Here is Teliport Me, which is a new Android app that lets you do panoramic photos with your smartphone. Here Vineet Devaiah shows me the app and explains how it works. We also talk about the panoramic market and the competitors over on the iOS side of the fence.
Last November, TechCrunch's own Sarah Lacy sat down with Vineet Devaiah from "social streetview" startup, Phototour.in, which, at the time, had just received term sheets from a number of high-profile U.S. investors and had recently been awarded the "Top Emerging Technology Company of 2010" by Nvidia. The startup was the first international, non-funded, under-20-member company to win the award, according to Devaiah.
Since then, Phototour added Academy Award certificate-winner and entrepreneur Bala S. Manian as an advisor (who was honored for "technical achievement" for his contributions to optical technologies used in films, including Star Wars) and has gained more than 47,000 users for the alpha version of its image and panorama crowdsourcing app, "360", on Android. Users have logged more than 75,000 panoramas in a relatively short period of time, so, considering the rumors that the iPhone 5 will have a native panorama app, sources tell us that 360 might be a candidate for a potential partnership with Android so that it can remain neck-in-neck with Apple.
What's more, today the startup is officially announcing that it is rebranding as TeliportMe and is bringing 360 out of alpha and into the public sphere in ready-to-wear form. For free. Granted, 360-degree panorama apps for smartphones are nothing new. There are quite a few cool apps and gadgets that have these capabilities on the market, like "You Gotta See This!", Occipital's 360 Panorama, and Microsoft's Photosynth, to name a few.
Taking a 360-degree image offers a more immersive viewing experience, but for Google Android devices, there aren't too many third-party panoramic apps to choose from. Some Android smartphones now come with a panoramic function in the native camera application, but that's usually reserved for higher-end devices. 360, a beta application for Android, has the potential to change that because it's optimized to work on handsets that have relatively low-end hardware. Plus, the software supports sharing of panoramic pics on social networks in addition to its own dedicated site.
The beta software was developed by TeliportMe, which is aiming to build a crowdsourced repository of 360-degree images, similar to Google's StreetView. To do this, however, the company understands that it needs a large number of users contributing images, so it created the 360 app for a wide range of Android phones. That's a challenge, because different phones use different gyroscopes and other sensors needed for the image creation process.
There's another challenge as well. According to Vineet Devaiah, TeliportMe's CEO, many Android handsets don't have the processing power needed to quickly build the panoramic images, which precludes them from taking such pictures. 360, however, makes up for meager hardware by using an efficient software solution.
If you consider an average smartphone user, he primarily uses it for 3 main purposes: Communication such as e-mail, IM and social networking, taking photos and playing games. And if you're like me, you're probably taking a lot of photos daily.
While social photo apps like Picplz and Lightbox are cool, no one has thought of going beyond that and looking at 'the big picture'. When you snap a photo, you're essentially creating a visual representation of that place and generating location details of that place through geotags, which can be used for mapping purposes.
Teliport.me, an Indian based startup, previously known as Phototour.in, aims to achieve something similar with its crowdsourced street view product.
Although Vineet Devaiah, co-founder of the Teliport.me refused to divulge any further details on the product they are currently working on, he hinted that their Android panorama app, which came out of Alpha last week, is just the tip of the iceberg and they have much larger plans with Teliport.me, which is currently under construction.
Speaking of the Android app, Vineet Devaiah and his team seem to have pulled off some impressive work over the past couple of months, considering how tricky and device-centric, the panorama feature usually is.
Teliportme is the Indian start-up that's the maker of one of Android's most awesome apps: 360, the panorama photo maker. The free app's clever panorama stitching feature was made with input from Teliportme's advisor, the entrepreneur Bala S. Manian, who has an Academy Awards certificate for technical merit for his work on Star Wars.
Penn Olson chatted with Teliportme's PR man, Sushant Ghargi, to hear how the company is rebranding itself from Phototour.in - which was its name when CEO Vineet Devaiah sat down to chat with TechCrunch last year - and where the start-up is heading.
The rebranding was necessitated, Sushant explains, because "we were facing some trademark issues with the Phototour brandname.' The new Teliport.me site will launch pretty soon, and bring back the element of a sort of crowd-sourced streetview - like Google's Streetview - to accompany the 360 panorama app.
The company's focus, meanwhile, remains the same. And although it's a photo app with social media integration, the Teliportme crosshairs are not really aimed at Instagram or Picplz. Sushant adds:
We reviewed 360 for Android a while ago when the 3D panoramic photo capturing and sharing freeware was new to the Android Market. We believed the app was a welcome addition to the Market, seeing as there aren't a lot of good apps of the genre available for the platform. And now we hear that the developers (TeleportMe) may have been approached by Google to build the app for their OEMs (Samsung and HTC). The initial release of the app was a tad rough around the edges as far as the process of capturing and stitching panoramas is concerned.
Freshly released to the Market, version 2.0 of 360 not only improves upon said process, it adds easier sharing on Facebook and Twitter, providing greater efficiency and ease of use that is sure to earn the app an increase in its user ratings. And with support for over 200 Android devices and the added option to browse through a stream of panoramic / regular photos uploaded by 45000+ users from all around the world, the app may soon step in with the best of its kind out there.
360 is a simple app that can do a lot of different things. The main being the ability to take panorama photos, so this is where we will start. Panorama shots have always been cool to me, and I have long been waiting for an app that can properly capture one and stitch it correctly. 360 does this and more, but I'll get to the more later. When you open the app you are greeted with four options: My Profile, Panorama, Photo, and My Panoramas. All of these options are pretty self-explanatory, so lets continue to the interface of the panorama shooting portion. When you click Panorama, you are brought to a screen that explains how to take a panorama. They are taken almost like you are shooting film of a specific area. You hit the "start" button and slowly move your camera across the area that you wish to capture. When this is finished, the app will stitch the photos together and make a fantastic, colorful panorama photo. A really cool feature of this app is being able to take full 360 pictures. This is a hard job to do, and if you take the picture slowly and correctly, the app works like a charm. A slight learning curve is there, but it is very small, and once you get the hang of things you'll be snapping panorama photos like a pro.
360 for Android is an awesome app for taking Panorama photos, and is also a great social experience for those looking to share what they see with the world. Whether you want the app to just take pictures, or you want to share your photos, you will most likely find yourself doing both after you play with the app a little. 360 for Android is available in the Market for free, and you can go directly there by clicking here.
