PixBento: Facebook Albums Suck, We’re Going to Do Photo Sharing the Right Way

Quite a few startups are trying – or have tried and failed – to crack the first-world problem of how to share and transfer images between a group of friends. You could email stuff back and forth, upload to Facebook and download some of your friends’ best snaps of you, set up a Dropbox folder, or use a wifi transfer thingy like Bump. Or a dozen other ways. Now PixBento wants to be the answer. One of our Startup Arena pitchers this afternoon, PixBento is launching into beta at this event. Users can pool and share photo albums with specific buddies across an iPhone app and a web app (pictured).

Right now, PixBento founder Kelvin Koh is pitching to our judges and explaining how it works. Before the Startup Arena pitching kicked into action, Kelvin told to me that Facebook privacy concerns – and over-complex settings – put a lot of people off sharing photos on Facebook. Plus, photos of a particular event/trip/holiday/party end up scattered and largely forgotten across the albums of numerous participants. That’s where PixBento comes in, ensuring privacy among a certain group with easy sharing and simple downloading of photos that are true keepers.

The PixBento web app – click to enlarge

As for previous failures in this genre – like the colossal cock-up of the over-funded and underwhelming Color app – Kelvin is confident of not falling into the same trap, telling me:

Well for one, apps like Color or even Albumatic – which tried to do something in similar fashion – put their money on real-time events and real-time contributions. One problem which they faced are complaints by users about strangers in the same vicinity joining their groups (due to geo-locational discovery). Apparently that is one key reason (amongst many others) that led to the downfall of Color.

One advantage we have, in relation to real-time usage, lies primarily on our web-based image collage, which we believe set our product apart from them. With a screen projection of the collage, we can see PixBento being used in public events, such as roadshows, weddings, parties, discos, etc. There are immediate engagements and gratifications from the users’ point of view.

It can also be used at any time after any event as well, whenever people get round to sharing images.

Picturing monetization

In addition to its usefulness, Kelvin explains to the judges (pictured above) that he has in mind a revenue model for both regular folks and business whereby the startup will be a platform for photo-oriented social marketing. Citing the example of how Facebook marginalizes the attempts of fans to give content to brands, he suggests PixBento as a better way for businesses and customers to push images to each other. A more positive example of social marketing is automaker Audi cleverly using fans’ photos on its Instagram feed; the idea is that this startup would make it easier for this kind of photo sharing to take place. As for monetization, brands could purchase tiered packages to allow fans to submit more photos to them.

A similar freemium model could apply to regular users, with free accounts capped at 200 uploaded photos. The startup reckons that, so long as one percent of 157 users sign up as a paying customer, it’s a model that can work – and a photo-sharing problem solved.