William Agush, a marketing veteran who lives in Wellesley, this week launched a new iPhone app called Shuttersong that lets you easily match a photo with music, then for better or worse, share it.
Shuttersong, based in Wellesley and which has been known to have meetings at La Riviera restaurant, has an Android version of the app on the way and will look to make money by working with companies who want to use Shuttersongs to spread their messages by enlisting the aid of creative customers.
The company got its start, according to Agush, when he stumbled across a 1995 photo of his then-5-year-old son Zachary last summer that was in a frame that played the boy’s voice when a button was pushed. That emotional experience inspired Agush to set about working with some techies to create the app.
While Shuttersong lets you match songs with photos in a JPEG format, you can also record and embed 15 seconds worth of words or other sounds to go with your images.
“Shuttersong uniquely fills the white space between three exploding trends: shareable photography, short-form video and sound,” Agush says in a press release. “Using patent-pending technology, we’ve accomplished what no-one else has been able to do: creating single JPEG files that combine high-quality photographic images with sound.” Users of the app can share their mini masterpieces via email and various social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Shuttersong has gotten some early buzz this week from the business and tech press, including the Globe and Boston Business Journal, which reports that Agush has raised $800K in seed funding from angel investors and is seeking another $2M to $3M. While Shuttersong is currently a one man-show (well, Agush has worked with developers at Find & Form and designers at Carbone Smolan), the business is looking to build a staff of 10 by year end, according to the BBJ.
You can even embed the musical pictures, as I’ve done here, via the app’s wordless user interface, which we found fairly intuitive. We matched up this photo of the Charles River in Wellesley (using the Instagrammy photo editing option in Shuttersong to make it sepia) with a snippet from Okkervil River‘s new song, “Down, Down the Deep River.”
Leave a Reply