Photo-sharing made simple

The age of the smartphone has turned everyone into a photographer

By ADAM GONN
Familio Photo Upload Service521 (photo credit: COURTESY FAMILIO)
Familio Photo Upload Service521
(photo credit: COURTESY FAMILIO)
The age of the smartphone has turned everyone into a photographer, and no event is too big, your child’s first steps, or too small, what you are having for lunch, to share with family and friends over social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
But as Iftach Yair, CEO of Familio.com, a new photo-sharing service available either as a browser add-on or an iOS or Android application, tells The Jerusalem Report, “There is over-sharing of stuff on Facebook and there is over-sharing of stuff on Instagram, but not everything that goes up on Facebook is appropriate for your family.
“For instance, if I have a bachelor party, I’m not sure that my mom is the target audience for that, and I’m not sure if I’d like to see her comments on my photos on Facebook,” he adds.
Familio is one of the first startups created by Lool Ventures a new micro venture capital fund active in Israel and started by VC veterans Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum. The Lool model is a hybrid of a VC and an incubator: On the one hand, Lool invests in start-up companies like any other VC, but it also has a small team that comes up with ideas for products and brings in CEOs to build them.
“Familio was one of the two first products that they created internally, so I’m a CEO whom they brought in after they thought that this product has a good foundation and the potential to become a real company,” Yair says.
The basic idea behind the product, Yair says, is that despite the various social networks and the like, there are still only a few ways to share memories with your family and only with your family. While Facebook is one option, Yair says, “Facebook isn’t built for privacy” – and then there is mom, who isn’t on Facebook, or if she is, she isn’t really sure how to set the privacy setting or she can’t upload a photo and share it.
“And that’s why we built Familio. We built it to be super easy to share with your family and we decided to keep it dead simple, on the one hand, but also to keep it very private so that you will feel comfortable sharing,” Yair says.
There are two ways to use Familio – via the Familo.com website, with users of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox having the option of installing an add-on that runs in the background and provides notifications regarding new activity. To share photos, all users must install the Familio software.
“We have just crossed the barrier of 10,000 users, but we just released a new version a few weeks ago, so we are very happy with the progress that it’s making,” Yair says. 