Idea to Aggregate Multitude of Photos at Collective Events Leads to Start of New Business

Ideas for starting a business are often in plain sight when people examine a problematic issue in need of a solution. For example, the proliferation of new technology brings both benefits and unintended consequences. Photography is an obvious case.

Today’s technology permits numerous people to easily take pictures at the same event and post them online. The result is uploaded photos of common appeal on disconnected  Facebook pages. Pictures of a shared event – such as a wedding or family reunion – are posted in various locations. No one sees the entire collection of images.

New York photo company Kaptur aims to resolve this situation. The company’s application collects all the digital images taken at a single event by multiple individuals that are uploaded to Facebook. A user of Kaptur sees all of the related photos and permanently retains them.

The company’s president got the idea for Kaptur after finding that pictures of his own wedding were scattered across Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. An algorithm was developed with Kaptur’s eventual chief technology officer to search Facebook for pictures of the wedding.

Eventually, the two entrepreneurs converted their idea into a business. Kaptur is a Facebook app that uses album names, photo captions, and people tags to gather related pictures. When users click on their own pictures, the Kaptur application searches for similar photos and videos to create a custom album for editing and sharing.

Competitors of Kaptur have similar platforms for collecting pictures and creating group albums. But these rivals are a little different than the Kaptur service by their mechanisms for uploading and sharing photos.

Kaptur was launched in 2011 and recently raised its first $2,000,000 from angel investors in early 2012. The company intends to use the funds for marketing its concept to the wedding industry and developing a mobile application.