LiveShare’s Real-Time Photo Sharing Looks Awesome

With real-time photos, LiveShare makes real-time tweets look like child’s play. I love Twitter, but the option to share photos and videos displayed gorgeously in real-time is extremely exciting, especially from a blogger’s point of view.

LiveShare is founded by Cooliris, a Silicon Valley based start-up which just ended its Series C round of funding. It has raised $30 million so far, according to Derek Tan, APAC Director at Cooliris. The folks at Cooliris is also the brain behind the brilliant Cooliris 3D Wall (chrome web store link), a gorgeous way to view Google-searched images. It has a whopping 40 million downloads and 5 million monthly active users.

The technology was also adopted by Google when the Nexus One smartphone was first launched. If you’re using an Android-powered phone (2.1 and above), the photo gallery you’re seeing on your phone is based on Cooliris’ technology.

Covering a tech conference isn’t an easy task. We often have to multitask: live blog, take pictures, tweet, and take down written notes. Sadly, these tasks can be quite a handful: Uploading photos to the blog is especially a pain.

With LiveShare, photos are snapped and automatically shared in real-time on the site, as I saw first-hand as Derek performed a live demonstration. Photos can be shared with groups of friends on LiveShare or broadcasted to your webpage if you have the LiveShare wall embedded.

Several big names publishers have already used it to stimulate user generated content and engagement. Derek said that major publishers like ESPN STAR Sports have used LiveShare to encourage users to share photos during the Cricket World Cup season. Channel News Asia also used LiveShare to publish Singapore General Election photos on its Facebook page. The service was also used by The Guardian and by Paris Hilton to engage her online fans.

Launched in February this year, LiveShare has attracted over 100,000 users so far, most of those are from U.S and Europe. One of Derek’s many tasks is to grow LiveShare’s user base in Asia. Derek says he is looking forward to possible collaborations with top brands such as McDonald’s or KFC in Singapore.

While LiveShare looks like a great tool for publishers and businesses to engage online visitors, there are several features which it is lacking though. For example, photos shared online can’t be commented directly on the partners’ sites. Comments can only be made on the mobile site and LiveShare.com. Users can only ‘like’ the photos across all platforms.

Photos are nicely displayed but there isn’t an option to add a description to give readers a better understanding on what the photo is about. These problems were point out during my discussion with Derek. He acknowledged and said that the product guys are addressing these issues. We should be able to see these changes pretty soon on LiveShare. Stay tuned.