Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I didn't mean to be so harsh on PixPulse. I guess my previous post about PixPulse just shows my love of email, not :-) !

Seriously after chatting briefly with the CEO, David Xue, I am cautiously optimistic about PixPulse. Yeah I don't use email on my mobile but most people do since they don't take 1000s of photos on their mobile. My feeling is that if PixPulse added an upload API that they would get the "power photo bloggers and sharers" like myself. The best of both worlds!

Here's what David wrote to me (which I am blogging with his permission):

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Hi Roland -

Thanks for taking the time to look at PixPulse and also signing up. I just wanted to have an open discussion with you regarding the goals of PixPulse and your conclusions on email uploading.

The goal of PixPulse is to share photos and videos directly to your friends phones and to exchange comments. We specifically decided to use email-to-sms as the devlivery method to exchange media and deliver content via a WAP portal since practically all phones across international carriers support our standards. We also went with WAP1.0 since it supports both WAP1.0/2.0 browsers.

PixPulse is not trying to be Flickr, but rather closer to a fotolog.net for mobile phones. Om Malik, senior editor of Business2.0 describes PixPulse as "a cross between Flickr and Dodgeball". People are sharing a couple highlights of their day and not their entire photo/video album.

Everyone agrees that a client-side app (J2ME in this example) will provide the best set of functionality, however according to statisics from mobile anlayst firm mmetrics.com, a very small % of handsets are running Nokia Series 60. Shozu only supports 13 handsets running Series 60 (http://www.shozu.com/portal/selfprovisioning.do?operation=showHandsets). I think Shozu works great for uploading photos to Flickr if you're running one of those phones.

To receive comments and media in real-time the J2ME app would have to be running 24/7 also any updates to the app will require a new download of the app--this goes directly again our goal of being simple and easy to use. A majority of media sharing users are female who do not buy $500 smart phones.

PixPulse will be releasing a J2ME app that runs on all J2ME phones and not just Symbian for the next release to support smarter uploading and geo-tagging. We will also have a WAP2.0 portal which will automatically detect the phone browser and serve the right WAP version to the phone.

I'm going to add you as a friend and if you could kindly accept I'll send out a photo for you to view and also comment. My contact details are below and I'd be happy to chat with you and answer any questions.

--
Best,

David Xue
Founder/CEO, PixPulse

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