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Wireless - Thursday, March 9, 2006

Cell Phone Photo Sharing Startups Get Funding

San Francisco-based Tiny Pictures is set to launch into beta an application called Radar for camera phones. It has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A from Mohr-Davidow Ventures. Tiny Pictures will let you invite friends to view "channels" of your photographic snippets as you travel. The company's CEO John Poisson was head of mobile media research and design groups for Sony in Tokyo.

Meanwhile, Sharpcast has raised $13.5M in a second round led by Sigma Partners with existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Selby Venture Partners. Its software also keeps photos synchronized among phone, computer, PDA or other devices. Sharpcast has signaled that photos are just its first market - it plans to enable other media synchronization between cell phones, PCs, etc.

Up in Seattle. a start-up called Vizrea has been founded by some ex-Microsoft jocks. Its released product ahead of Sharpcast and Tiny Pictures and has been getting great reviews. Clearly photo sharing between cell phones and PCs is going to see heated competition, particularly as Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are launching their own products.