Hot off their recent launch, Keepsy continues to innovate and win accolades from both customers and industry influencers. The company announced today that it won Robert Scoble's pick for the Startup Showcase, held on March 29th at the 2011 Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
"Our goal is to make creating photo albums as fun and easy as taking the photos," said CEO Peter Weck, "and to win an award like this is thrilling for us. We've had really positive feedback from our customers, and to get this kind of recognition by an industry influencer like Scoble is very rewarding."
"This is an exciting time to be in this space," continued Weck, "Shutterfly's recent acquisition of TinyPrints for $333 million, Sequoia Capital's $41 million investment in Color.com, and the meteoric rise of mobile applications like Instagram and Picplz shows that both print product and photo sharing applications are hotter than ever for investors and consumers alike."
The company was picked as one of three winners from a group of thirty startups at the Web 2.0 Expo.
In discussing the choice on stage, the judges -- Robert Scoble and Ann Winblad (Hummer Winblad Ventures) -- highlighted the site's novelty, ease of use and the elegant results of the printed product. "We've talked with heck of a lot of people," responded Blake Williams, VP of Product, "and we've learned that while people love taking photos and looking at photos books, they perceive making the books as a real pain. They want these books, but they don't enjoy making them. That's a ripe opportunity in a market that's over $1B and growing."
To illustrate the ease of use, Keepsy points to its new Instapage feature. "Imagine it's your wedding, and the guests are taking great candid shots on their mobile phones," said Williams, "How are you going to get those photos into a printed keepsake album? Before Keepsy, the guests would have to remember download, upload, synch, etc. With Instapage, you can give your album a unique email address to share with your guests. They can then send their photos and captions directly to the album from their phones in real-time and Keepsy will auto-create pages in the album for them. In other words, the guests can create an entire photo album without setting down their wineglasses, and before the bride and groom have even left the reception."
While Keepsy's free online software has a multitude of photo book applications, the company cites group events and collaborative projects like weddings, reunions, birthdays, and yearbooks as their main focus.
At the SXSW conference last month, the founders were pleased with the unexpected but enthusiastic response from event planners and marketers. "We were fortunate enough to run a very successful pilot test of our event album for the SXSW Search Party that was hosted by Blekko, Chomp, Hipmunk, and Ashton Kutcher," said Weck. "We're now getting interest and speaking with other partners about future events."
About Keepsy
Keepsy is a site that uses the power of social networks to create custom, collaborative photo albums. People can create their own custom albums and invite friends to add their own photos and messages to the album. Keepsy also enables people to 'group gift' an album, and to include gift cards for events and special occasions. Keepsy was founded by Peter Weck, Blake Williams, and Kai Zhao. To learn more about Keepsy, please visit http://www.keepsy.com.
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