Daus Gonia of Inmoto.in was one of the presenters at Monday night’s Obsat featuring HoRepublik, talking about his photo printing service which became a finalist at id-byte Startup Hunt. Inmoto.in provides a hashtag-powered photo printing service intended for events, brands, and public spaces as on of their visitor activity points.
“Inmoto.in is a collaboration of hardware, software, and memories. We don’t just built the application but we also build the hardware and collect data from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. We build our own printers and devices”, said Gonia. “The service was initially built for brands but we found that it is increasingly being used at weddings. We also want to deploy this at schools, museums, and public places”.
Because it is a printing service and it takes advantage of hashtags, it creates buzz not just at the event but also on social media as people would talk about having keepsakes or mementos and they would spread the printed photo on those networks, resulting in an Inception like effect where the printed version of a digital photo gets redistributed digitally.
How it works is attendees at an event that has deployed Inmoto.in simply post photos to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter with the corresponding hashtag determined by the service and the photos will then be printed on site by Inmoto.in using its printing system.
Early on, the system was easily exploited as it will grab any social media post with the corresponding hashtag and print the attached photo. Gonia told the story of how a friend actually uploaded screenshots of his thesis to have it printed by Inmoto which at that point was being deployed at an event. Sure enough, the thesis pages were being printed remotely, so Gonia and his team had to stop the service for a while.
Today, Inmoto.in has a geofencing filter which allows the system to ignore social media posts that originate from outside of an event. Gonia said that as an early deterrent, the system will only accept photos posted within 1 kilometer radius.
Inmoto.in has a core team of four people but backed by 15 more from Inmotion, the company for which Gonia works. He said that with 10 wedding events in a week, the team needs no venture funding. They currently have four sets of equipments ready to deploy at any time with the ability to print 120 photos per printer per hour, but they plan to expand that to 12 sets.
The company isn’t interested in expanding too much, saying that resources will not only be stretched too thinly but an expansion also involves a lot of capital to manage so the team prefers to keep things lean. To maintain that approach yet still accommodate for expansion, Inmoto.in will be rolling out a licensing model for which it will provide the service, API, and support but encourage potential partners to build their own printing set instead.
At the moment Inmoto.in’s entire system is still quite rough and complicated to deploy, but once the team has managed to streamline the process, it would open its licensing. The company has yet to disclose its licensing model nor whether it will implement a revenue sharing scheme with partners.