DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY NEWS

New iPhone Application from Big Canvas Allows Users to Instantly Share, Store and Manage Pictures Online

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Big Canvas™, a creative developer of applications for the iPhone and Web, today announced its first application, Big Canvas PhotoShare. With PhotoShare, iPhone users can seamlessly share, store and manage images taken on their device. Photos can be uploaded live, moments after being taken, comments can be added to the images, and they can be easily categorized to share with designated groups. With a few simple touches, directly on the iPhone, users can easily take images captured from daily life and distribute these photos to friends, family, affinity groups, or even just mark them for public or private viewing. The core application and service are free.

“The iPhone has fundamentally transformed how people use mobile devices to interact with the Internet and communicate. Just as Instant Messenger and Twitter changed text-based communication, PhotoShare – with its ability to share pictures and provide commentary in real time – offers a totally new level of photo-based communication,” said Satoshi Nakajima, founder and president of Big Canvas. “With PhotoShare, users can easily take pictures, decide who to share them with, and then the application does the rest – uploading the images for friends, family or the world to view online.”

PhotoShare is an innovative new application built from scratch just for the iPhone, using the iPhone SDK. It combines a native iPhone application and a Web 2.0 service, which work in harmony to ensure customers get the best possible user experience on the iPhone. As part of the development initiative, the Big Canvas team has optimized the overall architecture – not only the application, but also the underlying network protocols – to take advantage of the iPhone’s unique capabilities, features and requirements.

PhotoShare includes a variety of features designed to make the experience of taking, sharing and storing images fun and exciting. Some of the key features include:

• Family and Friends – share photos with family and friends directly from the iPhone (just as secure as sending private e-mail messages, but a lot more convenient)
• Most Popular – when you save a public photo to your personal favorites, you essentially cast your vote for the best public pictures on PhotoShare; help distinguish the best-of-the-best from thousands of pictures posted by users, win great prizes
• Following – subscribe to other user photo-casts and enjoy the ongoing photo postings instantly

Big Canvas PhotoShare is built around two key concepts – simplicity in its user interface and robustness in the underlying network replication protocols. It has been designed to seamlessly work, each and every time. As part of these guiding principles, Big Canvas PhotoShare is free and does not require any registration or password for personal use and server storage. In addition, all changes the user makes (adding new photos, changing titles, changing permissions, etc.) are asynchronously replicated on the server in the background, achieving a seamless user experience. The application quits when necessary, and immediately resumes and completes any pending actions when selected, thereby hiding any network latency from the user. Finally, all changes persist locally across the application session until the server receives and confirms the replication – so even in the middle of uploading (asynchronous replication), the user is free to receive a phone call, and the application silently recovers from lost network connections.

Pricing and Availability

Big Canvas PhotoShare is free and available immediately at the iPhone store on iTunes. Stay tuned for an enhanced “PRO” version, coming soon!

About Big Canvas

Big Canvas is a creative developer of online and on-device applications for the iPhone and iTouch. The company’s first application, Big Canvas PhotoShare, allows users to instantly and seamlessly share, manage and store photos online. Big Canvas was founded by Satoshi Nakajima and Yuichiro Masui. Nakajima is the creator of the world’s first CAD application for the personal computer, and a defining force behind the architecture for Microsoft Windows 95 and the creation of Internet Explorer 3.0. Nakajima previously founded UIEvolution® and co-founded venture firm Ignition, LLC. The company is based in Bellevue, Wash. For more information, please visit www.bigcanvasinc.com.