Picuous, an HTML5 web app that turns your pictures into promotional vehicles by making them embeddable, launched today on TheNextWeb. According to TheNextWeb, Picuous is "an incredibly easy way to embed photos onto a website while still retaining copyright." Read the full article here.
Picuous was created to combat the two biggest issues with pictures online today: (1) rampant copyright violation and unauthorised sharing (80% of pictures on the internet by some measures), and (2) the inability to easily share them. These problems have been solved many times over with other content—videos have Vimeo/YouTube, sounds have SoundCloud, documents have Scribd. But somehow, pictures have been overlooked.
Using a similar approach to these services, Picuous makes it easy for people to present their pictures in an interactive HTML5 player where their audience can 1-click share them across social media and reblog them. At the same time, they are provided with detailed traffic statistics, making pictures “smarter”.
In a private beta, the service acquired over 10,000 photos and 100,000 views. And end users are sharing the pictures as well—35% of the pictures posted to Picuous have been embedded on at least 6 different websites and 70% have been shared across social media.
Picuous, and its CEO Martin Pannier, are Graduates of the Paris Founder Institute.
