Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

Fotonauts, a startup that just launched at TC 50, is a “Wikipedia for Photos” literally. The company is the brainchild of Jean-Marie Huillot who has been a former CTO of NeXT, a company that Steve Jobs founded, and at the Apple’s Applications Division.

Fotonauts, lets people organize, upload, synchronize, share and search their photos. In addition to this the service fetches data from Wikipedia, Google Maps and other such places. All this data is added to the photo albums and are published as web pages for specific photos.

The service allows users to upload photos from their desktops, though a mobile client is missing at the moment, and other social services like Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook photos, and Picasa etc. In addition to creating your own albums you could follow other people and could also follow a specific place like the Eifel tower to know if any photo is added to it in the future via an event stream.

Huillot demonstrated creating a photo album of his recent visit to Nepal. He uploaded a few photos taken in Katmandu, added an article related to Katmandu from Wikipedia from within the app, added photos of Pashupatinath Temple that he visited in Katmandu. In addition to this he also visited a place called Boudhanath, but couldn’t take any photos since he forgot his camera at home. He told us that this is not a problem at all as you could easily search add for Photos, tagged with Boudhanath and uploaded on the social photo sharing sites under Creative Commons license, to the photo album.

Fotonauts premise is that Photo albums could be created collaboratively like the knowledge that has been created on Wikipedia. Fotonauts is also completely synced with the photo sharing sites and in case you add any tags or meta data to photos on Fotonauts it would automatically be added to the sites on which the photo was originally uploaded.

Fotonauts has recently completed a seed financing round of $2.3 million, led by Brad Silverberg at Ignition Partners and joined by Banexi (France); Digital Garage (Japan); SofttechVC (Bay Area); Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Saul Klein and Ron Conway. Silverberg and Ito join Hullot and Teare on the Board of Directors.

You can watch their TC 50 launch video below: