Picture Perfect: Ron Sheridan's New Venture - Pixt.com - Aims to Revolutionize Photo Sharing + Lana del Rey Wins Major Brit Award

While covering the DOMAINfest Global conference in Santa Monica, California earlier this month I bumped into serial entrepreneur Ron Sheridan (the former Business Development Director at Oversee.net who was the subject of our February 2009 Cover Story). When I asked Ron what he was working on now, he had something really cool to show me.

That something is called Pixt.com - a new platform, currently in beta, that pulls all of your photos from multiple sources (including Facebook) into one central location with features I've never seen before. You can spread the photos out on your wall and, like real snapshots, each one can be moved around (by you or visitors to your Pixt page), flipped over to see notes about the photo and filed into photo drawers you create to keep all of your photos neatly organized. 

Sheridan is always looking at new web-related  opportunities and when he saw this technology that had been created by four partners, he quickly invested in the project, taking significant equity in the enterprise. Since Pixt.com is a free platform, the first thing that popped into my mind is "how are you going to monetize this?" Sheridan promptly showed me real businesses that were already incorporating the Pixt technology. For example a vineyard licensed it and is letting their customers post their own wine related photos on the vineyard website's Pixt-powered page. This kind of fresh, appealing user-generated content will almost certainly increase a business site's traffic and keep people coming back for more. 

I also liked what Pixt does for online shopping. Let's say you are interested in buying some new neckties. Pixt will pull in photos from all of the silk ties offered on Amazon, for instance, allowing you to then easily pick your favorites, 

Ron Sheridan

click on any you want to order (which takes you right to Amazon for fulfillment) or file them in a necktie drawer you create for future reference. The more I looked at the platform the more I realized how many possibilities it opens up. Given the massive reach of Facebook, another cool thing about Pixt is that you can access and use all of its features from within your Facebook account, without ever leaving.

One thing Ron asked me to pass along to his many friends in the domain community is that he would like your help during the platform's beta period. You can do that by requesting an invite through the site (you can also select a "Just Try It Out" option without signing up), playing around with Pixt and letting them know of any issues that need to be resolved or improvements you would like to see. It is a very impressive platform - one we all may be hearing a lot more about in the future.

(Posted Feb. 21, 2012)