SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired) - shoto is launching today at DEMO FALL 2013. Presenting today in the Mobile category at 8:45am on the main stage, shoto will demonstrate how the app makes the camera roll privately social with the friends that were there and the people that matter.
When a user downloads and launches shoto, their entire camera roll is immediately imported into the app, organized intelligently into albums and backed-up. At launch, shoto users have virtually unlimited storage, which removes the need for them to think about where to back up. Next, shoto looks at the phonebook and the photos taken by friends to identify which of them were together at certain occasions, right from the first photo. For example, if a husband and wife both download shoto, they will instantly have access to each other's vacation album from last summer automatically -- without any thinking.
Where shoto really stands out is with its upmost focus on User Privacy. By making it effortlessly easy for users to control what others see, it removes the complexity of managing permissions altogether. Users can choose from "me," "friends there," or "world" through an easy-to-use circle gesture that can be set at an app, album or photo level. Privacy and control is instant in shoto, meaning that as the privacy settings are changed, photos appear or disappear from everyone else's phone magically.
For those moments where photos need to be shared with the people you care about who were not there, shoto makes it easy to send an album with a note. When the album is shared, only the photos taken by the phone's owner will show up, because shoto believes that the photos belong to the person who took them.
"Ultimately we are building a service that lets you reconnect with the people with whom you have shared moments, so you can initiate a new intimate style of conversation with the people that matter without any of the nagging, pestering or multiple steps as you'll find in many of the hundred-odd photo-sharing apps in the iTunes AppStore," says Sachin Duggal, co-founder and chief wizard at shoto. "Today's debut app release only starts to touch on some of what we are working on. As we continue to build out the app, we are pushing the envelope on building a service that thinks like you do about your memories and moments -- everything from search for 'photos from favorite restaurants last summer' to contextual reminiscing when you come back to somewhere you've been before."
shoto makes the magic happen by a combination of its own social graph (based on your phonebook) and heuristics / machine learning algorithms that drive insights from your historical photo taking behavior.
"Photo-sharing is still mostly a tedious, picture-by-picture affair. The shoto app takes a smarter approach photos. It knows which of your friends were with you when you took your photos and creates shared albums on the fly. Instead of having to share photos with your entire social network, shoto makes it easy to share them only with the people who matter the most to them," said Erick Schonfeld, executive producer of DEMO.
shoto was founded in January 2013 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fresh new eyes that include MIT Innovators of the Year and World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers. In the first week of the 80-user pilot shoto had over 300,000 photos uploaded from over 160,000 locations into some 45,000 albums.
shoto is live in the Apple AppStore. Get the app for your iPhone by visiting shoto.com/nothinking in mobile Safari or visit shoto.com for more information.
To learn more about the bi-annual DEMO Conference, world-renowned for launching the most innovative companies in mobile, big data, health, enterprise, consumer, hardware and wearable computing technologies, visit the communities on the following sites:
ABOUT SHOTO
shoto is privately owned San Francisco based startup whose vision is to let you share without thinking. Founded by a team that's lead by seasoned serial entrepreneur Sachin Dev Duggal the company is building an app works by bringing together the photos you and your friends have taken together into a single set of albums in a single app. It provides organization, backup, search and rediscovery of moments right from the first picture available on your phone.
the company believes the future has a heavy lean on "contextual computing", and has a broader vision is to build a private graph from all the hidden data to power personalized apps & services based on behavior.
@shotophoto | www.shoto.com | facebook.com/shoto.so
ABOUT DEMO
Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.