Michael Szewczyk was sitting around this past summer, taking stock of all the photo sharing apps that were blossoming and wondering why all this user generated content wasn’t being monetized better. So the director of operations at San Francisco start-up Qwiki left the company and returned to New York, where he set about tackling that opportunity.

The result is a new iPhone app called Kapture that lets merchants, businesses and brands reward loyal users for sharing pictures of a business or product on Facebook. It’s taking a habit that many consumers already do – taking pictures of meals and establishments – and giving merchants a way to leverage that as a marketing channel and also build a better relationship with their customers. And it lets consumers benefit from their interest in certain businesses and brands.

“We created Kapture to take this experience that people already know – taking pictures and sharing them – and we asked: why not reward users for sharing this with their friends,” said Szewczyk. ”With Kapture, the individuals visiting a business become their social media troops in a way.”

Photos ops offer rewards

Kapture is starting at 25 businesses in New York including the Gansevoort Park hotel and Battery Place Market and has many more lined up to go soon. The merchants offer a range of small discounts and free items for users who take a picture and share it on Facebook. For example, Gansevoort Park is offering a free glass of champagne for people who take a picture at its rooftop bar. Spin Ping Pong is also offering a free drink for a picture of a user’s game. The pictures gets stamped with a water mark from the merchant and link back to a landing page from Kapture that tells where it was taken and provides information on any discounts. The Facebook posting itself doesn’t include any discount information so it appears like a regular update.

The app allows users to see what “photo ops” are nearby and when they get to a participating location, they can take a picture through the app. They can then tag friends, share the picture directly to Facebook and then receive a coupon, which they show to employees. Kapture plans to extend support for Android and Twitter next year. Kapture doesn’t actively try to ferret out fraud but does include a button to report abuse. Szewczyk said social pressure on Facebook should also curb people’s desire to spam their friends using Kapture.

A tool for merchants
Szewczyk moved to the Bay Area from New York two years ago to be part of the founding team on Qwiki, which presents search information in short multimedia presentations. He was excited to return to New York and get started on his own venture, which is now up to 7 people. He is in the process of still raising seed funding and has gotten investments from Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce and COO Navin Thukkaram. He’s also signed on some notable advisors including Serkan Piantino, who is leading Facebook’s New York engineeing office and Alexia Giles, principal of new business development at Google.Merchants can set up their own Kapture account online through a dashboard and set their rewards and what they want users to do in the picture. They can also determine how often they want to run rewards and how many they want to offer each day. Business owners will have a Kapture sticker they can put in their window and they can also put up signs directing people to specific discounts and the app.

Leveraging user generated content

I think Kapture is a smart idea that can be a helpful tool for merchants if it can scale up. Business owners are getting bombarded with offers from companies like Groupon and Living Social. But those deals often require them to offer steep discounts with sometimes half of the revenue going back to the deal provider. That can be helpful for some businesses, who want access to email lists from these deal providers. But for many merchants, they already have an avenue for getting the word out: their own customers. If they can better leverage their existing fans, they can market to a wide audience without having to offer big deals. Using photos is also smart because it’s an action that people already do. I just took a photo of a dish I had in Brooklyn just because I liked the meal. Getting rewarded for that might push me to come back and it would definitely make me appreciate that restaurant more.

CEO Michael Szewczyk

This is a growing opportunity, helping merchants and retailers leverage social actions and user generated content. I recently wrote about Social Passport, another New York company that lets people use QR codes and NFC on their smartphone to trigger social actions such as liking, following, checking-in or posting about a business. Piictu, yet another New York company, launched publicly in September and offers users a way to have conversations through pictures. The company said it sees a way in the future to help brands sponsor picture conversations on Piictu and help create user-generated content. Szewczyk said pictures are just the first step for Kapture, which will eventually become more of a platform for leveraging all kinds of user generated content.

Long term prospects

Kapture still has a ways to go and there are all kinds of companies looking to capture the local advertising budgets of merchants and retailers. And I wonder if this will be a feature that other competitors will try and incorporate into their products. Facebook and Google could also be interested in picking up Kapture if it gathers steam, especially considering their advisor connections. But I’d like to see what Kapture can do on its own. It’s got an interesting take on user generated content and could be a good tool for merchants looking to make better use of social media.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

We all know that Microsoft added Twitter integration as part of the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update. The integration allowed you to view Twitter feeds in your People hub, reply or retweet to them, post a new tweet, receive notifications of Twitter mentions in the Me tile, as well as integrating your Twitter followers with your contact list. However, the tweets you see in the What’s New feed in the People hub were always limited to text-based tweets only. Even if the tweet contains a link to an image, the feed would display a link to the photo only, without actually displaying the image.

This seems to be changing recently, with Pocketnow.com reporting (and confirmed by myself) that some Twitter photos are now showing up in the What’s New feed in the People hub, and because of this, they now appear in the Pictures hub too:

It seems like Microsoft had been doing some tweaks to its Windows Live backend to make this happen. Could this be related to the recent updates to Windows Live? Are you seeing Twitter photos in your Windows Phone What’s New feed too? If you have noticed anything else different to your Windows Live social feeds, whether on Messenger or on Windows Phone, let us know in the comments below!

LiveSide.net

Couldn’t make it out to the Santa Clara Valley Fair Microsoft store opening? Don’t worry, a Neowin reader has you covered and was able to snap a few pictures from the event. Read more…

Neowin.net

With the tablet wars raging on, Motorola is apparently working on their Xoom 2, and now pictures have leaked of their upcoming tablet Read more…

Neowin.net

Screenshots of Google’s upcoming Android refresh “Ice Cream Sandwich” have leaked out from two sources. They indicate a UI shift towards Honeycomb. Read more…

Neowin.net

Earlier we showed you how Manan Kakkar had noticed that it’s now possible to stream music from SkyDrive to your Windows Phone, and now Makram Daou at MobileTechWorld follows up, pointing out that this works with video too, and provides a neat trick to be able to stream video directly from the Pictures Hub, rather than the Office Hub as we showed you before.

Daou points out that these changes aren’t the result of anything new in SkyDrive, but just a side-effect of bringing IE9 to Windows Phone in the Mango update:

Microsoft didn’t change anything to the Skydrive: there’s no new music streaming service, functionality etc.. The only “new” thing is that IE9 Mobile in the 7712 Mango build can now properly open the music and videos files hosted on a Skydrive (just like it has always work with similar files hosted on any other server….)

Now, on to the trick.  It’s as easy as changing a setting on your SkyDrive folder(s) containing video, from “Documents” to “Photos”.  You can change the folder settings by first clicking on the circled “i” to the right of the folder list:

…and then changing the folder type to Photos:

After that, the folder will show up in your Pictures Hub, where you can then stream video directly from SkyDrive to your (Mango enabled) phone!  Nice!

(thanks for the tip, “Ike”!)

LiveSide.net

Earlier we showed you how Manan Kakkar had noticed that it’s now possible to stream music from SkyDrive to your Windows Phone, and now Makram Daou at MobileTechWorld follows up, pointing out that this works with video too, and provides a neat trick to be able to stream video directly from the Pictures Hub, rather than the Office Hub as we showed you before.

Daou points out that these changes aren’t the result of anything new in SkyDrive, but just a side-effect of bringing IE9 to Windows Phone in the Mango update:

Microsoft didn’t change anything to the Skydrive: there’s no new music streaming service, functionality etc.. The only “new” thing is that IE9 Mobile in the 7712 Mango build can now properly open the music and videos files hosted on a Skydrive (just like it has always work with similar files hosted on any other server….)

Now, on to the trick.  It’s as easy as changing a setting on your SkyDrive folder(s) containing video, from “Documents” to “Photos”.  You can change the folder settings by first clicking on the circled “i” to the right of the folder list:

…and then changing the folder type to Photos:

After that, the folder will show up in your Pictures Hub, where you can then stream video directly from SkyDrive to your (Mango enabled) phone!  Nice!

(thanks for the tip, “Ike”!)

LiveSide.net

There have been rumors for months that Apple has plans to create a cheaper and/or smaller version of its iPhone product. Now a web site has supposedly leaked pictures that appear at first glance to show a “lite” version of Apple’s popular smartphone. TechCrunch has the pictures which originally came…

Neowin.net

The first images of what is to be Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7 device have leaked to the public. The design is essentially identical to that of the recently announced Nokia N9 (powered by MeeGo), however the images clearly show both the device running Windows Phone 7 and a different…

Neowin.net

When you type a query that’s popular in Google Image Search, Google’s Web search engine shows a list of the most relevant images in an OneBox result. If you add “pictures”, “images” to your query, the OneBox now includes a lot more images.

“If we detect that your query has ‘high image intent’ (meaning, we’re pretty sure you’re looking for images) we’ll start showing more images on the page. If you add words like ‘photos’, ‘pictures’, and ‘images’ to a query, that means you’re probably not looking for a blog post or video. Showing more images on the main search results page makes it just that much faster to find the image you’re looking for,” informs Google.

Another change is that Google will show a larger thumbnail when you mouse an image from the OneBox, just like in Google Image Search. The OneBox result now looks like the first page of images search results, but it’s interesting to notice that the ranking is slightly different.

Google Operating System