Will Oosah be the web’s photo hub?
A startup called Oosah is launching a new service today that can help you sort through the plethora of photo and other media sites online. Through the Oosah Media Explorer, users can upload photos, movies and music to the web, and easily move them between sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook.
Oosah’s goal isn’t to compete with those photo sites, says chief operating officer Mike Duggan; in fact, it’s less of a strain on the Palo Alto startup’s servers if you store your photos elsewhere. Instead, the company wants to help you manage your media on other sites, and the Media Explorer’s big selling point is its interface. Other sites like Slide and RockYou help you share your photos across the web, but there’s really no management hierarchy — in other words, you can sort photos by storing them in an album, but that’s about it. With Oosah, you use a file management system similar to your desktop’s. That allows you to create a hierarchy of folders within folders (see screenshot below), and to move folders (and media) around by just clicking and dragging.
Oosah also has some of the basic features of other photo sites, like creating slideshows that can be shared as widgets.
Right now, Oosah supports sharing with Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and YouTube, but will soon add compatibility with other sites — Duggan can’t say which, but he says they’re the “usual suspects.” Duggan also declined to get specific about the company’s business plans, but he noted that Oosah should be able to make money through advertising, and is also talking to other companies about partnerships.
Oosah is funded by unidentified angel investors, and is currently working on a seed round.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.