

Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content - gregarious
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/chute-seed-round/

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ShabbyDoo
I did some work for an ecommerce consultancy a couple of years ago where we
were literally looking a a customer's request for "ability for customers to
upload photos of themselves wearing our clothing" and saying, "Why isn't there
a white box image service?" Now there is.

To those who have not dealt with user-generated media content, it is easy to
underestimate the amount of effort involved in building a secure, monitorable
system. Building an image grinding pipeline is non-trivial, even though all
the open source tools are of high quality. Once users start uploading photos,
marketing will realize that they need to be cropped, resized, and enhanced. As
soon as your users upload the first pieces of questionable content, you will
have to build an image moderation app. Then, you have to build a feature where
the user sees his own photos on the site privately when logged in because
users hate the lack of immediacy. Then, your marketing people will ask for
video. Totally separate pipeline. Then, someone will upload custom-generated
40Kx40k single-color jpgs to see if your image crunching pipeline allows
denial of service attacks. Once you get your first upload of child
pornography, your legal team will become much more interested and ask how you
are ensuring the destruction of these images from all your servers. Now,
you'll learn that a reasonable portion of your bandwidth is being used to
serve up deep-linked content for sketchy sites. Oh, and other stuff will
happen too. Then, you'll see the value of Chute.

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gregarious
This is definitely a great look into all the things we are working on and
trying to manage.

Thanks for sharing your insights, definitely a great help in understanding why
user-generated media has been very difficult for brands and agencies to
leverage so far.

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ig1
I don't think they know what Twilio is.

The article has close to zero content about the company, from reading Chute's
own website it looks like it provides an API service for managing rich-media
UGC content.

~~~
gregarious
Ha, it's an interesting point actually. I'm pretty amazed at the wonderful job
Twillio has done establishing itself as the "normal" definition of API and
platform.

Obviously, they're not synonymous, but seems a convenient enough of a hook I
guess.

Then again, it's main TC that opts for that analogy.

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biot
Can someone explain what Twilio for media content means? Twilio is essentially
API-driven telephony infrastructure. It doesn't look like Chute allows you to
use an API to drive real-world audio-visual infrastructure (that would be
cool!), but is rather User-Generated Content with some do-it-yourself APIs and
libraries.

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gregarious
Hi, one of the Chute founders.

It's definitely not how we describe ourselves, but I think the analogy they're
gunning for is simply around exposing an infrastructure for a specific media.

User-generated is definitely a broad use of Chute but certainly not the only
one. It's also being used where you have your own media (photos, etc.) that
you want to publish and have a bit more flexibility in both how they're used
and the info you can gather from the usage.

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jjacobson
I just used a site with Chute for the first time yesterday
(<http://www.refer.ly>) and it blew my mind how easy it was to grab photos
from the various cloud like places I upload them to (facebook, flickr, etc)
and use them right there on Referly through Chute's widget. Instead of having
to do the old "Right click, save, upload" method. It is ridiculously easy and
awesome. Well done, Chute.

~~~
gregarious
Always happy to hear that and would love to learn more about how we can make
it better and simpler.

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HorizonXP
Met Gregarious at StartupFest in Montreal. Great guy, and awesome startup.
Happy to see they got some seed funding.

Now if only Gregarious could figure out which bus stop to get off at. :-P

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kevinwmerritt
What are the benefits of Chute over a service like filepicker.io?

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gregarious
This is a great question Kevin.

I think it comes down to a couple of things.

1\. File Requirements 2\. Workflow

If you're looking to simply capture any binary data, Chute is not the ideal
option. While we will offer access to even more sources than we have today,
we're not focusing on the capture of documents, presentations or other non-
media docs.

If you definitely need media, then we think we're a great solution since our
tools only work with those types of files. That means that not only do we
spend a lot of time working through how they arrive and get processed, but
also in how delivered back to your users.

This leads me to my point about workflow. We've seen and learned that every
app wants to use media files in different ways. That creates a number of
unique challenges as a platform: authentication, rights management, terms of
use, custom metadata, custom profile data, 3rd party processing ,etc.

For many, and we'd venture most, media apps - simply putting the file online
won't be enough. It will have to go through a number of steps and more often
than not, there's a need to capture additional data as part of the intake. Put
another way, a media file's life only begins when it gets "online".

We're focused on those use cases first and foremost and think we'll be the
ideal fit for anyone who needs the same thing.

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esharef
What markets are you focused on with Chute?

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gregarious
We have two primary audiences today: brands/publishers and developers.

While there's a great deal of support for developers already, we know that
there's a lot more that we can do and will be rolling out a great deal of new
content soon.

~~~
esharef
Hmm...those are two fairly different audiences. What makes you think you can
support both at once. Why don't you just focus on one?

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bhaveshdhupar
Congrats, Chute looks like something which can become synonyms with images. On
the other hand its interesting how Twilio is always used as the placeholder
for API.

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JonLim
Congrats on the funding, Gregarious!

Chute definitely seems like an interesting company, and I'm glad it's not
just-another-photo-sharing site. Looking forward to seeing what else comes
from your camp!

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wolfparade
I don't see the pricing for Chute.

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hnwh
absolutely no pricing info available.. hard to dig into this

