Current status (roadmap, progress, number of users): ShoZu is about 18 months old (although the technology we use has been in development since 2001). Initially ShoZu was launched as a smartphone application for uploading photos from cameraphones to Flickr, but the service now supports more than 20 popular video and photo-sharing services, blogs and citizen journalism websites, and runs on over 100 phone models. ShoZu has also been extended to support ZuCasts – content feeds from the web that stay automatically up-to-date on your phone.
Here are 4 questions Andy Tiller Cto, Co-Founder to Shozu
Can you tell us more about your service?
ShoZu connects your mobile phone to popular Web 2.0 services such as Flickr, YouTube and a wide range of blog sites. With ShoZu installed on your phone, posting videos, photos and text to websites is very easy. ShoZu also retrieves content feeds automatically from the web, so that the latest content is always up-to-date on your phone. All the data transfer happens quietly in the background, without interrupting normal use of your phone.
What is your business model ?
ShoZu does not charge consumers for use of the ShoZu service. Instead, we have commercial arrangements with other parts of our ecosystem, consisting of websites, handset manufacturers, media companies and mobile network operators. We have also recently demonstrated how ShoZu can be used to deliver mobile advertising to phones in a way that is attractive to advertisers and end-users alike.
What are the projects, additional features you’re preparing ?
We’re about to announce location tagging of images from GPS-enabled devices. Another key area for us is supporting more handsets – we’re working with several handset manufacturers to pre-install ShoZu in new phones, and are working on a BREW version. Were also working on a version of our ZuCasts service for Java handsets.
What are the current users’ feedback, your learnings on the service’s usage ?
The thing that most end users appreciate about ShoZu is its ease of use – they like to send videos and photos to the web with a single click after capturing them on the phone, and be able to continue immediately taking more photos or making calls without waiting for the upload to finish. They also tell us that they like the ability to configure a personal list of web destinations, and use ShoZu to send the same video or photo to several websites, blogs and email addresses with only a single data charge for upload.
The thing they like least is the fairly complex set-up required. This is really a problem for all mobile applications that have to be downloaded over the air. We’re actively working with handset manufacturers and mobile network operators to greatly simplify the set-up process.
One interesting, but not unexpected, observation is that data prices have a big impact on ShoZu usage. In the US and Northern Europe, where flat-rate data plans are available, ShoZu usage is very high, with some users regularly uploading more than 400 videos and photos every month. Usage is much lower in Southern Europe, where mobile data is more expensive. Judging by the photos of yachts and villas we see on Flickr, our top users in Spain and Italy are rich! For phone manufacturers, ShoZu is interesting because it works with a wide range of popular Web 2.0 services. This allows them to give consumers a choice of services without having to build lots of separate applications into the phone. And because new services become popular on the web very quickly, handset manufacturers need the ability to make new services available to existing users without having to upgrade the client software – with ShoZu we simply integrate a new web service with our server, and it’s immediately available to all users.