Make a Smilebox postcard

Smilebox released its desktop media client for Mac users today. The Flash-based tool can be used to compile digital slideshows, postcards, scrapbooks, and other arrangements for sharing photos and videos with friends and family.

Playing with Smilebox is a bit like browsing the greeting card aisle at your local supermarket. The template designs are either tasteful or tacky, depending on your aesthetic sensibilities. But they’re certainly not beautiful. The available audio overlays are also pleasant enough but not terribly exciting (fortunately paying users can upload their own tracks).

Smilebox is a freemium service: subscribers enjoy the extra music tracks, full-screen capabilities, and respite from advertisements kept from stingy basic users.

I’d like to see Smilebox develop a completely in-browser producer tool (it’s based in Flash anyway – can it be that hard to port over?), and allow its creations to play within the actual embed, as is the case with other widget companies (Slide, etc). If you click on my photo boat above, you’ll see a new window pop up.

The Redmond-based company raised $7 million last fall and has accrued $12 million overall so far.

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Smilebox, a site where you can create a variety of media presentations (such slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, photobooks, and postcards) by loading your own amateur photos and videos into designer templates, has raised $7M in Series B financing. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Frazier Technology Ventures.

The company says that it has garnered 1.8M users since its launch in June 2006, and that it experiences over 1.3M unique users monthly. Smilebox has recently been improved to allow for integration of music from media players like iTunes and automatic posting of creations to Facebook. The company has also partnered with several companies for distribution including Six Apart (creator of Vox) and Corel.

In unrelated news, European social network for young students Bahu has raised $1M in its first round of funding, led by theLightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab (LGiLab). The company says that Bahu differentiates itself from other social networks by focusing on users’ talents and helping to showcase them.

In addition to raising some money, Bahu has also appointed Ouriel Ohayon (editor of TechCrunch France) to its board of directors. Bahu was launched in July and claims to already have over 300,000 international users and to have experienced 15M page views in November.

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