Ina Fried

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Start-Up Aims to Cast Mobile Photos in a New Lightt

Apps that take photos or videos are so 2011.

These days, the big thing is apps that try to find some interesting fusion of the two.

Programs like Cinemagram do this by allowing users to create an animated image that is mostly a still image, with video running in a portion of the scene.

A new iPhone app called Lightt offers another take on the photo-video hybrid, taking a series of still images over a 10-second period and then playing them back at faster-than-life speed.

The company didn’t set out with its final product in mind, though.

“The first idea for Lightt was to come up with a simple way to capture daily pictures of your face and animate them over time,” CEO Alex Mostoufi said in an email interview. “It was inspired by the YouTube video where a guy takes a picture of his face every day for several years.”

In trying to build something to do that, though, Mostoufi said he realized that the company had stumbled upon something that was neither still photo nor video.

Now Mostoufi hopes to create a community around sharing such moments. “Lightt is a new way to see and share life as it happens,” Mostoufi said.

Start-ups have been taking different cracks at this notion for a while. Glmps, for example, captures a still image along with video of the few seconds that precede it.

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