Digital photo product powerhouse Shutterfly announced recently that is to acquire ThisLife, a less popular video and photo storage service.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Shutterfly did announce that “In the coming months, Shutterfly will layer ThisLife’s technology onto the Shutterfly platform to enable richer storytelling and easier product creation. Consumers will be able to safely and easily preserve, organize and share their memories, regardless of where photos are stored – from Facebook to Picasa to mobile phones”.
ThisLife, which was founded in 2009, raised about $275 million in funding last summer. The photo and video storage and sharing site has a main demographic of families and allows all connections to share albums.
Shutter, which was founded in 1999, offers everything from cards and stationary to unique photo gifts. What sets the site apart is the promise that “it never deletes a photo”. The site has faced off against over 1,000 other photo startup sites. Last year the site did over $600 million in sales.
The digital photo sharing site acquired Tiny Pictures in 2009 and Tiny Prints in 2011. In May of 2012, the company acquired Photoccina, a photo analysis and story-telling startup, and Penguin Digital in September of the same year.
Seemingly, it sounds as if Shutterfly is obtaining smaller photo sharing companies and incorporating their best qualities into the Shutterfly platform.
Shutterfly says that it is using these deals to build “the next generation, fully integrated, platform agnostic solution for organizing, storing, sharing and creating physical and digital products from the web or mobile devices.”
Source: TheNextWeb
