SnapMyLife launches mobile New Year's Eve initiative

By Giselle Tsirulnik

December 30, 2008

New Year's Eve Times Square

Want to capture the fun and excitement of this New Year's Eve event? SnapMyLife has launched a mobile initiative to do just that.

SnapMyLife is inviting people around the world who own a mobile phone to take a snapshot of their New Year's celebrations at 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m. SnapMyLife's mobile Web community allows users to share, discover and location-tag photos from around the world.

"In addition to enabling SnapMyLife users to instantly share any photos from their mobile phones, we encourage our users to share and tag photos taken during key holidays and events," said David Chang, vice president of marketing at SnapMyLife, Needham, MA.

"We do so to enhance the community aspect of SnapMyLife, and we've found that our top users appreciate seeing how others around the world celebrate a specific holiday," he said. "In fact, one of our avid users recently asked us for our schedule of upcoming events so that he could be prepared to contribute more content.

"In particular, New Years is a particularly broad event since it is applicable to our entire global user base. Note that last month, SnapMyLife had a visitor from every country in the world."

SnapMyLife (http://www.snapmylife.com) is a mobile Web community for instantly sharing and discovering photos from locations around the world.

The site is optimized for viewing directly on mobile phones, offers location tagging and interactive picture maps, and uses filtering technology for its audience and advertisers.

SnapMyLife claims this is the first global, grassroots mobile photo collage of a world event.

People who are interested in participating and seeing the last photos of 2008 and the first of 2009 can view photos of New Year's Eve celebrations around the world.

To see images people are submitting, users can visit http://www.snapmylife.com/tags/show/newyears.

To see photos from specific countries or cities, users have to go to http://www.snapmylife.com/maps.

In order to submit photos to the global photo collage, consumers need to register at http://www.snapmylife.com.

Then, on New Year's Eve, consumers need to email or MMS the photos they take at 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m. to a personal upload address and include the tag "newyears" in the body of the message.
Photos taken with Apple iPhones are automatically geo-tagged.

Consumers with regular phones can simply add their city and country in the text of the email.

"Ringing in 2009 and telling stories through pictures from around the world is a perfect example of what SnapMyLife is about," Mr. Chang said.

"We often see pictures of our local New Year's parties, but through SnapMyLife, you can instantly see how people are celebrating in small towns and big cities on every continent around the world," he said.