Mooter Media, a digital media developer, has snagged $15 million from a California venture capital group to develop a platform in the growing area of social photography. Mooter says it’s one of the larger investments in technology and online media in recent Australian history, at least since 99Designs secured $45 million in April.
The infusion from La Jolla Cove Investors will help Mooter Media (which also has offices in Singapore and San Francisco) and technical development partner Hot Shot Media to commercialise, market and launch ImageSocial, “the web’s first comprehensive social photography platform,” Mooter says in a news release.
Social photography makes use of all the toys now available to shooters via wireless connections to the Internet, including geo-tags, online mapping and live streams. Mooter says the ImageSocial platform will be used to largest online photo contest ever — “a global reality search for the most defining moments of our generation, with the capacity to forever impact how the world approaches photography and imagery.”
Give Mooter credit; they aren’t thinking small.
Chris Jermyn, managing director and CEO of Hot Shot Media, invokes the wild success of the “Idol” singing-contest franchise when he describes what ImageSocial could achieve online.
“Our similarities to ‘Idol’ run deep, harnessing the power of social media to allow interactive competition on a massive, global scale,” he says in the news release. “But those who were just viewers can now become participants.”
Hot Shot Media has been tinkering with and expanding the ImageSocial platform over the past year, rolling out contests on increasingly larger scales. A good example is Snapshot Scholar, a competition first offered on two San Francisco Bay area university campuses, then expanded to entice students across California.
Image by Cupcakes2
