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Posts Tagged ‘posterous’

San Francisco based Posterous, a fast growing publishing platform, has taken a $4.4 million investment from Redpoint Ventures. Partner Satish Dharmaraj, who is also an individual investor in Posterous, led the round and joins the company’s board of directors (and he maintains his personal blog at Posterous here).

Posterous, founded in 2008 by Sachin Agarwal, Garry Tan and Brett Gibson, is a Y Combinator company that began as a way for users to very easily post pictures online. Its appeal lies in its simplicity – users can just email a photo to post@posterous.com and an account is immediately created for them. But today people are using Posterous for videos and text blogs as well. Users can change the CSS and even use their own domain names – see Guy Kawasaki’s HolKaw blog, for example, which is run by Posterous.

The company does have revenue, such as this early deal with Coca Cola for a branded site, but has stood firm in keeping the “nickel and dime” consumer fees out of the product. There are no restrictions on usage, storage, CSS customization or using your own domain, says the company.

Later this year Posterous will launch a pro version of the service for bigger brands, and allow things like Javascript and site monetization for a fee, they say.

All that simplicity and freeness has resulted in a lot of growth for the company. They have 12 million unique monthly visitors, they say, and 25 million page views. And they grew 30% per month in 2009, all with just 4 employees (they are up to 6 now).

Posterous regularly releases new products, such as Post.ly a month ago. Post.ly lets users easily share media on their Twitter account.

CEO Sachin Agarwal says that they want to continue to add new products that make it dead simple to post and share content online: “Our goal is to become synonymous with “posting” just like Google is synonymous with “search”. Doesn’t matter if it’s for twitter or a blog, private or public, group or individual. if you need it online, you go to Posterous.”

Dead-simple blogging and content distribution service Posterous has long used the URL post.ly as a custom branded Web address for blog posts hosted on its platform. Today, the startup is announcing that it has turned Post.ly into a destination site of its own, more specifically making it the latest media sharing service for Twitter.

Staying true to its well-earned reputation of keeping its services as simple as they are functional, Posterous has turned Post.ly into something I can see myself using a lot going forward.

If you’re a Posterous user and logged on, Post.ly will recognize you as such, or you can simply sign in with your username and password. You can then use the tool to send out a tweet to your Twitter account (which you can link up using the OAuth protocol) and add multiple media files like photos, videos, music, documents and more to your message.

If 140 characters doesn’t quite cut it for you, there’s an option to include an unlimited amount of extra text. Evidently, whatever you choose to publish will end up on on your Posterous blog and be distributed to your Twitter stream using Posterous’ auto-post technology.

If you’re not a Posterous user yet, using Post.ly will work in the same fashion as sending an e-mail to post@posterous.com for the first time: it will automatically set up a custom blog for you with your Twitter username, and you can later dive into the settings to configure the title, theme, etc. Couldn’t be easier.

Posterous is introducing this new feature / service because it hopes Post.ly will introduce more people to their core service and entice them to discover more about what it’s capable of. As a Posterous user myself, I think it is also terribly useful for existing users, mainly because for whatever reason you currently can’t upload files to Posterous when you’re publishing a new blog post from the Web.

Last year, Box.net acquired a small company called Increo without giving much insight as to what they’d be doing with the technology. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of that acquisition: Box.net is launching a new integrated Flash file viewer, allowing users to immediately view over 20 file types from their browser, including most common document formats, images (including Photoshop), audio, and video.

From a technology standpoint, Box’s new viewer has a lot in common with the converters you’ll find on Scribd and DocStoc: it takes documents and makes them readable in a Flash-based viewer, so you don’t have to worry about installing any extra software to view the file. This makes it easier to share files among coworkers and access them from other computers.

Of course, one issue that you’ll find with many small businesses is that they use files with proprietary formats — things like accounting spreadsheets, statistical reports, or patient data. To deal with these, Box has built its platform with extensibility in mind. For now, they aren’t supporting these proprietary formats (though they say the 20 formats they do support cover 95% of the files stored on Box). But they intend to quickly build out modules for new formats, and will help the developers behind proprietary apps build support for their own file formats. Finally, Box intends to offer tools to the public, so the community can develop modules to support even more formats.

Aside from the viewer, Box has been showing strong growth over the last year. CEO Aaron Levie says that in 2009, Box’s reveneue from its enterprise offerings grew by 500%, and the service is now up to 3.5 million users with over 100 million files stored. The company now staffs 70 employees. Levie recently wrote a guest post for us describing how the enterprise is moving to the cloud (and obviously Box is one player looking to welcome them).

Dropico is a brand new service that allows you to drag and drop pictures from multiple social networks rapidly and seamlessly, without the need to upload photos and other imagery to each of them separately.

Have any pictures stored on your TwitPic account that you want to share with your Facebook Friends, or want to bring a couple of your Flickr shots to your MySpace account? Just log on to Dropico, log into the services you use and start dragging and dropping.

Dropico is currently in private beta, but 1,000 TechCrunch readers can try out the service via this link.

Personally, I tend to simply send pictures to my Posterous account by e-mail and auto-distribute them to my blog, Flickr and Facebook account, but I can see why people might be interested in giving Dropico a whirl. It’s an easy way of organizing media across multiple social networks, but aside from that it’s also a decent media uploading service since it also allows you to fetch pictures from your computer or from any web page. Once you’ve imported images on Dropico, you can distribute them to your social network(s) of choice all in one interface.

Dropico currently works with Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Bebo, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. In the near future, the Israeli startup behind the service intends to add more services to the fray, and also make it easier for users to drag and drop other media like videos across social networks. There’s also an API in the works.

The startup is currently operating on some $150k from its founders and some angel investors, but is currently talking to other investors about a bigger round.

(Via Orli)

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We’re big fans (and users) of übersimple microblogging service Posterous here at TechCrunch, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day that the young upstart would finally come out with an iPhone app. Frankly, needing to go to the camera roll on my iPhone and e-mailing in pictures I wanted to post on my Posterous blog every time had become a little tedious.

Now Posterous co-founder Garry Tan just checked in to let us know the iPhone app that had been submitted about 15 days ago has finally been approved by Apple and live in the App Store (iTunes link).

Unfortunately, it’s a bit underwhelming.

It’s not that the app, dubbed PicPosterous, doesn’t do what is advertised on the product website, it’s just that I wish it did a little more. Billed as ‘Your iPhone Instant Camera’, you can basically use the iPhone 3GS’ camera to shoot both pictures and videos, which you can subsequently add to virtual albums and upload directly to your Posterous blog.

When you log on to the app using your registered Posterous account (which you don’t necessarily need to have to use it), you can manage multiple sites, create private albums and auto-post whatever you upload to your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and FriendFeed stream.

The app is capable of geo-tagging photos and videos, so you can switch on a location map online next to each album. The nice thing about it is that you can add a first picture to an album and then simply keep uploading photos to that album for as long as you like, so the pictures are not each posted as a separate blog post when you send them in.

A couple of gripes though. First, when you send pictures or videos to your Posterous blog, it’s impossible to add any kind of text or link from within the app (something I was able to do when I simply e-mailed in photos I took with my iPhone camera using the mail application). Second, when you add multiple pictures to one album you can’t delete individual pics afterwards, leaving you only the option to clear all your albums and start over. Third, you need to use your iPhone camera in landscape mode when you want your pictures to come out right on your blog, something that’s not indicated anywhere and you need to find out yourself. And finally, while you can turn off the auto-post feature, it would be nice if you could get the option to send it to e.g. only your Twitter or Flickr account rather than all or nothing.

Great to finally see Posterous come out with an iPhone, but I sincerely hope they keep improving it based on my and other users’ feedback to make it as satisfying an experience as the actual web service.

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Microblogging is one popular type of cake, and Six Apart damn well wants a piece of it too. The company has just added a new element to its TypePad offering: a so-called ‘microblog-style blog’, which I imagine could just as well simply be dubbed a microblog. If you know what Posterous is and does, it’s easy to explain what the new TypePad feature does: exactly the same.

If you’re a TypePad user, you can now post by e-mailing in an article or using your iPhone to publish whatever short posts, links, videos and pictures you want to put up on the web easily and rapidly. And you can just as easily push the content back out to other services such as Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed while you’re at it, which is entirely in line with what Posterous has been all about since its inception. To complement the new feature, Six Apart is also adding some new custom themes to TypePad, starting with the Pico template the company introduced yesterday.

The only difference with Posterous that I can see is the support and training Six Apart provides with its TypePad service and the fact that you can add advertising units to your new mini-blog, although I can’t imagine this will convince many individuals to actually pay for a microblogging service when there are so many free alternatives.

Or will it?

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The race is on to become the dominant media sharing site on Twitter, with favorites like TwitPic and newcomers including PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo vying for popularity as Twitter begins to hit the mainstream. Now Posterous is looking to join the race with a new API that developers can integrate into their Twitter apps with a minimal amount of effort.

We’re big fans of Posterous, the dead-simple blogging tool that makes it incredibly easy to post text, photos, and other media online. To post a photo or post to the site, you simply send an Email message to the generic post@posterous.com address, and the site does the rest. And you can optionally have the service automatically syndicate each of these posts to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and a number of other services.

Now, Posterous is looking to become even more convenient. Its new API allows developers to add Posterous support to their Twitter clients, which means you’ll soon be able to send photos to the service from your iPhone or desktop much the same way you would with TwitPic or one of its many competitors (assuming the clients integrate the service - more on that later).

But Posterous isn’t looking to simply serve as yet another competitor offering a near-identical featureset. Instead, the company believes that its blogging platform is superior to the basic photo galleries offered by other services (and Michael agrees - he’s been posting his photos here). The service supports multiple photo uploads at once, which are automatically placed into photo galleries, and can also generate embeddable players for audio and video files (though its API is starting off with support for images only). Users can optionally use their own domain names with the service, which means that they can more easily track analytics. And finally, users can download media in its original format, while some competitors only offer compressed versions for download.

I prefer Posterous to the other image platforms because it’s much more flexible. But as I wrote yesterday about TwitGoo, the key to the service’s success (at least as a TwitPic alternative) will lie in getting integrated into popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Tweetie. It’s not clear how selective these clients are at this point, but they’re going to have have to start making choices, otherwise users are going to be overwhelmed with the number of services they have at their disposal. That said, Posterous is making the process as easy as possible on developers, as it uses the “exact same methods, parameters, and response codes” as TwitPic.

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