Odysee, an app that lets you privately back up and share your photos and videos , has been acquired by Google. The app, which is available for iOS and Android, lets users back up their photos and videos on their home computers.
As per the terms of acquisition, the app will shut down on from Februry 23, and the entire team will join the Google+ team. Odysee also has an API, which can be integrated to third party apps so as to use app’s features. Since Odysee’s team will join Google+, you can expect more offline photo options from Google on Google+ soon.
As a result of this acquisition, Odysee’s app from both iOS App Store and Google’s Play Store has been pulled down along with account of its maker, Nimbuzz Inc. There is also not much detail available regarding how many users downloaded Odysee. The app had raised a $760K seed round earlier, which included entrepreneur Ed Han and food tech company Goji Food Solutions CEO Alex Shubat as investors.
Google isn’t new to acquiring early-stage startups so as to include them into its own service. Just last week, it acquired a kids-centric startup LaunchPad Toys, so as to bring out a kids-only version of YouTube. While rumours earlier said that Google may simply filter adult content to bring out a similar service, but the LaunchPad acquisition made it clear that the search giant will probably launch an all-new platform.
This Odysee acquisition too brings in some interesting rumours along with it. A report in Bloomberg had earlier suggested that the search giant is planning to launch a Photos App, which will come out of its Google+ offering. The app is rumoured to be standalone in nature. However, it will interesting to see as to how Google differentiates its service from the already crowded photo-based app market, which includes some well-established and backed players like Facebook-owned Instagram, Yahoo-owned Flickr, DropBox and others.
Odysee lets users log in using their Facebook credentials, and was co-founded by Raghavan Menon and Shiva Javalagi. Though there are many photo-sharing options available, what specifically differentiates Odysee from others, is its feature, wherein it stores your photo into your own home computer rather than a public cloud. This is a huge positive, considering how wary people are these days of cloud services, due to numerous data breaches and reservations regarding how the company may use that particular information.
The full note, posted on Odysee’s website is as shown :
We are excited to share that the Odysee Platform Team will be joining the Google+ Team.
Odysee’s vision was to be the easiest way for everyone to capture unlimited memories and access them everywhere. We are very excited to join Google where we’ll continue to focus on building amazing products that people love.
Our deepest thanks to every one of our users. To help you with the transition, the Odysee service will continue till Feb 23rd and soon after that all your photos and videos will be available as a downloadable archive.
