Saves Time & Money; Extends ShoZu’s Reach to Any Media-Enabled Handset
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (November 20, 2007) – Do you want to send the latest snapshot from your camera phone to your Flickr album, Facebook page, personal blog and best friend’s email simultaneously without creating multiple messages for every photo or video clip as well as paying for each upload? ShoZu Inc. today announced a new picture messaging/MMS service offering this mass publishing ability for every media-enabled handset, bringing its core technology and industry-leading integration with 30 social media sites to every phone for the first time.
The service is designed for the millions of users who regularly send images to multiple destinations. A just-released study by Parks Associates found that nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site, while one in six use three or more. That does not include other social media properties such as photo communities. ShoZu’s own records indicate that more than one-third of the users of the company’s other services publish images to multiple websites and/or email addresses.
To use the new ShoZu service, simply set up your preferred websites, blogs and email addresses at www.shozu.com. After that, any photo or video clip sent to go@m.shozu.com is delivered directly to ShoZu’s servers and then forwarded automatically to all of the destinations you have specified. There’s no need to waste time and effort setting up and sending consecutive MMS/picture messages from your handset, or multiple emails from your BlackBerry or iPhone. One ShoZu message does it all. There is no limit on the number of destinations.
In addition, users can assign auto-tags from the ShoZu website that will accompany each photo uploaded in a particular group (“Tahoe”, “Joe’s 25th birthday”, etc.). MMS uploads typically do not support tags, and if carriers do offer a tagging capability, users must take the time to tag each photo or video clip separately.
The ShoZu service requires no software installation and is free other than the data or messaging charges from your wireless carrier. For the large number of consumers with picture messaging or flat rate data packages, this means the service is available at no additional cost. If you don’t have a flat rate data package, you also save the cost of uploading to each destination as required with standard picture mail/MMS or email use. Users pay only for sending the image file once to ShoZu’s servers.
Destination options include leading photo community and social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Picasa, Faces, Buzznet, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Moblog.uk, Dada.net, Pikeo, Faces.com and blip.tv. Other choices include personal blogging and citizen-contributed photojournalism sites such as Google Blogger, LiveJournal, Textamerica, TypePad, Vox, WordPress, MetaWeblog, CNN, the BBC and Scoopt. Users can also add multiple email and FTP addresses from the Shozu portal.
In addition, users can send images to now@shozu.com to take advantage of ShoZu Slideshow, a new mobile widget that populates “virtual photo frames” installed on personal websites, profiles or blogs with photos or videos sent from any media-capable mobile phone. Users can embed the ShoZu widget into the site of their choice. New images sent to the Slideshow address are then automatically delivered to every site where the widget is installed, creating a dynamic photo or video album that eliminates the need for users to send new images to their personal pages, friends or family members manually. The widget is available at www.shozuslideshow.com.
“Today mobile users in 119 countries use ShoZu’s complete Share-It service for interacting with their favorite social media sites, including advanced capabilities like having your friends’ posts delivered directly to your handset. The Share-It service is now downloadable to hundreds of different handset models, and will be shipping out of the box with pre-install deals on Motorola and Samsung handsets, but consumers without those handsets have been left out until now,” said ShoZu CEO Mark Bole. “This new MMS service brings our multiple-images-for-one-upload benefit to virtually every media-enabled phone, and this is the first of several steps in bringing the broader ShoZu experience to the market at large.”
ShoZu’s Share-It service, currently available on 278 handset models, offers the same mass publishing ability as the new MMS service plus two-way media sharing designed to connect the user’s online life to his or her mobile life. Share-It users can send photos, videos and text from their phones to their favorite social media sites with a single click, as well as receive friends’ newest Flickr photos and more on their phone as soon as they are posted online.
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