JetLib News

The digerati ponder Color and its tens of millions of dollars in financing. It will become the next Cuil, or it will turn Facebook into a buggy whip, or both, depending on who you talk too. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the actual user experience is horrific (luckily the product seems happily disconnected to the company’s hype).

Meanwhile, I still want to make on the fly photo albums during events. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and there aren’t many options out there. Flickr has some limited group sharing but it’s too onerous for one time events, and works better for long term groups (butterfly lovers or whatever). MG managed to use Color for a weekend trip to Mexico that ended dramatically if not surprisingly with a bout of Montezuma’s revenge. Few others will bother until the app has gone through a few more versions.

Anyway, new startup ZangZing will fit this need nicely. It’s a beautiful photo repository that focuses on sharing and presentation. If you’re at an event, say a wedding, and you want to start a group album, just upload a picture from the wedding via email and then invite your friends. They can reply with their own photos, which are added to the album. And they can add new friends by email invite as well, unless someone’s changed the privacy setting to make an album private or even password protected. There’s no need for anyone to create a new account, simply by responding to the email with photos they’ve begun the process, and can finish the rest later, if they like. It’s one of the ways Posterous grew so fast, by making account creation so simple that you’re done before you even know you’ve begun.

ZangZing hasn’t launched yet, but it will soon and I’ve been testing the service. Pictures are beautifully displayed, with very little distracting text and certainly no advertisements. Scrolling through photos is a very Flash-like experience but, wonderfully, the site is entirely Flash-free. The wonders of HTML. And they’ve integrated a very nice desktop downloader into the browser experience. No more broken Flash uploaders to deal with, either.

And ZangZing says they want to be your long term repository for photos. It will be a freemium service where you will eventually pay a fee for increased storage. But if you discontinue paying they won’t hold your photos hostage, like Flickr so callously does. “We’ll always give users access to their photos,” says cofounder Joseph Ansanelli (a promise we’ll hold him to). he says for long term users they may just send them a DVD on request with their photos to save the days and days of downloading required for huge numbers of photos. I imagine they’d charge a few dollars for that, but it would be worth it. Flickr should do the same.

Anyway, this is just a teaser for now, the company doesn’t want any screenshots out there yet. The team, by the way, has some serious chops. They’ve self-funded so far with $1.5 million.

Serious photographers will probably always have their favorite sites to show off their photos. But the social/sharing/group photo crowd space is still wide open, other than Facebook. I think there’s room for a service like ZangZing to capture our imagination, particularly if they integrate with Facebook and eliminate the need for another social graph.

Is there no end to the group buying craze? It seems not and today news comes that Huddlebuy, the ‘Groupon for small businesses’, has raised £350,000 in Angel funding. Those that participated in the round include Alex Chesterman, co-founder of LoveFilm and Zoopla, and well-known Angel Sherry Coutu.

UK-based Huddlebuy is founded by Per Larsen (ex-Apple), Chieu Cao (ex-Microsoft) and Saurav Chopra (ex-Deloite/Yahoo!) and like a typical group buying site, offers discounts – this time aimed at small businesses – through the so-called power of group buying, which in reality is achieved through a sprinkling of economies of scale supported by a heavy dose of social media marketing as offers are designed to go viral.

As such, each deal only goes through once it reaches a tipping point, which in the case of Huddlebuy varies by product and supplier but averages around as little as 3-5 buyers per-deal, while the site runs between 10 and 15 deals at a time. Recent offers include those from KashFlow for its online accounting software and Epson for a 4-in-1 printer.

Interestingly – and I’ve been waiting for somebody to do this – Huddlebuy also offers a ‘request a deal’ option whereby businesses can register their interest in a deal that has expired or a new one they would like to see on the site. Huddlebuy then sends out its sales team to try to make it happen.

More investors pouring more money into Spanish group buying site Groupalia as the company just announced that it has landed $15 million from current shareholders and new backers like General Atlantic, Insight Venture Partners and Index Ventures. The round follows a 5 million euros investment secured back in October 2010 and a 2.5 million euros round secured back in May 2010.

Groupalia is a site that features a daily deal, in the form of a discount coupon, on the best things to do, see, eat and buy in the cities where it is present. The company expects a turnover of $150 million in 2011, which would be 16 times the turnover booked last year.

The company says the extra capital will be used to consolidate its position in the countries where it is already present and explore strategic partnerships or acquisitions.

Groupalia claims 6 million users, 400 employees and a presence in eight countries: Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Peru. Spectacular numbers, if you stop and think about it – the company was founded less than a year ago (May 2010).

It seems like there is no shortage of group texting apps out there these days, with GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society, Yobongo and even Google taking part in the growing trend. Today, Y Combinator-backed Innobell is throwing its hat into the ring with the launch of its group texting app for Android phones. You can access the app here.

Similar to other group texting apps, Innobell allows you to chat with or call multiple people at the same time. But Innobell adds another layer of apps on top of chat by allowing users to add and share maps to chats, YouTube videos, games and more. You can also wire money via PayPal within the app, send links and access and post Facebook photos to the group chats.

So if you are chatting with a contact and want to post your location, you can simply add a map to the chat with your exact location. Or if you are chatting with a friend and want to share a YouTube video, you can access YouTube from within the IM chat, and post the video.

Innobell’s founder Shai Magzimof has an interesting backstory. Originally enrolled in Y Combinator’s 2010 program, Magzimof was called for duty in the Israeli army and was forced to cut his program short. He eventually negotiated with the Israeli powers that be to take an extended period of time off (he plans to return to Israel for his tour), so that he could develop Innobell.

Magzimof says that he is also exploring adding the ability to post Groupons, play multi player games (i.e.Poker), schedule a meetings with calendars, and share to-do lists. The startup hasn’t really managed to figure out monetization yet. For now Innobell plans to make money from affiliate fees from the sale of virtual goods within games, mobile commerce or group buying.

It’s important to note that the combination of IM and the apps will not work on CDMA Android phones, but is functional on LTE phones. Innobell, which has raised $100,000 in funding, is also exploring developing similar apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry.