Big Canvas Inc.

Big Canvas Photo Apps Could Make MMS on iPhone Irrelevant, Cult of Mac, Feb 9 2009

PhotoCanvas offers a number of preset backgrounds and photo frames that can be customized with drawing and text rendered in 48 colors and two dozen font faces, all of which are accessed and applied through an easy-to-use, intuitive UI that makes good use of Apple’s mobile platform design.

iPhone apps of the week, CNet The Download Blog, Jan 23 2009

What makes the application particularly interesting is that it acts like a photo version of Twitter. You can follow specific users, add favorites, and post photos from your daily life complete with comments.

iPhone & Photos: Business opportunities through Apps, ZDNet, Jan 20, 2009

Big Canvas, a startup out of the Seattle area, is an example of a company that’s doing more than just trying to build a photo-sharing network. Granted, the sharing application – an iPhone freebie – is an important element. But the money comes in via the 99-cent and $1.99 apps that let you do fun things with your photos – like making them look like oil paintings, adding your own drawings on top of them, wrapping a holiday frame around them or even turning a pic into a Valentine’s Day card and countdown to the date – to share with the significant other, of course.

Holiday Frames, an iPhone App Comes Just In Time For the Holidays, MacBlogz, Dec 24, 2008

We have covered an application from Big Canvas before called PhotoShare, and they definitely have some talent over there. Big Canvas founder and president, Satoshi Nakajima has a very clear vision of how the mobile market can enhance social communication and sharing. Through the company’s applications, he is hoping to help further this space, while having fun at the same time. If you’re planning on sending some photos to your friends or family this year, you may want to think about sprucing them up with some holiday frames first.

HP Makes APP Store Debut with iPrint Photo, Top Tech News, Dec 23, 2008

Mobile Veteran Changes Focus From Reaching The Mass Market To Single Focus On The iPhone, mocoNews.net, Dec 17, 2008

Twitter’s well-reported problem is that it does not know how it will make money yet. Nakajima doesn’t believe he’s solved that problem, but he is making money, which is critical because he doesn’t want to have to raise venture capital in this environment to support the three-person company. Although the initial PhotoShare app is free, there’s add-ons which cost a fee. For instance, yesterday the company announced its fifth application, HolidayFrames. The application allows users to customize photos with holiday-themed photo frames. The app costs $1.99. Nakajima hopes to release a new app every month.

iPhone, Economy Spur Better Phones, Apps, PCWorld, Dec 15, 2008

The beauty of the iPhone is that it gets rid of the business development cost, Nakajima said. The 30 percent that developers share with Apple in order to sell the application in the store “is nothing compared to the painful cost of dealing with wireless operators worldwide,” he said.

Windows Mobile: What Microsoft Needs to fix, BusinessWeek, Dec 11, 2008

Meanwhile, to win back developers Microsoft must unveil its own applications store similar to Apple’s App Store. Without a store, developers have to spend a lot of money peddling their wares to handset makers and carriers worldwide. “Because of this very expensive business development cost, people are losing money,” says Satoshi Nakajima, CEO of Seattle-based startup Big Canvas, which has developed a mobile social-networking application for the iPhone. Nakajima was software architect at Microsoft for Windows ‘95 and Internet Explorer until 2000.

Finger-Painting iPhone App Is an Artistic Time Waster, Wired blog, Nov 26, 2008

Oil Canvas, an iPhone app released Wednesday, is a neat piece of image-editing software that enables virtual finger painting.

Quick App: Big Canvas PhotoShare Social Networks Pics for the iPhone, The iPhone blog, Oct 23 2008

Big Canvas PhotoShare offers easy uploading and sharing of photos, with comments and all the usual social networking trappings, for your iPhone. How does this fair compared to built in, but social-less services like MobileMe, or 3rd party support for giants like Facebook and Flickr?

Windows 95 Lead Architect is a Mac Convert, Launches First iPhone App, iPhone me, July 19, 2008

Still, he has some interesting thoughts on the mobile market, like there’s “no business reason” to develop for Android and that “Apple has proved that having a single app store does make sense to users as well as the offerers, so I believe Microsoft, Nokia and possibly Google will follow and we’ll have five stores, and that’s ideal.”

Big Canvas for iPhone, Coolest Gadgets, July 12, 2008

… and among them is Big Canvas PhotoShare. iPhone users will be able to seamlessly share, store and manage images taken on their device using PhotoShare. These images can then be uploaded live a few seconds after capturing them, with the option to throw in captions for a more memorable imag.e Sounds like the perfect tool for the socialite.

iPhone Calls On Software Developers, Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2008

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.

Software Drives the iPhone 3G, PDA Street, July 9, 2008

Nakajima, who was once a lead software architect at Microsoft for Windows 95 and other projects, said he’s been working on software for eight years for other mobile platforms, including the Treo, Java and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. “But it’s almost impossible to make money unless you do business with the carriers, and that means hiring business development folks to go out and wine and dine the carriers, which is time consuming and expensive.”