Canadian photo sharing startup BubbleShare will be shuttered on November 15, 2009. Users were notified via email and a notice on the site’s home page.

The site, founded by Albert Lai, first launched in late 2005 and we immediately liked it: “Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something…” Adding interface features like zoom just made it even more fun to use.

In early 2007 the company was sold to Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.

Some Kaboose assets, in turn, were acquired by Disney in April 2009 for $18.4 million.

No word on why they’re shutting down, but this may have something to do with it. We’ll always have fond memories of BubbleShare, but it’s now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Today they announced their acquisition by Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.

This marks 28 year old founder Albert Lai’s second entrepreneurial success. He was a millionaire before his 20th birthday after founding MyDesktopNetwork and selling it in 1999. He dabbled in a few other startups before BubbleShare, and has now made another mini-fortune. Congrats to the entire team.

Our previous coverage of BubbleShare is here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

One thing we know for certain at this point – the deal with News Corp., rumored to be in the $5 million range, is now dead. A source with knowledge of the deal says the reason is the leak, which angered News Corp. Internal strife among BubbleShare equity holders may have also played a part.

Albert Lai, BubbleShare’s CEO, isn’t saying much on the record. His message comes down to “We’re not commenting on whether or not there was a deal, but if there was one, and it died, it had nothing to do with a leak, which never occured” (this is not a direct quote). Fox declined to comment.

Despite the turmoil, BubbleShare is a service that we continue to applauded for its ease of use and intuitive interface.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

We’ve held off on reporting this as it our understanding that the deal is not yet finalized, but rumors of the possible acquisition popped up on blogs earlier today.

The deal is rumored to be south of $5 million, which is in line with other recent online acquisitions by News Corp., including NewRoo and Ksolo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The 8 person team behind BubbleShare was founded in late 2004, has been live for 10 months and is headed by CEO Albert Lai. No funding has been announced to date.

We have written about BubbleShare here before and the core features of the system are strong. You can start using the service fast – no account is needed to share photos, add audio captions and cartoon speech bubbles. Account holders can access a wide variety of other photo management and bookmarking features.

What’s most exciting to me though is the new service BubbleShare Live. Without installing any software users can effectively share browser windows to look at photos together. Anyone on the page can control the slide show and the pointer to highlight details in the images, or some users can be sent to a URL that only views page activity. It’s just in demo form right now, but you can go and try it out.

If you’re going to look at it by yourself, you can open a second browser window to the same URL your click-through to the demo lands on and see how well it works.

BubbleShare Live is built with a flash application at the server level, with only HTML facing users. It’s pretty smooth and a great idea. The company says they plan on adding chat and more user info in the near term future. If it scales well, it could be a powerful tool. I can imagine throwing screen shots into the system and using it to point out parts of multiple web pages with someone over the phone – for free!

There are obviously countless photo sharing services online. I think BubbleShare stood out with some interesting features even before the introduction of this Live component. Now it’s something I’m excited to use.

A whole new crop of services are gunning for flickr and the title of “coolest photo site”. I call these the “Flickr Gunners” and I’ve written about them often. Yahoo Photos and Webshots, two newly rejuvenated services, are also combining new and exciting features with their massive existing customer and photo base.

Photo sharing sites are sticky by nature. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of uploading your photos, tagging them and creating albums, it’ll take something very special to get you to move. Flickr had this “specialness” – the social tagging and viewing features built a network effect that made flickr more valuable to a new user as it grew.

But Flickr has weaknesses. First, as I said they are not the biggest photo site. Yahoo Photos, Webshots and others dwarf them both in terms of users and uploaded photos. These larger services can afford to wait and see what works best and then duplicate it (and Yahoo Photos is rolling out new stuff that isn’t available on Flickr. Second, flickr hasn’t done much in terms of new features lately. They missed the video boat entirely, and YouTube now has a big lead in that category. And third, there are a number of UI issues that could easily be fixed but remain unchanged, stubbornly: the need for sub albums, better batch editing features and the ability to view more photos on a page. Yes, flickr has been working hard on scalability issues, but that shouldn’t stop them from evolving the UI and feature set.

And brand new or very young services are rolling out new features regularly. These small companies are hungry and obsessive and will do anything for market share. Here are three I’ve been tracking:

BubbleShare

I really like BubbleShare. As I’ve written before, it takes about 10 seconds from hitting the site for the first time to actually viewing pictures that you’ve uploaded. You don’t even need to create an account.

BubbleShare has added new features often since launch. Recent upgrades include Audio Caption, BubbleBar (a way to bring photos right to your desktop, similar to Slide or FilmLoop) and the less serious but really fun BubbleCaptions, (where you can add cartoon text captions to photos).

BubbleShare’s big weakness is that they do not allow tagging of photos, or photo search. This service isn’t about discovery, it’s about sharing photos and albums you’ve uploaded/created with others.

Ookles

Ookles is Scott Johnson’s (Feedster Founder) newest venture, and my expectations are very high for this yet to be launched photo service.

There aren’t many details yet, but Scott has described Ookles as Flickr+Riya+YouTube (click on the Zooomrtations on the bottom right sidebar). In a recent podcast with Gregory Galant, Scott called Ookles the “next gen Flickr” targeted to people with children. He stressed that both the front and back ends will be compelling – a “beautiful UI with everything Ajax”, and an intelligent, scalable back end. He also disclosed that the company has gotten to launch stage on just $75,000 in funding.

The hype machine is on. Scott, you have our attention. Please deliver.

Zooomr

Zooomr came out of nowhere a few weeks ago and suddenly 17 year old founder Kristopher Tate is the coolest guy at the party. Zooomr 2.0 is coming out next week and includes new features like “inspector” (a quick view of photo details), “smartsets” (dynamically generated albums based on rules, such as certain tags, dates, people, etc. – Yahoo Photos is doing something similar), geotagging improvements and more.

Kristopher is listening to his users, too, and adding features quickly, sometimes real time. Read Thomas Hawk’s post about how he recommended that Kristopher add trackbacks to photos and it was up within an hour.

Keep an eye on Zooomr – my bet is that it gets acquired quickly, if only so that one of the big players can get their hands on Kristopher. My original profile on Zooomr is here.

It’s called BubbleZoom, and CEO Albert Lai tells me that it’s inspired by Apple’s Aperture Zooming capabilities. The feature is available on every picture hosted by BubbleShare – simply click on the BubbleZoom button and have a 3x zoom view on any area of the photo. Very slick.

Try it out now.

BubbleShare allows users to upload photos without registration (this isn’t really a trick either – later registration is absolutely bare bones). There is a tour linked from the home page, but you really don’t need it – just start uploading photos and you’ll get how it works (they use the Flash 8 upload feature for photo sharing).

Things are album based. The free service allows users to create albums of up to 100 photos each, with a permanent URL for sharing. Photos can be dragged and dropped to change the order, resized and a voice comment can be added. Comments are available for visitors as well as an RSS feed.

Another key BubbleShare feature that many photo sites don’t have is a multi-uploader tool that allows user to upload many photos at once.

The only thing that BubbleShare is missing is photo tagging and tag search.

BubbleShare is now my second-favorite Canadian web 2.0 company. Brian Benzinger has more.