The Pixelpipe Blog

The humble origins of Pixelpipe started way back in June of 2004 when I was looking for a way to share media from my new fancy (at the time) Nokia 3650 to my friends and family. The main problem that I needed to solve was the ability to share my camera phone pictures with my friends across networks since you couldn’t send an photo or video (MMS) across networks (eg. AT&T to Verizon). You could however send an email to a phone number as well as post to a few services that accepted posting via email like Flickr and MoveableType blogs and so the idea was born.

I’d originally called the service fotobomb since it was a way to blast your media off of your mobile phone or desktop and out to as many friends or services you’d like. The same original idea that was applied then is utilzed now with Pixelpipe, send once and receive to many.

While the fotobomb service was popular with my friends I didn’t really pursue it as a business since the main mode of transport was a simple email and the carriers started to allow users to send multimedia messages across networks.

The big move from prototype to a Pixelpipe came when I was looking for a change last year and observed that the same problem I’d tried to solve back in 2004 still existed today however across social networks and photo/video sites instead of mobile phones. The problem wasn’t the carriers it was now just too many options for users, I had a solution however needed it to be more sophisticated implementation that would require a direct integration with the destinations API.

I’d worked with Jacob Jay in the past when I was the Imaging Architect at Ofoto/Kodak Gallery and helped him integrate his desktop software PictureSync application with Kodak Gallery so looked him up to see if he was available. Jacob was fortunately planning his next move at the time and thought he could help bring his past experience with API integrations to the table. We decided to put my online services “chocolate” with his API “toffee” (he’s English) and see what we could build a tasty treat.

To make a long story short, Jacob came to SF and stayed with me for a few weeks, we decided create a dev team in New Delhi that he’d live there and oversee as he continued development of PictureSync, “Google Tracy” and I went to Delhi and built computers, hired initial team, also slept on floors and of course got a little sick however we’ll save that story for another posting.

We soon secured a hip little space just around the corner for Zeitgeist in the SF mission district, built a full-time SF team to compliment our global efforts and got busy developing the Pixelpipe services. We’ve come along way in the last year however still remember our roots with both PictureSync and fotobomb.com supporting Pixelpipe.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for much more to come.

Viva la Pixelpipe!

-Brett