On October 6th Lord Bilimoria successfully launched PictoSo, a photo sharing app designed to operate in small groups, at the Cambridge Freshers’ Fair. The launch saw huge interest in the picture sharing app, with students eager to learn more about how the Founder of Cobra Beer’s tech venture would change they way they shared photos with friends.
PictoSo provides a platform for groups of people to share photos among themselves in a more private setting than Instagram or Facebook. Moving away from the traditional broadcasting nature of social media, PictoSo aims to help people share the moments that matter with the people that matter. The app works well at any occasion, from small gatherings among family and friends to huge parties and boasts a number of innovative features – pictures can be customised before sharing with filters, effects, stickers and more, and 10-second videos can also be shared in groups of your choosing by creating albums and inviting your friends from your phone contacts.
Lord Bilimoria spoke to Tom Knowles of The Times to discuss the launch:
It’s time to curry favour with the web’s chattering classes
The founder and chairman of Cobra Beer will unveil a surprise drive into the technology industry today when he launches a photo-sharing app designed to win market share from Instagram, Flickr and Snapchat.
Lord Bilimoria, who has spent 26 years in the drinks industry, has joined forces with his cousin Rashid Bilimoria, a Boston-based technology entrepreneur, to create PictoSo.
Having achieved success with Cobra, a less gassy lager that many diners enjoy with their Indian food, Lord Bilimoria is confident that his app will find a gap in the popular market for sharing photos on mobiles and online.
“To me, it’s like Cobra,” he said. “The whole idea of Cobra came out of doing something differently and changing the marketplace for ever. Beers had existed for thousands of years. I wasn’t inventing beer, I was just doing it differently. It’s the same with PictoSo — yes, there are lots of other photosharing apps, but this is a way of doing it in such a beautifully simple way that no one else is doing.”
As well as the benefits available on many photo-sharing apps, such as being able to upload pictures instantly, users of PictoSo will be able to create a private album that they can invite specific friends and family to join. Users who have been invited can then add their own photos to the album.
Over the past five years there has been a huge rise in online and mobile photo-sharing, with a trillion photos expected to be uploaded online over the next year. Instagram, the giant of photo-sharing apps, was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012 and has 300 million users worldwide.