San Diego Startup Expeerience Crowdsourced Event Photos For Everyone

There are a few startups out there vying for the position to be the platform that allows people at an event to all upload photos from the same event. San Diego startup Expeerience is one of those companies.

Expeerience allows users to share videos and photos at events. When individual Expeerience users upload their photos at any particular event they are put together with all of the photos and videos from other users at the same event. Essentially, Expeerience is crowdsourcing photos and videos from their users at events, creating one big gallery of event photos.

With many of the other photo sharing apps available today people take photos and videos and upload them to their existing social networks. If they’re at a big event there’s a good chance time lines will be filled with similar photos. However, as co-founder Stephen Boyd explains in an interview with nibletz, after the event everyone goes their separate ways. Social networks begin filling with the next big event.

Expeerience keeps an ongoing record in a “collection” with all the photos from the same event that users can go back to over and over again. Expeerience users can also save event photos from other users.  At a small event like a wedding, users can easily save the bouquet toss and dancing photos from other users. They can do the same thing at a football game for big plays and touch downs.

Boyd compares Expeerience to a “Pinterest style Twitter”.

Check out our interview with Boyd below.

What is Expeerience?

Expeerience™ is a mobile social network that allows users to share their experiences with the world via photos and videos. The app then ties them together around moments in time, allowing others to experience events, concerts, sports games, bars, night clubs, etc as if they were there in person. By doing so, Expeerience show users what’s going on around them locally, and allows them to experience other moments in time going on around the globe.

For example, thousands of photos and videos are taken at every single sports event.  Typically, these photos and videos are then shared on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter as visual representations of people’s experiences at the event.  However, once the game is over everyone goes their separate ways along with the content they produced, and the relevance online is quickly overrun by newer posts on crowded Facebook walls.  Expeerience’s goal is to tie that content together around moments in time, allowing anyone to witness the game as if they were actually there. This same process can be applied to anything from concerts to natural disasters.

One of the features that sets Expeerience apart from other photo and video sharing apps is the ability to both put-out and collect content.  Users have “collections”, in which they can organize their favorite photos and videos. What’s cool is that users can collect content that other users have posted, i.e. great touchdown catches, plays, etc some users may have missed.

Also, Expeerience allows users to post to major social networks simultaneously, cutting down the effort it takes to share content on their favorite networks. Our goal is to create a platform where users can create a more visual representation of themselves, almost like a “Pinterest-style Twitter”. 

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Expeerience was founded by two guys; Stephen Boyd and David Knell, who have a combined 25+ years in application/systems engineering, and another 5+ in mobile development.

Where are you based?

Expeerience has yet to find a home, but we intend to relocate to the Bay Area, or possibly San Diego.

How did you come up with the idea?

The idea was born during a trip to the Bahamas. When you go to new places, it’s difficult to find out what’s going on around you, whether it’s common activities or popular places to check out.  Even with a list of popular things to do, it’s still hard to find out exactly what to expect when you get there. That’s where Expeerience was born; if there was a way to experience different tourist attractions, bar, nightclubs, beaches, activities on the island through photos and videos ahead of time, that would be ideal.

Not only that, but photo and video sharing was and still is extremely cumbersome. For example, if I took a photo of a beautiful beach setting, and I wanted to share it with the girl I went with, I’d have to either post it to Facebook or Twitter, and she’d have to download it for her own purposes. Or I could message a cut down version to her phone, which destroys the image quality.  Or I could email it to her, but then she’d have to post it on Facebook herself.  It just wasn’t as easy as it could be.  That’s where the “collection” button was born.  If all she had to do was hit the “collect” button to add it to her “Bahamas” collection, and that collection could auto-sync with Facebook, we’d both be able to customize our own albums in our own personalized way.  But even further than that, Expeerience has a “flick” feature that allows user to snap a photo or video, and then simply flick gesture their finger on the screen and the post will get shared to any of their followers phones via push notification. It’s essentially a direct message, but it’s sent in the form of a photo/video.  Pretty cool.

What problems does Expeerience address?

1. Experiencing what’s going on in the world is still extremely difficult; from checking out what the local bars look like in near real-time, to seeing what the riots in Egypt actually looked like in person. Our goal is to create a platform where users can experience the world through photos and videos that others have taken via smartphones, and to group them together based on moments in time.

2. Social media focuses heavily on relationships between people, not experiences. Expeerience will focus on mapping experiences, and will then use Facebook to tie the people involved together. We believe the experience layer is the next frontier in social media.

3. An entire layer of social content is being ignored. Expeerience will organize content around moments in time so companies, brands, and venues can interact with customers on a more visual level.  The key is tying relevant content together in a way that benefits users and brands alike.

4. Photo and video sharing/collecting is not where it needs to be. We’re introducing new UI elements and gestures that will allow people to share and collect photos and videos easier than ever.

There are other experience sharing apps out there, what sets you apart what’s your secret sauce?

Our secret sauce is our ability to tie together media stream of content and filter them by geo-proximity.  We’re essentially creating community photo and video albums around moments in time, and we do that by doing some pretty complex stuff on the back end of our technology.

Additionally, Expeerience is intended to show users photos and videos that are captured in first-person perspective. We don’t want to create another “YouTube userbase”. Our goal is to create a community where photos and videos based on experiences can be shared, discovered, and enjoyed.

What’s your plan to build scale?

We have a lot of really cool partnerships in the works, from major concert touring companies to extreme sports agencies.  We’re attacking several niche markets to get the platform off of the ground. We need to see what works, and then double down on those successes. Other platforms have had remarkable successes with celebrities, sports figures, artists, etc. We’ll definitely pursue those demographics as well.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned in the startup process?

Whoa, where do I start?  I suppose the most important thing for entrepreneurs to focus on is building a business.  Don’t count on media, lucky breaks, promised deals, or anything else that isn’t concrete. If you do, you’ll only find yourself getting let down more often than you should.  The startup lifestyle isn’t easy. It’s full of let downs, peaks and valleys that screw with your emotions.  Don’t get excited about promises. Get excited about results. Focus on building a business and the rest will follow.

Will you just be on iOS or are you building an Android app as well?

We’ll initially launch on iOS, specifically for iPhone users.  We’ll move to the iPad shortly after, while simultaneously building a Facebook App to drive more web traffic and page views. Once we validate our product, UI designs, and UX, we’ll move to Android.

What can you expect to see in the near future?

Expeerience launched a public beta to work out the kinks that all apps have during a first release.  The first update, which will be released toward the end of September, will show users common activities to do around them, i.e. hiking, kayaking, biking, etc that other users have experienced, along with trending events like sports games and concerts. The app will feature a map view of what’s going on around each user, almost unlocking the area around them and helping people discover cool things to do.

Linkage:

Check out Expeerience here

Here are more interviews with startups from “everywhere else”

Make sure you make it to this

750x100

You Might Also Like