Beijing startup unifies your photo streams, focuses on snapping up US users

“More than half of the content on the internet is photos,” says Yue Zhuge, co-founder of social gallery app Ivy. In the age of digital photography, she explains that a photo contains much more than just pixels: it contains info like the time stamp, location, device, frequency of shots, and more. And that’s before you’ve even started tagging friends. You can learn a lot about individuals and entire societies with the metadata stored in image files.

Yue Zhuge has had her eye on “big data” before it ever became a global tech buzzword. After picking up her PhD at Stanford, she took her talents to Microsoft, Yahoo, and a couple of Silicon Valley startups. Tech in Asia caught up with her when the app was still in beta late last year to ask about the project.

“Coming from Stanford, I’ve always wanted to do something on my own,” she says. “You just have to find the right time and the right partner.”

Last year, Yue jumped on the opportunity to create Ivy, a slick photo management app that lets users organize their photos based on chronological events, then collaborate on those albums with friends. They can then be shared across social networks and cloud media. Yue explains how Ivy solves a “very real” problem with the ever-growing number of photos stored both online and off.

“[In the future] it’s going to be massive, and there’s going to be too many. People can’t find their photos, they don’t know where it is,” she says. “They don’t have time to locate them, but they do want to save them.”

The main cause behind the flood of photos, of course, is the global proliferation of smartphones. She adds:

Once people have a smartphone, other than talking [and messaging] on the phone, most of the things they do are taking photos. Photos become the language of expression, as easy as writing.

Despite being based in Beijing, Yue and her team decided to target the US first. That’s a complete about-face from Ivy’s biggest competitor on iOS, Cooliris, which last year headed into Chinese-speaking markets with support for local social networks like Renren, Sina Weibo, and Baidu cloud storage.

“Cloud storage is a lot more ready over there,” Yue says. “You don’t have to persuade people to put photos on the cloud first.”

Do you need another “stream”?

A picture is worth a thousand words, but how many dollars?