Their first app for the iPhone, PhotoShare, isn’t bad, but it’s another photo service to sign up for, and we just wanna use Flickr, damn it.
PhotoShare is NOT yet another photo storage service, it is a social networking service that allows users to share their experiences with friends, family and the rest of world in real time.
The key is “real-time”. PhotoShare is not designed for people to upload pictures they have taken several hours ago. We have optimized PhotoShare for people to share their photos while they are experiencing, in order to share their experiences, express their emotions, and communicates with friends and family.
Last weekend, many PhotoShare users took their own photos right before they go to Dark Knight (a new batman movie) sharing their excitements, then posted their photos again after watching the movie. This exactly the scenario PhotoShare was designed, for that that is the real “always connected” lifestyle.
Apple has finally opened the App Store, and our flagship application, PhotoShare is available to download. PhotoShare is a brand new social networking application that allows iPhone users to share photos with friends and family directly from their iPhone - very easy to use, very smooth to run, and (unlike other social networking services) no registration is required.
We have designed everything (client-side software for iPhone, server-side software, and web-service API) from scratch, in order to offer the best possible user experience to iPhone users. With our state-of-art asynchronous transaction manager, all the communications with the server were done asynchronously and securely - offering a seamless, stress-free user experience.
Here is a promotional/instruction video we’ve just created and uploaded to Youtube.
One of the new wave of iPhone start-ups is Big Canvas Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., a firm creating a social-networking application for the iPhone that uses photos. Satoshi Nakajima, CEO of Big Canvas, said the development tools Apple offers for the iPhone, which are derived from technology underpinning Apple’s time-tested Macintosh operating system, are the best he has seen for mobile software developers.
Mr. Nakajima, a former longtime Microsoft software engineer, also praised the App Store, Apple’s channel for distributing software to iPhone users, which he believes will give greater visibility to unknown software developers than has been the case with other mobile phones.
We have chosen iPhone as the platform to release our first product. There are several reasons:
1. We love Apple products - MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, etc. You need ‘love’ to be creative.
2. We believe the devices like iPhone will change people’s life style, and we really would like to participate in that process.
3. This new platform (iPhone OS, Xcode, Objective-C) is a barrier of entry for big companies (because of the training cost, and high risk), it’s perfect for a small start-up to make a bet on.
We are not ready to announce our product yet, but we are very actively writing code already, and have a plan to launch our first product when Apple opens the iTunes Store for iPhone products this summer.
We are designing this product with following criteria in our mind:
It’s so easy and natural to use
It’s optimized for iPhone
It fits really well to the lifestyle of iPhone users
Once you see the value of this product, you are going to use it everyday
The Internet is a canvas, a really really big canvas, large enough for everybody in the world to participate.
This canvas is open for everybody. Anybody with creative spirits - designers, developers, writers, bloggers, musicians,photographers, teachers, students - can participate in this Internet Renaissance.
Big Canvas will offer a series of web-based “creativity tools” that accelerate this process.