BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

FotoSwipe Takes Cue From Bump, Offers Intuitive Photo-Sharing Software

Following
This article is more than 7 years old.

Do you remember Bump? It was the mobile photo- and data-sharing app that let users easily transfer information by tapping their phones together. After exploding in popularity in the early 2010s, it was acquired by Google and later discontinued in favor of Android Beam.

Bump’s short run stoked demand for peer-to-peer data transfer software that could circumvent the need for email, SMS messaging, cables, flash drives and SD cards. Apple debuted its AirDrop app in 2011 as a first-party choice for Mac and iOS users, and ProxToMe offered a similar file-sharing product for several years before redirecting its focus toward businesses.

FotoSwipe is the newest contender in the accessory-free data transfer arena. It’s the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Sylvain Dufour, former founder of VoIP service Pagoo as well as mobile app development studios 995SOFT and Mobigloo. His years of experience building mobile apps prepared him well for his latest venture.

The beauty of FotoSwipe is its cross-platform functionality. It works with any Android or iOS device as well as on laptops and computers, and any device can share files with another regardless of platform or mobile carrier. And the way you do it is pretty slick, too: you simply use your finger to drag the file off one device and onto the other. That’s it.

Check out the product pitch by Dufour and CTO Bradley Rubin. They even show a short clip to demonstrate how the software works.

Blowing Up the Photo-Sharing Spot

FotoSwipe has been making waves since the company’s founding in 2014. The team completed an accelerator program with Groundwork Labs and secured $1.06 million in funding between July 2014 and April 2015, with North Carolina angel David Gardner among the list of investors.

The app launched in October 2014 following beta testing and gained traction rapidly. It has been downloaded 2 million times, with users in just about every country in the world and 300,000 devices connected each month. FotoSwipe users transferred 10.5 million photos and 350,000 videos in March alone.

Dufour decided early in development to focus on sharing photos and videos because those are historically the main things mobile users like to transfer, but all kinds of files can be made compatible with some software tweaks. Contact information, PowerPoint presentations and word documents are a few obvious examples.

And the best part of the app for users? It’s free and doesn’t even require an email registration to get started. As Dufour explains in an interview with a local website, “We want to make adoption of this product absolutely frictionless.” Their approach seems to be working.

Is the Sky the Limit?

FotoSwipe has done fantastically for itself, especially considering much of the work has fallen to only three people (Dufour, Rubin and Director of Mobile Operations Michael Barnes). Now that their business has seen ten-times growth in just one year, they are starting to think about monetization.

The app will still be free, but business subscriptions will be rolled out to let companies’ employees exchange work-related documents like those mentioned above. FotoSwipe is also poised to introduce a global photo-printing option, with which users can have their photos printed by a partnering company and delivered to their mailbox for a fee. The team is also considering in-app advertising as a source of revenue.

It’s tough to think of a reason why FotoSwipe won’t soar to atmospheric heights. The fun, intuitive way the app works coupled with its across-all-platforms functionality put it head and shoulders above the competition.

The company might experience a growth hiccup if its monetization plans don’t pan out or if a new competitor enters the fray, but it seems the only thing that could feasibly kill the app is if people simply stopped wanting to move photos and videos between devices. This appears unlikely given the size of the mobile market and FotoSwipe’s usage statistics so far.

“We think we have a very revolutionary file transfer tool,” says Rubin during his product pitch with Dufour. That may be a bit of an understatement.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website