
Why we're building Loom - jansen
http://blog.loom.com/why-were-building-loom/
======
angersock
I hate to be a jerk, but why so many first-world problem startups?

Is keeping a handle on your cat pictures and food shots really that big a
deal, something that keeps Joe Sixpack up at night?

Here's an idea: instead of helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy
hobos into the cloud, do something that matters.

For example, go after the giant clusterfuck that is medical image sharing.
Again, it's cloud data storage of images, it's sharing on all kinds of
devices, and it's technically challenging (privacy concerns, etc.)--and it
actually helps people.

Why don't you take this tech and use it to help patients move their medical
images between practitioners?

~~~
pg
a) Photos are a fundamental form of data, and better infrastructure for
managing them helps everyone.

b) We did fund a startup for managing medical images: Clariso, in the last
batch. You don't hear as much about b2b startups as consumer ones, because
unless you're e.g. a radiologist, they're not trying to reach you. Which means
if you try to estimate the number of consumer focused startups based on which
ones you happen to hear about, you'll overestimate.

~~~
angersock
Fair enough.

My comment was more rooted in seeing a rough area of application for what I
presume their tech and backend must be capable of, and then thinking about
where else it could be put to use outside of the consumer market.

How'd the Clariso folks end up? Still around, I hope?

How much interest do you gauge for these sorts of things (better tech in
medical, which is admittedly a whole can of worms)?

~~~
abbasmehdi
Yes, Clariso is still very much around. In fact, I introduced their product to
an organization that is used by large hospital chains to outsource radiology
reports to, these guys have tens of full-time, in-house radiologists looking
at hundreds of reports all day, every day. Their immediate reaction after
checking out the product? Blown away! The best alternative costs them over
$100k/year and it feels like Windows95. Their CTO could not believe such a
solution was even possible. The CEO (a radiologist with >25 years of report-
reading experience) said to me that this could be "revolutionary".

~~~
macspoofing
It "only" works in Chrome. That's a problem.

//

Limited in ie, firefox and mobile.

~~~
kibibu
If it saved your company > $100k a year, you'd probably rollout Chrome or at
least ChromeFrame

~~~
spartango
While this trivializes the issue substantially, it is true that if you depend
on chrome there are ways to roll out nice site-specific chromium apps that
keep everyone happy.

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twald
I've been using Loom's beta version for about two months now. I have to be
honest. At first I didn't completely get it and I didn't use it too much. I
thought it was just a photo centric version of Dropbox. And it took me a few
more weeks and a few "I wish I could show you this right now" moments until I
did get it and started appreciating a few of it's features.

I've been traveling a lot over the years and it is such an uplifting feeling
to meet somebody again after some time, to share some "good old times"
pictures and reconnect. One of the things about Loom is that it stores a low
res. version of your pictures on your phone and allows you to stream full res.
in no time, so I have pretty much all my pictures of the last 10 years on my
phone. I've also found some really interesting use cases at work lately...

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huhtenberg
Does anyone else remember Lucas Art's Loom?

<http://store.steampowered.com/app/32340/>

~~~
vivin
I do! It was a great game and I thought this was going to be some sort of
remake. I was a little disappointed.

Do you remember the Pirate in Monkey Island I in the Scumm Bar, whom you could
ask about LOOM?

~~~
huhtenberg
Ha, good one!

The only one I still remember was the button in Space Quest I escape pod that
when pressed ejected you through the time-space warp into Kings Quest I and
then killed you on impact :)

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bitsweet
I've been lucky to be in the beta for the last two months or so... my wife and
I use it to group the photos we individually take on our iPhones and then
share them with our family back home. It just works, unlike our old setup

~~~
kmfrk
Could you try explaining what this actually does? I can't figure it out from
the link.

~~~
ukd1
My 'what is does' for Loom is; it stores your images / videos in the cloud and
syncs smartly and selectively between all your devices (mac, ipad, iphone,
web).

E.g. I have ~180G of photos on Loom, but I can still access them all on my SSD
MacBook, even though it's only got a few G free. Selective sync FTW.

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mpobrien
Looked at loom.com, don't get what this site does.

Looked at loom.com/about and read wall of text, still not sure.

I'd suggest finding a more efficient way to communicate what this site is to
newcomers.

~~~
jjsz
I followed your steps and after reading:

"We're making it fast for you to access and manage your entire photo and video
library on every device without taking up local storage space. "

I came to the conclusion this is a Dropbox with extended managing tools for
pictures- it wasn't that hard.

~~~
lttlrck
Dropbox uses local storage space... How hard?

~~~
jjsz
When I said hard, I wasn't talking about the implementation I was talking
about figuring out what it does...

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ajaymehta
Ignore the hate -- this is a huge problem for millions that still hasn't been
solved very well. I take tons of photos on my phone, and iPhoto is a terrible,
clunky piece of software to manage all of them.

The end result is that, aside from the one-off shares to Instagram or
Facebook, I don't do anything with my hundreds of photos at all. But I really
want to. If Loom helps me do that, it's a very valuable service indeed.

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PLenz
I thought this was about the classic adventure game and was briefly excited...

~~~
davidjhall
As did I -- especially considering the shutdown of Lucasarts, I had hoped this
was an article about the license being given to some other company

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orangethirty
Loom: Hire me to write your blog posts/press releases because that one is
simply not engaging.

~~~
cbg0
You should have made your comment more engaging.

~~~
orangethirty
You read it and replied. Textbook definition of engagement.

~~~
dougk16
By that definition, Loom's post was engaging to you...sorry, I had to take the
bait. :)

~~~
orangethirty
You do have a valid point. Though there are different types of engagements.
The one we have here is a _negative_ engagement to the message/media. What
they want is to get a positive engagement from the marketplace to get them to
use their app. Anyhow, Paypal me $99 and I'll show you how to do this
correctly (did I just close on you? (: ). /Joke.

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isaacn
I've switched to using DropBox for my image storage and haven't looked back.
It just works on all my devices, no problem. It works with videos too. How is
Loom better than that?

~~~
pkulak
Or Google instant upload. If all you've ever used was Photostream, this sounds
great. But not everything (anything?) is as broken as the disaster that is
Photostream.

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inthewoods
I agree with the premise of the startup that dealing with photos on the iPhone
is broken and an issue. Having used a Windows Phone for the past 6 months, I
can say that I while I hate lots of things about the OS and phones, the
syncing to Skydrive is truly awesome and has taken me out of the world that is
described in the Loom positioning. My understanding that the Android space
already has this figured out as well. I love not having to worry about
syncing/downloading/etc - it has felt very freeing.

Which is to say, I think this is an interesting company, but very likely to
face a serious challenge if/when Apple comes out with an update to iCloud that
does the same things. Competing against stuff built into an OS is very, very
hard - not impossible (see: Chrome, Firefox), but definitely hard.

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macspoofing
>Photo management is still broken – we want to change that.

Are you sure? Really really sure? There are countless photo management web,
desktop and mobile apps.

~~~
dirtyaura
But very few of them really solve the problem well. And as photos are quite
universal form of expression, there is need for multiple solutions: a
professional magazine photographer have different needs than a serious
hobbyist who again has different needs than a mom photographing her kids and
sharing photos to grandparents, and the mom differs from a teen who wants to
express him/herself to find a new friends and get laid.

After searching for a couple of years for solution my needs, I finally found
Everpix, which is really really good, but it still doesn't handle sharing as
well as I'd like to.

There is a lot of room for innovation or just plain good execution left in the
photo space.

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resu
So, uh, dropbox?

To be a bit more specific: please be more specific! How is this any different
than dropbox? Are you building 'Adobe Lightroom for the cloud'?

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nfoz
"Ideally, you wouldn’t have to take time to think about personal content
management anymore."

Sigh. Everytime someone makes things "easier" for me by removing my ability to
manage my content, it ends up being way more frustrating than if I could just
get the files with a file manager.

~~~
dtw
sorry I'm a bit late to the party, but I'd be curious to have a discussion
about this. maybe we can help :)

what's your favourite way of interacting with your photos? organising them in
a folder hierarchy on disk and having them mirrored/rsynced to some remote
location? would you prefer a no-nonsense poweruser interface? we'll in all
likelyhood open up our api soon so there could be a flurry of clients for all
wants.

or shoot me an email on daniel loom com

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od2m
Ask me about Loom...

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prawn
Is it a bit like Spotify for your photos? e.g., originals in the cloud, and
streamed/cached in a smaller format to your local device? That I could get
behind.

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gol706
<http://images.wikia.com/monkeyisland/images/c/c9/Cobb.jpg>

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wcfields
I wonder how much that domain cost.

Good name for a mobile / cloud app though.

~~~
rjwebb
Almost as much as color.com?

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pazimzadeh
Cool, some competition for Everpix: www.everpix.com

