Chute (YC W12) Launches A Twilio For Photos | Hacker News Reader

Chute (YC W12) Launches A Twilio For Photos

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169 pointsranvir46 comments

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...

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

Adam Sah is pretty awesome -- he also built the Google Gadgets product, and is now doing a gourmet food wholesaling service (like etsy for artisan food vendors, I think).

The Internet now is a lot different from 2003 -- there are more sites than just eBay and a few hundred others -- back then you needed to raise Series A of $20mm to run a big startup, now you can do it by getting rid of your car payment.

Presumably Chute is going to be the kind of tool which would have let eBay build their in-house photo tool faster. This might not have worked in 2003, and maybe can work now.

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

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

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?

From what I can tell, this would be better called "Zencoder for photos", not "Twilio for photos".

I think they just mean that it's supposed to be an easy, versatile API for photo integration into whatever web app you're working on, like how Twilio is an API for phone integration.

You know that product {X} has arrived when it's assumed to be so mainstream that is's being used to describe functionality {Y} in sentences like "it's like {X} for {Y}".

There used to be a great site: http://nowthatswhaticallstartups.com/ but it appears to be down now unfortunately.

The Twilio reference is more a nod to how effective Twilio has been at making voice accessible to developers.

It's more an analogy and definitely not the ideal, most precise way to describe what we do.

We're much more likely to consider ourselves akin to Heroku as we offer infrastructure and connections to services that make deploying and running super simple. Not to say that Twilio doesn't accomplish the same for tons of folks.

Me too, and I work at Twilio.

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

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 :)

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

Guys, what about multipart SMS message sending/receiving, and 6 sms/minute speed limit?

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!

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

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.

UploadCare http://uploadcare.com is another startup in this area.

So, similar to Transloadit, then? (http://transloadit.com/)

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

the Chute mobile SDK provides a comprehensive end to end solution for mobile developers, for both iOS and Android.

Yeah, "the Transloadit of photos" makes a good bit more sense.

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.

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.

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.

However, if photo sharing is just one feature of lots of people's apps then they might be more willing to.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

http://transloadit.com/

Http://zencoder.com

Video is definitely on the horizon and we'll be offering a similar series of services around it.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

very nice!

Cool!

Now this is smart.

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

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