For global friendships, an app for long-distance selfies

So, you like selfies. But what happens when your best friend moves away for a new job or your boyfriend goes to a different college?

A new selfie app wants to keep the gang together and the romance alive, helping you take selfies together in real-time. It’s called Picpal.

The app does this by bringing together everyone at the same time to form a selfie collage – it doesn’t matter where in the world you are. Picpal users can invite up to three friends to take their selfies along with you. They will have up to 15 minutes to respond to your Picpal request and send across their selfies to you. The selfies can be retaken or edited using the in-built tools and text can be added if you wish. The app will compile all the selfies together into a single collage that will appear in your Picpal gallery. Each collage is jointly created with your friends, which can be shared within the app or on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

It’s available now as a free app for iOS or Android.

Global app

Picpal was created by startup, Myndbee, a California headquartered, but Bangalore, India incorporated company. The team behind it is comprised of 12 people spread across the US and India.

The startup crew says the app simplifies taking their long-distance selfies, which would otherwise require three seperate apps, a messaging app for inviting friends and sharing photos, a camera app for taking selfies and an insta-collage maker app.

Myndbee was founded by serial entrepreneurs Rajesh Srivathsa and Mahesh Rajagopalan. Srivathsa is an electronics and communications engineer with a PhD from the University of Illinois. Prior to co-founding Myndbee, Srivathsa was a founder and managing partner of Ojas Venture Partners and worked at several Fortune 100 companies before entering the startup ecosystem.

Rajagopalan is an IIT Bombay graduate with an MBA degree from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He has product development and product management experience, including from his time spent at Verizon. He is also the co-founder and president of Resolvity, a provider of cloud-based speech recognition and interactive technology, based in Irving, Texas.

So how did they move from the serious stuff to selfies?

The duo launched a chat app called Diffr about a year ago. “Unlike other chat apps which allow you to post as yourself or be anonymous, in Diffr, a user could switch ‘hats’ mid-chat – they could post as themselves, anonymously, or even spoof a friend,” says Srivathsa. But they recently decided to scrap it as the app never really took off, but from these initial efforts eventually came Picpal.

The photo-sharing space is highly-pixelated