You are absolutely right that there are many ways to accomplish basic uploading and hosting. In fact, we've used those same gems time and time again and it was the process of re-building it that seemed problematic. When we started working on mobile, however, most of those things were not as readily available or accessible.
That said, we're much more focused on the workflow that is required to make those photos useful. For example, if you're a publisher, you may need to have rights cleared, captions, user information collected, and even moderation before any user-generated content is "usable" to you.
We're happy to help anyone get their prototype running and hopefully offer enough value on top that they won't ever want to leave.
Yeah. I have a lightly used production stack that is the very beginnings of a service like this. I think there is a lot of potential value here, if you can strike the right pricing/feature balance. Also a ton of opportunity to add value (look at some of the Ideé APIs for ideas: http://ideeinc.com/ ). I'll be keeping on eye on this product & space in general.
You are absolutely right that there are many ways to accomplish basic uploading and hosting. In fact, we've used those same gems time and time again and it was the process of re-building it that seemed problematic. When we started working on mobile, however, most of those things were not as readily available or accessible.
That said, we're much more focused on the workflow that is required to make those photos useful. For example, if you're a publisher, you may need to have rights cleared, captions, user information collected, and even moderation before any user-generated content is "usable" to you.
We're happy to help anyone get their prototype running and hopefully offer enough value on top that they won't ever want to leave.