoto for Education were launched. Animoto for Education gives teachers and students unlimited access to its standard & premium services for free.

More information

• Founded August 2006
• Headquarters New York, NY
• Key people Brad Jefferson, Jason Hsiao co-founders
• Services software applications
• Website http://animoto.com/

F lickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, B.C., Canada-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr’s backend systems evolved away from the Game Neverending’s codebase.

Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.

In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.

On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from beta to “gamma”, along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site’s FAQ, the term “gamma”, rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

In December 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (originally a 2GB per month limit).

In January 2007, Flickr announced that “Old Skool” members–those who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition–would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticized by some users.

On April 9, 2008, Flickr began to allow paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size.

Yahoo! Photos

Yahoo announced that they would shut down Yahoo! Photos on September 20, 2007, after which all photos would be deleted. During the interim, users had the ability to migrate their photos to Flickr or other services (including Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Photobucket). All who migrated to Flickr were given three months of a Flickr Pro account. AT&T Internet Services customers were given a free Flickr Pro account, which originally was planned to be for the duration of the customer’s subscription to AT&T Internet Services, but AT&T has recently decided to drop the Pro account services, with most customers’ Pro accounts ending next year unless they subscribe to Flickr Pro. This generated some negative feedback amongst AT&T customers. Flickr users who do subscribe to Pro before their term runs out will be given an extra two months of the service free of charge.

Visit Flickr

It allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 1 GB of photos for free. Users can purchase more storage space, which can be shared between Google services.

Users may upload pictures either via a web interface, Picasa 2.5.0 or later[4] on Microsoft Windows, using the Exporter for iPhoto, the Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in, or Uploader on Mac OS X, or F-Spot on Linux. In both paid and free accounts, the actual resolution of the photo is maintained (even though a smaller resolution photo may be displayed by the web interface), and the original photo can be downloaded.

PWA uses an “unlisted number” approach for URLs for private photo albums. This allows a user to email a private album’s URL to anyone s/he wants; the recipient can view the album without having to create a user account – this is done via an “authentication key” that’s needed to be appended to the URL for the album to be shown. The Picasa help files say that private albums are not searchable by anyone except the user.

On October 11, 2006, the “Test” name was removed, in favour of purely Picasa Web Albums.

No ads are shown on Picasa Web Albums, in either free or paid accounts. The Terms of Service[6] permit Google to use the uploaded photos to display on the website or via RSS feeds, and also for promoting Google services royalty-free.

Picasa Web Albums was first leaked on June 6, 2006. When introduced, it came with 250 MB free space. On March 7, 2007, it was upgraded to 1 GB.

Visit Picasa