We were saying that mobile business should not only focus on location, but also the phone pictures. Glad to see more and more Chinese mobile applications have emerged and entered the market. Camera360, invested by Matrix Partner is one of the best on image processing, but we are still waiting for its iPhone version and more social elements to be implemented. Dingzai, as one of early players working on mobile photo-sharing available for both iPhone and Android, also confirmed its $1.5millions investment from Junwei Financial Group.
Like Instagram, Dingzai also provides several image filters, such as Lomo, B&W etc. You can create a new album and upload the image which can be shared with others too. Dingzai also has a web-based service via which users can manage their images uploaded, view their friends’ uploads and send a message to friends. Using Dingzai’s mobile application, the images can be easily shared to social media such as Sina weibo, Renren etc. Every user can upload up to 25,600 pictures for free.
We are playing with Dingzai. The web-based service has limited functions but is good complement for its mobile application. On mobile, the photo processing is good and fast but not that convenient as we expected. e.g. You are only allowed to use one filter per image, and seems that now you can not view your friends’ uploads right on the application.
Dingzai team is based in Shenzhen and the company is set up in 2008. It is reported that the $1.5millions new investment takes 50% of company share. The money will be used on team building, R&D and international marketing.