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Imageloop Gets Funding

imageloop logo According to Deutsche Startups (german) Cologne based imageloop has received another round of funding from investment firm media ventures. No official accouncement has been made yet. Last year imageloop has raised more than 1 million Euros from investors including Andreas Weigend (former Chief Scientist with Amazon.com), the private-equity firm Otto Wolff GmbH, Bernd Schlobohm and Gerd Eickers (QSC) and internet business angel Mehrdad Piroozram.

imageloop lets you easily create animated slideshows from your photos and integrate them as a widget on your blog, website or at various social networks. Their plans are ambitious – in their own words:

With more than 10 million played slideshows per month imageloop is the market leader in Europe for this type of online service. Our goal is to become the number one European platform for photo Hosting“, as Stefan Riehl, the COO of imageloop, comments. „There is no easier way to create and embed slideshows in the Web – not even with competitors such as the US services Slide, Rockyou or Photobucket.

screenshot imageloop

imageloop is nicely executed indeed and they are trying to innovate (e.g. the presentation to slideshow widget or imageloopR which updates a slideshow from a photostream at flickr), but quality alone probably will not help them gaining market share. Compelling widgets can generate some viral traction of course, but their major strategy seems to be teaming up with existing platforms to make imageloop available to an existing user base: partnerships with Lulu, motor.de, blauarbeit.de, blogger.de, beepworld.de, TypePad, knuddels and bloomstreet have been announced already.

Currently imageloop if free, premium membership, exclusive third-party products and advertising will be added at a later point.

Fun fact: when the domain imageloop.com became available two months ago they changed their name from imagelooop which was misspelled by most people.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)
☍ 30.07.2007 # imageloop funding