Paris, France based Fotonauts, which launched at TechCrunch50, had a strong showing at the Le Web conference earlier this month.
The company aims to be a sort of Wikipedia for photographs, letting users create and edit albums of events, things and places. Information from Google maps and Wikipedia is automatically added to the albums.
The attention to detail and design is what makes Fotonauts so awesome. Check out the customization options for the album embedded above, for example, here (try dragging the margins to make the embed larger or smaller). No wonder that the founding team is ex-Apple.
Fotonauts is still in private beta, with 5,000 people or so on the waiting list. But during Le Web anyone could sign up, and were encouraged to upload their photos from the event to the many albums that popped up.
The company also announced the hiring of a CEO – Gilles Samoun – at Le Web, and released a Windows version of its desktop software (previously it was Mac only).
If you’re dying to get in to the Fotonauts beta right now, send an email to techcrunch@fotonauts.com. The first 500 will get set up right away. Otherwise, sign up here and wait in line.
Will form a opinion about it only after having a close look…
Will request for a invite instead of waiting in the big waitlist. Iam still trying to explore their service which seems to be really slow at the moment.
They are not linking back directly to wiki, but instead are redirecting.
Overall the images currently available are awesome and the site’s also really looking neat with the right colour combination. We have design some tattoo’s which i think i would upload via the gallery feature and share with everyone!
$2.3M funding to create an online user album app with automatic scrapping of wikipedia and google maps informations ?
A php coder with 2 months experience can do this.
Nice design ? ok, but what’s innovative, creative ? What’s new with Fotonauts
don’t be that guy.
wow, this is the best MA comeback i have seen yet.
you are learning, MA. well done.
I saw the demo at TC50 and they are pretty amazing!
I’ve requested an invite per your instructions. It’s an interesting idea only if they truly aim to be the Wikipedia of images.
The Wikipedia of images is Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/ .
Unlike Fotonauts, everything on Commons is required to really be under a proper free license.
Commons is likely to be the Wikimedia Foundation’s next big hit after Wikipedia – main problem at the moment is the search sucks. “We’re like Getty Images with really bad search.” There is technical work going on to attempt to alleviate this, FWIW (hampered by the fact that MySQL sucks, but anyway).
Your requirement of a “proper free license” is exactly my problem with your service.
There’s lots of people who wouldn’t mind sharing photos freely for non-commercial use. Why on earth would people in their right mind want to sign away all rights?
One thing that might be interesting, why not allow stricter licensing but have the uploader set a specific date that the photo will transition to a more liberal copyleft license?
@ma
Interresting, but I kind of agree with that guy. Besides, seems like you might just be trying to win the French over;)
totally. that pic of Loic “two hours lunch is better” Lemiur at the beginning of the slideshow almost made me leave the page before reading the post.
Sounds inspirational. We’re currently working on a major design upgrade for SmibsNet and Doorbell -after staring at our own stuff for weeks I look forward to some outside inspiration. Thanks for the beta invite.
Merry Christmas
PS Interesting how so many people can’t drop the ‘yeah I could build this in 2 hours, where is the value….’ type of comment. All I can say is go and do it – or do something that you come up with yourself.
I have a couple of electrical engineer buddies that could build something like the first iPod in a couple of weeks. There already were dozens of mp3 players, where is the value in creating another one? Well… http://www.appl.../04/09ipod.html
We didn’t do it. My ‘problem’.
I’ve build something like Gmail (half ass) 9 years ago and never brought it to market.
My problem.
We developed ajax type web apps in the late nineties and dropped it because people told us that they only want stuff that runs on every f***ed up 1966 browser.
My problem.
Any script kid could build something like twitter (at least the old permanently crashing version) but they all didn’t.
Their problem.
What do I learn out of this? If you don’t do it it’s your problem and just because an idea hasn’t reached blockbuster status yet doesn’t mean that it won’t (or will) fly.
Creating functionality is is not hard anymore (in most cases) Creating an experience that people embrace is damn hard. That’s where the value lies in most things that take off.
Now let’s go do stuff (once our belly hurts less form all the Christmas dinners
)
No problem.
I just signed up through the TC invite – cool signup experience via Email. The little things that make a difference
. Looks very cool and I just got a new camera from Santa so this will be a lot of fun to play with over the holidays.
Sorry to hog the comments but I just tried out their software and the concept is amazing. This is iPhoto done right in terms of web collaboration and presentation. Amazing experience and execution of an idea.
This is freakin’ amazing. Just put up a a few images. Drop them into the fotonauts desktop app and bang you’ve got your online silde show.
Here are some pics … http://www.foto...4f-cfcee333d445
What’s the point of this app? After trying it out all it did was search google and Wikipedia for photos.
Jeez!
Anyway, uninstalled.
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Sorry to hog the comments but I just tried out their software and the concept is amazing. This is iPhoto done right in terms of web collaboration and presentation. Amazing experience and execution of an idea
wow, this is the best MA comeback i have seen yet.
you are learning, MA. well done