Ontela, a start-up focusing on accessing photos on mobile phones, has landed $4.5 million in series A funding from Hunt Ventures, Oak Investment Partners and Voyager Capital. The funding will be used to move from closed service trials to market deployment of its PicDeck platform. PicDeck allows people to automatically move photos they’ve taken with their mobile phone to a PC or a web-based phone service...there’s a lot of those about, but Ontela is targeting simplicity and the lower end of the market.
“We wanted this to be ridiculously easy to use for everyone, and that can mean removing features,” Dan Shapiro, CEO of Ontela told MocoNews. The system doesn’t support tagging photos or other more advanced uses, it simply puts the photo somewhere else. “We gave away all these features for the sake of simplicity and reliability...We’ve focused this on the mainstream users, and that means Java and Brew.”
The service can be set up to send the photo to multiple places once it’s taken, and the user doesn’t do anything for that, although Dan said that “advanced users can go in an uncheck any or all of the boxes”.
Ontela aims to sell the service to carriers or imaging companies like Flickr or ScanR. The application is designed to be easy for the customer to download and start. Dan said that although there are no firm plans for more funding rounds, “working with the carriers can be an expensive business so we wouldn’t rule out that happening in the future”.