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Squint No More! Shareable Photos Make It To The Big Screen

This article is more than 8 years old.

What happens at a party when someone wants to share a funny, weird or inspiring photo? Right now, that's a trip to Awkward Town. All we can do is pass around the photo-holder's smartphone, so that everyone gets a second or two to squint at a tiny image. But Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sheldon Laube is betting that there's an easy way to get such shareable photos onto the big screen.

Laube has developed Look Connect. It's a software/hardware combination that engages with users' own photo streams, from the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest and Dropbox. Those photos then are steered onto a 27-inch, high-definition screen called the Look. By Laube's account, a Look app on users' smartphones does all the work. "You won't do anything different than you already do today to get pictures displaying on your Look," he says.

Rather than raise venture capital to get this business rolling, Laube has opted to fund his idea via Kickstarter. Starting this week, he is inviting people to pitch in $349 apiece, in return for the chance to own one of the first 150 Look screens to be made. His fundraising target is $50,000; his projected delivery date is October 2015. Hours after launching the Kickstarter initiative, he had already raised 22% of his target.

As is customary with Kickstarter, if Laube raises his target funding goal in the next month, the project proceeds. If he can't meet the target, funders' offers of money are waived, no one pays anything, and the project is in limbo.

Laube's business model includes a $9.99/month subscription fee for users. That payment entitles users to tap into a separate photo stream of news, sports and fashion photos, as well as a collection of fine-art photos from more than 4,000 museums.

Two years ago, Laube began work on a different version of this idea, focused mostly on helping people use their television sets to display digital versions of famous paintings in their homes.  That concept, known as ArtKick, attracted 40,000 registrants, Laube says. To his chagrin, however, most registrants couldn't break the habit of turning off the TV when they weren't watching a program.

Sharing social media photos -- on a big screen built specifically for that purpose -- feels like a much more compelling idea, Laube says. "We want to help unlock everybody's photos from small devices," he declares.