

Chute (YC W12) Launches A Twilio For Photos - ranvir
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/chute-launch/

======
nwatson
IPIX was a photo-hosting service for E-Bay and various other sites in the late
'90's -- that was a very big chunk of their revenue, I believe, and sounds a
lot like Chute's product area as well.

It looks like E-Bay discontinued the IPIX integration and brought all that in-
house, effectively killing IPIX's main cash cow (which was already anaemic
after the dot-com crash). See this article from 2003:
<http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m09/i22/s01> . I wish the YC company
best of luck in addressing this similar market.

I think IPIX' original product idea was a special camera to take 360-radial or
360-spherical photos and let people host those images on their website. Web
clients needed a special plugin to view the results. Using these became
popular on various real-estate websites for a while. It looks from IPIX
website (<http://www.ipix.com/>) that that's their main focus again.

A former IPIX employee, Adam Sah, took some rudimentary log-aggregation tech
he built for monitoring the IPIX servers, got permission to start a new
company, and founded Addamark, now SenSage (<http://www.sensage.com>). They
implemented one of the first columnar databases to minimize large-scale log
aggregation storage space (logs take 2.5% the space required in a traditional
DB) and to speed up queries. Many other companies are adopting this strategy
(see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS>). Here's the
columnar-database patent:
[http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=q4d4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=nathan+watson+column&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XypVT7ifJKSZiAKx5uS0Bg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA)

I worked at Addamark/SenSage for almost 4 years, it was a very good
experience.

~~~
kumarm
Thanks that was some good background info. Only informative message among
useless back patting posts.

~~~
AznHisoka
seriously, they probably got some friends to comment.. i rarely see such
useless responses to posts here.

------
suprasanna
I'm a little confused as to the Twilio reference. Does this mean Chute will
allow users to MMS images to a phone number with a server backend?

~~~
conroy
Me too, and I work at Twilio.

~~~
suprasanna
Isn't twilio working on allowing web apps to receive MMS messages? I assumed
this is what Chute is intending to do.

~~~
gregarious
MMS would be very cool - we support web services, email, mobile and would love
to add MMS.

I'm sure we'd use Twilio to accomplish it as well :)

~~~
dmor
Let's talk, happy to buy you a beer and take a list of feature requests. You
know where to find me. :)

------
ajju
From the article, here's a good excerpt of what Chute does.

 _[Chute] handles the entire backend environment for uploading, processing,
authenticating, resizing, and serving images.

...for example, you’re running a popular website and you want all of your
users to be able to have profile images, you can sign up for Chute and paste a
few lines of code into your application, and that’s it. Users will then be
able to upload images to Chute’s servers, where they will be cropped, resized,
etc. according to your specifications, before being served onto your site._

That's pretty useful!

------
phzbOx
Yeah, I don't like the Twilio reference explanation.. it's just confusing.

------
Maascamp
It seems like there is a growing market for offering the most basic of web
development tasks as a service to all the non-technical people trying to start
a site these days. It seems people are moving away from all-in-one website
builders (no geek cred.) to do-it-all frameworks coupled with a large variety
of 3rd party services to implement the few things the framework doesn't.

It'll be interested to see the common man's web stack in a few years.

------
yurylifshits
UploadCare <http://uploadcare.com> is another startup in this area.

------
stdbrouw
So, similar to Transloadit, then? (<http://transloadit.com/>)

~~~
felixge
Yeah, except they seem to also provide photo hosting and tooling beyond that.
We are purely focused on upload and processing so far.

------
AznHisoka
Idea has been mentioned many times here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3594401>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049903>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877026>

Though I'm not sure how mission critical this is.. it's something you can
easily find a gem for, and adjust for your own use in a couple of hours. And
if you're a photo sharing startup/business, I would assume you wouldn't want
to outsource something that I'd consider part of your core.

~~~
gregarious
Hi - one of the founders of Chute.

You are absolutely right that there are many ways to accomplish basic
uploading and hosting. In fact, we've used those same gems time and time again
and it was the process of re-building it that seemed problematic. When we
started working on mobile, however, most of those things were not as readily
available or accessible.

That said, we're much more focused on the workflow that is required to make
those photos useful. For example, if you're a publisher, you may need to have
rights cleared, captions, user information collected, and even moderation
before any user-generated content is "usable" to you.

We're happy to help anyone get their prototype running and hopefully offer
enough value on top that they won't ever want to leave.

~~~
sstrudeau
Yeah. I have a lightly used production stack that is the very beginnings of a
service like this. I think there is a lot of potential value here, if you can
strike the right pricing/feature balance. Also a ton of opportunity to add
value (look at some of the Ideé APIs for ideas: <http://ideeinc.com/> ). I'll
be keeping on eye on this product & space in general.

------
geoffc
Twilio has now achieved Kleenex status in the tech community, nicely done!

------
qeorge
We currently use SWFUpload + ImageMagick + (sometimes) Aviary in our PHP apps.
We're using Mailgun for receiving images via email/SMS.

I'd love to replace that with Chute. Checking it out now.

~~~
gregarious
Let me know if we can help get you started, we can add you in !

------
mendable
Congrats on the launch!

I'm curious about the previous project - lifegrams.com - I was talking to my
OH about a similar idea just a few hours ago.

Would be interested to see a lessons-learned for the previous project. Was it
successful, if not as successful as hoped, why not, how much traction, what
could have been done differently, etc.

~~~
gregarious
Would be happy to chat some time about that experience! Feel free to shoot us
an email. gregarious at getchute dot com

------
camwest
Slightly Off Topic:

I'd love to see a service like this for Video. We currently have to content
manage a ton of video for our Video Based eLearning application and it sucks
to have to manage encodings file upload/download and streaming. I'd like to
outsource all of that and focus on just building a great learning platform.

~~~
bradhe
<http://transloadit.com/>

------
marcusf
This sort of reminds me of a DAM (Digital Asset Management system). I work in
the media CMS industry, and most big news organisations carry one + usually
some front end integration code. Seems like an obvious direction to take this
(though it carries the pain of doing enterprise sales, of course).

~~~
gregarious
We're definitely working in that direction as part of our launch. As you
mentioned, there's some specialization required for publishers, even more so
for large ones.

User-generated content has definitely posed new challenges for them and we're
working to package the platform in a way that makes it a lot easier.

------
nedwin
Looking great and positioning is really nice (just photos).

We used Zencoder for a similar purpose last year and it helped to encode video
files as well. The pricing on these services to make your image-related pain
go away is totally worth it.

------
marquis
I would love to start using this now on a new project. Is there any idea yet
of pricing / paid features? I'm hesitant to spend time on a new API only to
find out in a couple of months it's outside of our budget.

------
codeodor
Sweet. Something similar has been on my ideas list for a little while now.
Glad someone is doing it, because it needs to be done, and the idea never
excited me to action.

------
aolczak
Detail but the word _chute_ means "failing/fail" in French.

pic related (french translation of a famous movie):
[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UzYc8Z-JK08/TsAvnQEJgjI/AAAAAAAAAV...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UzYc8Z-JK08/TsAvnQEJgjI/AAAAAAAAAV4/BQpcgk3SUaQ/s1600/la-
chute.jpg)

------
aggarwalachal
very nice!

------
siddhaarth
Cool!

------
deepkut
Now this is smart.

------
flipside
Grats on the launch!

Was awesome meeting you guys at AngelHack over the weekend.

Your stuff is legit and I'll be spreading the good word to my photo-centric
entrepreneurs.

Less stuff for them to worry about.

-Mat

