ShoZu is a pretty fine photo-sharing application, and an even more exciting service. It’s a consumer application that’s risen from the operator-licensed Cognima Snap (see our previous posts on it for background), and has been received very enthusiastically — so much so that Cognima has stopped licensing Snap and only servicing existing deployments in order to devote the bulk of its resources to ShoZu.
What makes ShoZu so great is its user experience. It does as advertised — it puts your cameraphone photos onto various photo hosting or blogging sites — but it does it simply and easily, and has some other nice features like contacts backup and downloading. The smartphone versions are pretty fantastic, and the Java version works well too. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s free, either.
In choosing to focus on ShoZu, Cognima has made some big changes to its business model. It’s no longer licensing Snap to carriers on a white-label basis, but one of its revenue streams is to do carrier deals for co-branded versions of ShoZu, and it’s also working on deals with handset manufacturers to embed ShoZu in their handsets (an additional revenue stream is affiliate deals with the Web partners to which users can upload their content).
It’s also got media deals going, including a recent one with Warner Music. The first thing it’s doing with them is to provide a video blog for the band The Veronicas, where they’re vlogging concerts and events around the launch of their album. We’ve posted before about similar moblogs moblogUK has done with popular beat combo Maximo Park, as well as more recently with Goldfrapp, so the musician moblog looks like a growing trend. It makes sense as it offers artists an easy and immediate way to communicate with their fans as well as build a community around them. ShoZu also got Howard Stern and his crew to document his switch from terrestrial radio to satellite in the US, which was quite a coup.
With its carrier and handset deals, ShoZu will add premium services that will presumably be paid either by users or by its partners. The company’s committed to its free services remaining free, with the exception of the contacts actions, for which it may charge later. But that doesn’t mean the features will stop coming: the company is now on a 6-week development cycle and has plenty of things in the works, including the delivery of media like podcasts, videocasts and RSS to users’ handsets, as well as the ability to send different media to multiple or separate sites (ie multiple accounts or, say, Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos). The versions that will be embedded in handsets, though, will be native applications — they won’t just be a rebadged Java version — that will more closely approach the functionality of the smartphone versions.
As I said earlier, the company is squarely focused on the user experience. They’ve put in some really thoughtful features, for instance the ability to email photos from the service rather than from the device. If you want to email a photo that you’ve already uploaded to your host, you simply go into the ShoZu app and put in the email addresses, and the service then sends out the full version of the photo. It costs just pennies, even for multiple recipients, because the only thing that goes over the cellular network are the addresses. The actual photo itself goes from the service.
An extension of its user focus is the company’s reliance on user feedback, with many of its ideas for new features coming from user suggestions. Cognima’s CEO says they all religiously follow what people are saying about ShoZu by using things like Technorati to track blogs. You’d expect little else from a company whose main purpose is to make a great user experience of something at which operators and handset manufacturers haven’t been quite so successful, but it’s still refreshing to hear that they’re listening.
Just had a quick try with Shozu - and of course my phone is not listed - a newer iMate Jammin Pocket PC Phone Edition. And that made me wonder - why can’t I just access Flickr directly from the browser on my phone? What value does ShoZu add to this?
Cheers,
Tim
This is definitely true. I wrote about Shozu and other methods of uploading photos to Flickr on my little old blog–which has very little traffic — and I was surprised and heartened to receive a comment from Andy Tiller, Cognima’s CTO. He corrected some errors in my review, and thanked me for writing kind words about Shozu. I thought this was especially cool, since I’m not an a-list or even b-list blogger.
And I must say that the new version of Shozu is super, they’ve really enhanced the tagging experience, as well as the email functions that you mentioned. Now I’m just torn between Shozu’s great user experience and Merkitys-Meaning’s location/context automatic tagging. Right now Shozu wins because Meaning keeps crashing…
Response to Tim:
You can indeed access Flickr from your phone’s browser - for example using Flickr Mobile (http://flickr.com/mob/), which is pretty cool.
However, the high latency on mobile networks, and the constraints of the mobile user interface, make any interactive browser-based application a bit of an effort to use on a mobile phone.
ShoZu basically makes it easier to upload photos, add tags, titles and descriptions, and to read other people’s comments on your phone.
For example, you can upload a photo with a single click, and then just get on with other activities on your phone. (If a photo upload is interrupted, ShoZu automatically resumes from the point of failure next time the network is available. This is one of the reasons why ShoZu is cheaper to use than alternatives.)
We’re introducing support for new phones all the time, so I hope you’ll get to try ShoZu soon.
Andy
And a reply to Joshua…
I’ve also found Merkitys interesting, and reasonably compatible with ShoZu. How about keeping both apps on your phone?
Andy
I used flickr’s upload via email and mobile interface for awhile before using Shozu. While it was a-ok to use, the number of clicks and context changes (camera, email app, browse for the right file) made it unwieldy.
Shozu excels in that regard as far as I’m concerned. I like that it pops up right after I take a pic, and can either upload it immediately or skip uploading and choose the best pics to upload later in the Shozu app itself.
While I haven’t quite gotten Merkitys-meaning to work yet, I do like that it makes the adding of tags, title and description very accessible at the time of capture - I don’t have to sink multiple clicks into navigating contextual menus to add tags etc.
[...] Fortunately, there are independent providers trying to bridge this gap with more open solutions, like ShoZu. Another platform-agnostic service, Netomat, announced today that it can now work with Flickr to send newly uploaded photos from groups to mobile devices, optimized for their displays. While it doesn’t look like Netomat can upload photos to Flickr at this point, its integration with it and the ease with which it lets people share information from all different types of online sources via mobile devices shows the kind of mobile/fixed integration that’s needed. [...]
[...] But I assume that you take the photo via the Java app, which then uploads it to Lewisham Council - a bit like a white label ShoZu. [...]
Yes the photo upload is a good product, but all this media channel stuff is nonsense! Why pay for what you can get as a podcast? It makes no sense, and will fold unless they can concentrate on the main poduct.