A cloud application uploading users mobile and Facebook photos to the world map.
Investment sought: £40,000
Mingle Facebook Photos With Google Maps.
As a cloud based application PhotoSextant would enable uploading mobile and Facebook photos to the map through a mobile application and a website. The system would use the geolocation abilities of smartphones and the location services of Facebook allowing users to upload directly photos from their phones or syncing their Facebook photos. PhotoSextant is a concept similar to Instagram or other photographic applications but instead of people or topics users could browse photos on the world map.
The mobile application is designed to upload photos from user’s phone (camera or gallery) with location data to the back end system to place them on the world map (Google). As a result all users can see the photos pinned at their location.
Visitors of website could synchronize photos from their Facebook account and pin them also on the world map using the Facebook’s location tags. Alternatively, by selecting, interactively, a position on the map using an application’s special tool.
Facebook said that 200 million users were tagging 2 billion photos and posts with location each month. This may indicate that location info of a photo becomes more and more an important part of it, especially in social networking.
The users of the application as well as the visitors of the website could browse photos on the world map, zoom in and out, enlarge selected photos, look for the exact location of each and visit the public Facebook page of the photographer. In this way PhotoSextant would be integrated to the Facebook network allowing users to not only view photos linked to a certain region of the world but to have an even better knowledge about the social life of the people in the area.
As a Facebook application PhotoSextant would be allowed to access the public data of users who have registered to it. The PhotoSextant users would be able to select and “sync” automatically photos with location tags from their Facebook account on the world map at the right place. In this way, the selected photos of a user could be viewed not only by his friends, but by all PhotoSextant users, placed at the right position on the world map.
We believe this might be a new way of browsing the world map, giving a new dimension in displaying photos posted to Facebook.PhotoSextant as an independent social network would be integrated in a larger network (Facebook) with its own group of users who could interact with PhotoSextant’s likes and comments.
PhotoSextant is an already fully developed system consisting of three modules, a mobile Android application (iOS is under development), a website and a back-end system.
The mobile application is free and can be downloaded and tested from Google’s market (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=c…). The website’s URL is https://www.photosextant.com and a visitor can register using Facebook login.
The back-end, supporting the mobile app, the website and all functions of the system is integrated in Amazon cloud. It belongs to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and includes website servers, databases, load balancers etc.
PhotoSextant is designed and developed for AWS (or other cloud based system) because of availability, storage reliability and mainly scalability. By using almost unlimited resources, support on demand up to millions of users and vast amount of data (photos), critical for a social network which could behave as “viral”.
The main revenue for PhotoSextant would be advertisements on the mobile application(s) and website. We have found that a widely accepted mobile ad network revenue calculation uses industry averages for non-converted (who delete application 5 minutes after downloading) and premium users (keep the application for an average of three weeks).
According to a relative calculation of Stanford Venture Lab 2012 technology entrepreneurship for every 100,000 downloads of an application the expected revenue is $2,160 for the non converted users and $10,080 for premium users with a total revenue of $12,240.
PhotoSextant would combine a mobile app and a website, both could be used by its registered Facebook users. In this way actual conversion rate is anticipated to be high because users could always visit the website when they are logged in Facebook – even if they delete the mobile application. A pilot system, with approx. 10,000 users, were used for initial measurements. We found that the majority of users remained linked to the system for more than eight months. Only a minority opt out regular notifications from the system through FB..An extra revenue could be produced from the sales of pro version of mobile application(s).
One of the top photographic system (mobile application and website) combining photos and social networking is Instagram, which has more that 200 million monthly users.
We believe that for a system like PhotoSextant a target of the 1/100 of above figure i.e. 2 million users could be feasible. It is worth noting that all successful photographic mobile applications (no website) have more than 5 million users.
Photosextant needs some funding to finish the following modules which are already in advanced development stage:
– The iOS (iPhone – iPad) version of mobile app.
– Extra editing and beautifying functions for the photos taken by the camera or stored in phone’s gallery.
– The pro version of the mobile app which will have some extra features, no ads and would be offered for sale at a price ($1 to $2).
The main part of the incoming funds and revenues would be used for advertising campaigns mainly in Facebook to gather new users at least to a number of 500,000. We consider this a safe seed for a self-proliferation users base. For the same reason (gathering new users) through the “shopping credit for likes” purchase of credit rewards would be funded.
About 93% of posts to Facebook are photos, over 350 million photos are uploaded every single day. Photos could be used as “synapses” of the social web linking “friends”, social channels, facebook groups and in the case of PhotoSextant users who uploaded photos from (or for) a certain area of the world of any size continent, country, city, neighborhood.
Statistics indicate that any Facebook user has an average of 338 “friends” and therefore theoretically just 1,000 users can post a recommendation and bring to a website or application 338,000 new others. According to Facebook 200 million users were tagging 2 billion photos and post with location data each month. This is anticipated the rough size of PhotoSextant’s target market.
To offer a motive for existing users to invite their “friends” to PhotoSexant a ‘photo like rewarding system’ would be developed. Every time a like is given to a photo the user who uploaded credited by a small amount. If the ‘like’ is posted by a ‘unique user’ (a person who posted a like for first time to any photo of the certain photographer) then a credit of tenfold the credit of a like.
It seems that the geolocation of a photo has become an important part of it as modern cameras embedding this information to photos in an “Exif” type file.
According to Facebook 200 million users are tagging 2 billion photos and post with location data each month. This would be the rough size of PhotoSextant’s target market, if someone post a photo with location data is expecting those data to be used. As far as we are aware, PhotoSextant is perhaps the only application using the Facebook’s location services to display users photos on a world map gallery. Instagram introduced photo maps where the photos of a single user can be browsed on the map.
Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom made the following statement when he introduced photo maps: “Instagram is definitely still about quick updates on the go, but we also want to give you a different lens. We realized that chronological order was not the way we wanted you to browse overall, and we decided that location was more important.”
1. Online advertisement:
The potential users of the system are already users of Facebook that is therefore anticipated to be the best advertising platform. On Facebook advertising can be targeted to specific audiences eg. age 25-35, Hispanics, residence FL U.S etc. For a system using geolocation, we believe that tags preparing specific campaigns for different areas using photos familiar for users from there could attract attention.
Online campaigns would also be made for the ‘photo like rewarding system’ (below) proposing to users to convert the likes on their photos to shopping credit.
2. SEO:
Search Engine Optimization commonly is an important tool in attracting visitors to a website. In the case of PhotoSextant the attraction-key point would be geotagged photos. We found that images searching is becoming increasingly popular. However developing keywords by combining images with geotags (like opera- Sydney) is not an easy task when dealing with millions of photos. Photosexant team intends to develop an effective SEO system supporting its photo database.
3. Likes for shopping credit:
Every time a like is given to a photo the user who uploaded it would credited a small amount and a tenfold amount if the ‘like’ is posted by a ‘unique user’ (a user who posted a like to any photo of the photographer for first time). The number of likes, users and the credit amount would be displayed in real time on the top of the webpage of the user as well as on the mobile app. As soon as the credit reaches the amount of 3$. an automatic notification would be posted to the user containing the code of an Amazon gift card and the counters of the account would reset to zero.
The rewarding system is anticipated to encourage users (especially teenagers) to ask for help from their friends to win a gift card. Perhaps they would do the same in return.
To our knowledge among photo sharing websites and applications there are a few supporting geolocation information of the photos, mainly by using the Exif properties of uploaded photos. All these applications could display the photos of a single user on the proper place of the map. In Instagram’s photo maps, photos of the user could be browsed on the map as well as photos from other users profiles but in our experience only for one user every time.
Having searched in all available applications on the four main platforms (Android, iOS, Microsoft, Blackberry) we found that PhotoSextant seems an application supporting simultaneous display of all photos in a geographic area independently of the photographer (user).
PhotoSextant is a Facebook application with access to public profile of registered users, which would allow them to “syncing” (upload) their Facebook photos on the world map by using the location tags or by selecting the proper location interactively on the map. Users could upload not only from the mobile’s camera or gallery but also photos from the “past” stored in the Facebook account.
The “Likes for shopping credit” would function as a promotion system, attracting new users and content (photos). Additionally, it would need to be funded (credit rewards) in tiny portions of 3$ only if a target (ie. 60 new users) is achieved. In the core of the system would be a software module able to monitor the points (likes) of millions photos and users completing every time the rewarding cycle automatically without human intervention. Money would be spend only if goal achieved eg. if photos of the user receive enough likes from new users.
PhotoSextant aims to keep an active link with its users, supporting posts of “push” notifications to the home screen of their mobiles even when the application is shut down. By those notifications users would be informed for comments on their photos, interact with PhotoSextant’s “community” and of course receive notifications from the system (announcements, rewards etc).