WebRTC World Feature Article Free eNews Subscription

June 16, 2014

FotoIN Talks the Power of 'Snap, Tag and Annotate'


For FotoIN, the leading provider of a mobile and cloud-based solution for photo documentation and reporting, its story started with two teens, aged 16. During his junior year of high school, FotoIN Founder and CEO Silvije "Sly" Barisic left his hometown of Croatia—formerly Yugoslavia —to come and live in the states with a family in Virginia, who also had a 16-year-old, FotoIN’s now Chief Operating Officer James Gates.

“From the moment he got off the airplane we were best friends,” Gates told Webrtcworld at the WebRTC Conference & Expo, taking place from Jun 17-19 in Atlanta, Georgia. “Fast forward from when we meet in 1995 to 2011 and we started talking about photos.”

At the time, Sly was working in the private equity space managing real estate, spending ample time sifting through photos. But Sly quickly realized that photos without context—such as where they were taken, for whom, and for what purpose—were just fragmented. And when Sly bought a smarthpone and learned it came preconfigured with automatic cloud storage, his wheels started turning. He started wondering if he could move photos over to the cloud and automate the product.

As such, in 2013 FotoIN was born, a company dedicated to photo documentation and management. With Sly, Co-Founder and CTO Ivan Klaric, and Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer Danielle Barisic at the helm, FotoIN gained its foot holding. Today, the mobile application has found its niche for taking all of your photos and automatically saving and organizing them into appropriate folders within your cloud storage, where they are easily accessible for immediate or later use by specified team members. 

“There are companies out there that do photos, but there are no other companies like us that take photos in the way that we do,” Gates said. “We embed metadata into the file and then automate that to the cloud seamlessly.”

Since its inception, the company has made big waves in the construction, property management, real estate, merchandise and insurance verticals. General contractors and sub-contractors, in particular, have embraced the application wholeheartedly as they can use the app to document as-built conditions, complete punch lists and share progress updates. In the construction space, FotoIN is able to help companies enjoy a 10:1 ROI, says Gates, and enables companies to focus their time on other tasks, aside from organizing and taking photos.

“Our clients can snap, tag and annotate and FotoIN does the rest,” said Gates.

One of the chief benefits of FotoIN is the application removes the barrier between field workers and the corporate office. The company prides itself on saving its clients time and money, enabling faster communication and fewer repeated field visits and resolving issues before they escalate.

The inherent benefits of the application have attracted the attention of some leading cloud vendors, resulting in FotoIN forming partnerships with companies such as Egnyte, Citrix ShareFile and Box. Moving forward, the company is setting its sights on growing its insurance business. 

FotoIN attributes much of its success to the sheer proliferation of photos today. In fact, today’s consumers take more photos today than ever before because they often have a high-quality camera on them at all times, thanks to the surge of smartphones and high-definition cameras. As Gates explains, everyone has a mobile device and most people have multiple. Coupled with the fact that there are 75 million mobile workers in the U.S. and the 1.2 billion mobile workers worldwide and the business case for photos becomes compelling.

“A few years ago, consultants and company leaders would rank order their strategies, and mobile strategy could usually be found somewhere in the middle to bottom tier,” Gates said. “Now, we see companies where that thinking has evolved to a mobile-first strategy.”

“Smarpthones and tablets have perpetuated that strategy and companies want to be more nimble in the field,” he added. “The cloud has accelerated this in that you can grab more data and store it more easily. We’ve harnessed the power of these technologies to offer an application that provides field workers with a valuable tool to increase their efficiency and accuracy of their reports.”

FotoIN shows no signs of slowing down and is hitting the road this summer to spread the word about its core competencies and unique value proposition. In fact, in just a few days Sly is heading to Washington, D.C., to speak at the June 26 18th annual American Claims Conference. To learn more about FotoIN, click here.  




Edited by Maurice Nagle
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]




FOLLOW US

Free WebRTC eNewsletter

Sign up now to recieve your free WebRTC eNewsletter for all up to date news and conference details. Its free! what are you waiting for.