Ex-Xobni Guys Now Printing Photos: First Up, Postagram for Instagram
“A printed photo is the most ubiquitously appreciated physical gift in the world,” according to Sincerely co-founder Matt Brezina, who’s launching a new company today to make it easier to print physical photos from phones.
Brezina’s first target is the three million or so early adopters of the mobile photo-sharing service Instagram, who take square-shaped pictures from their daily life using their nice iPhone cameras and make them look old-timey and stylized. Sincerely’s new iPhone and Web app launching today, called Postagram, prints an Instagram pic and a 140-character message on a glossy postcard and sends it anywhere in the world for $0.99. (As a launch special, one pic per user is free until 9 am PT on Wednesday.)
Brezina last summer left Xobni, the email application start-up he co-founded, and co-founded Sincerely with early Xobni employee Bryan Kennedy, who had launched and sold an iPhone credit card terminal called Swipe.
The San Francisco-based company isn’t disclosing any fundraising yet, but they have hired three additional employees and outsourced their printing and shipping.
Mobile phones accounted for 42 percent of photos taken last December, according to an NPD Group study. Meanwhile, the Photo Marketing Association reported that 57 percent of prints were picked up at retail (e.g. kiosks), 14 percent ordered online and received by mail, and 27 percent printed at home (though I believe those stats are only for photos from digital still cameras, as camera phone prints are more rare).
