I did some work for an ecommerce consultancy a couple of years ago where we were literally looking a a customer's request for "ability for customers to upload photos of themselves wearing our clothing" and saying, "Why isn't there a white box image service?" Now there is.<p>To those who have not dealt with user-generated media content, it is easy to underestimate the amount of effort involved in building a secure, monitorable system. Building an image grinding pipeline is non-trivial, even though all the open source tools are of high quality. Once users start uploading photos, marketing will realize that they need to be cropped, resized, and enhanced. As soon as your users upload the first pieces of questionable content, you will have to build an image moderation app. Then, you have to build a feature where the user sees his own photos on the site privately when logged in because users hate the lack of immediacy. Then, your marketing people will ask for video. Totally separate pipeline. Then, someone will upload custom-generated 40Kx40k single-color jpgs to see if your image crunching pipeline allows denial of service attacks. Once you get your first upload of child pornography, your legal team will become much more interested and ask how you are ensuring the destruction of these images from all your servers. Now, you'll learn that a reasonable portion of your bandwidth is being used to serve up deep-linked content for sketchy sites. Oh, and other stuff will happen too. Then, you'll see the value of Chute.
I don't think they know what Twilio is.<p>The article has close to zero content about the company, from reading Chute's own website it looks like it provides an API service for managing rich-media UGC content.
Can someone explain what Twilio for media content means? Twilio is essentially API-driven telephony infrastructure. It doesn't look like Chute allows you to use an API to drive real-world audio-visual infrastructure (that would be cool!), but is rather User-Generated Content with some do-it-yourself APIs and libraries.
I just used a site with Chute for the first time yesterday (<a href="http://www.refer.ly" rel="nofollow">http://www.refer.ly</a>) and it blew my mind how easy it was to grab photos from the various cloud like places I upload them to (facebook, flickr, etc) and use them right there on Referly through Chute's widget. Instead of having to do the old "Right click, save, upload" method. It is ridiculously easy and awesome. Well done, Chute.
Met Gregarious at StartupFest in Montreal. Great guy, and awesome startup. Happy to see they got some seed funding.<p>Now if only Gregarious could figure out which bus stop to get off at. :-P
Congrats, Chute looks like something which can become synonyms with images. On the other hand its interesting how Twilio is always used as the placeholder for API.
Congrats on the funding, Gregarious!<p>Chute definitely seems like an interesting company, and I'm glad it's not just-another-photo-sharing site. Looking forward to seeing what else comes from your camp!