Waldo Photos is an Austin-based startup trying to change how photos are captured and distributed. Operationally, Waldo Photos works with professional photographers, events venue and/or restaurants to take pictures for you and have it match to you personal profile via a combination of facial recognition, GPS, time and album code, and delivered via a convenience text-based interface. In a way, users can now effortlessly send and receive their photos with their friends & family. I see this company trying to solve one of the root challenges of today’s generation and that is the high level of engagement, perhaps addiction, with their smartphones and cameras during fun moments in life.
Waldo lets you live in the moment, put down the selfie stick, put your phone back in your pocket and enjoy life’s most valued moments.
I believe Waldo Photos’s technology and concept has implication way beyond the photo capturing and sharing part of the smartphone engagement spectrum. If WP can successful reach some level of market adoption and scalability, then the impact will be felt across all verticals of content creation and consumption portion of the industry. Content creation and distribution between the regular consumers and ‘professionals’ has shifted between the two numerous times in the past 20+ years. Back in early 1900’s, the successful launch of the Kodak portable camera allows consumers to put their creative content creation and distribution in their own hands and thus, have less reliance on the professional photographers (or purchase a SLR, which is unaffordable and complicated for the average end users). In the midst of this evolution, Polaroid took the change to a whole new level by offering users the ability to instantly observe and see their creative work, hence provide a direct engagement feedback between the content creator and their content creation. The introduction of high connectivity phones and later smartphones allows content creators to directly create, observe, adjust and share the content. Below I will breakdown my perspective on the upsides and downsides associated with each major change on how content is created and distributed in the past 20+ years.
- Pager/Beeper
- + Text-based, easy to use
- – No camera functionality, minimal functionality for content creation
- SLR
- + High-quality, potentially higher value per unit,
- – Long turnaround, reserved for the professional, pricy and bulky
- Kodak Disposable Camera
- + Portable, affordable content creation in hands of regular consumers
- – Lower quality, limited shareability
- Polaroid
- + Portable, content creation in hands of regular consumers
- – Bulky to carry around, pricy and limited quantity
- Motorola RAZR
- + portable, content creation in hands of regular consumers
- – small screen, quality is limited (pixelated)
- Smartphone
- + content creation and distribution available to the general public (Vloggers, YouTubers, etc.)
- – Addiction to smartphone and taking pictures of EVERYTHING
Waldo Photos takes the best and aims to solve some of the challenges that content creator and distributor faced in the past 20+ years. WP offers a text-based (from Pager/Beeper era) distribution of high quality content (SLR era) to the end users while providing content creator the time to actually enjoy the event (one of the core challenges I see with users nowadays if how often they engage with their smartphones in the midst of precious moments).
I am pretty optimistic on where Waldo Photo’s future (and if all else fails, that’s a BIG if, their facial recognition software will be on great value-add to the industry and other companies).
*Waldo Photos is backed by Upfront Ventures in a recent seed round.
Let me know what you think in the comment section!
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