We knew mobile was going to be a huge focus for ThingLink, the Finnish startup that enables individuals and brands to easily enrich images with sound, video, links, text and whatnot, and share them with the world.
Today, the company is formally launching ThingLink Mobile, a free consumer-oriented iOS app that popped up in the iTunes store last week.
The app allows iPhone and iPad users to make their photos interactive by embedding videos and text within the pictures, and to easily share them by email, to Twitter or on Facebook.
Although the app can be used by consumers, ThingLink’s Web app has traditionally been used by a number of big publishers (more than 155,000 and counting) as well as advertisers to increase engagement with their content.
The Washington Post was the first news outlet to use a pre-release version of the ThingLink Mobile app, creating interactive images of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Ulla Engeström, founder and CEO of Thinglink, said:
“ThingLink Mobile has one goal: to give more meaning to your camera images, allowing them to instantly come alive in new ways.
As a storytelling tool, ThingLink Mobile unleashes creative ways to capture deeper moments. It also brings the ability to microblog within images to anyone with a smartphone.”
She’s been using the app recently when “making nettle pasta with the kids”. Other example images are available here.
It’s important to note that ThingLink Mobile is limited, in the sense that you can only add video and text tags to photos today, whereas the Thinglink Web-based application allows users to add content from SoundCloud, Spotify, Google Maps, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites.
Most of ThingLink’s users are currently in English-speaking countries, with 85 percent of them in the United States (hence why the company has an office in New York), and Western Europe.
Engeström said in an interview late last year that what sets ThingLink apart from others in this space, such as Stipple and Luminate, by believing in curation rather than automation, and giving publishers the necessary tools to carefully add curated, meaningful tags to images.
Top image credit: Thinkstock
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