by Lauren Keyson and Zak Niazi
Inaki Berenguer is the founder and CEO of Pixable, a mobile photo discovery act. At the January NY Tech Meetup, his team launched their new app called Photofeed, a mobile application to back up photos across devices. Once Photofeed is installed on a laptop or other device, it will automatically back up all the photos into a single photo feed in a single timeline, eliminating the duplicates across devices and across photos. Everything is then backed up.
Disruptive Technologists: Great, so what’s the disruptive part of it?
Berenguer: The disruptive part of it is that people keep taking photos, photos, photos, photos on their cell phone and then put them into their computer. They never have access to them when they need it. It would be great to look at your camera roll and your device and access all of your photos as if they were local. It doesn’t matter if they were taken here or if they were taken on a computer or external hard drive. Everything is accessed as if it’s from the same device as if it were local.
How’d you come up with the idea?
We came up with the idea because we are experts in photos. Three years ago we launched Pixable. This is a similar application but it’s used to browse photos of your friends across social networks. So we said, instead of friend’s photos, why don’t we focus on your primary photos?
Did it all of the sudden just occur to you? How long have you been working on this?
So we have been working on this for about a year now.
Anything you could tell people about how to create a product that’s disruptive?
It’s hard. They always tell you to have a very basic product and launch a minimum viable product, but in this case the basic prototype took us a while. That’s because the idea of having something that is sitting in the background, backing up photos without you noticing, and all of those photos being synchronized is not trivial from our point of view. So it took us more than half a year to have a minimum viable product.
Did you have to give anything up?
We had to give up on certain features if they weren’t successful, but in terms of the problem that you are solving, you don’t want to give up on that. But you may want to give up on a particular feature or functionality because you think that that is what people like, but in the end, that’s not what people use.
