Aviary is a New York-based startup that’s built a powerful suite of lightweight web based tools that’s popular among digital artists and prosumers. But the company is making a big pivot, ditching Flash and slimming down its tools to target the average consumer.
Over the holiday, Aviary introduced their first product for the internet laymen, a super simple photo editor, Feather, that works right from a Web browser.
“When you stop to think about it, there is a huge market opportunity for an always-on, browser-based photo editor,” says Alex Taub, head of business development at Aviary. “Three billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month, but there is no simple way to edit those images right from the web page.”
For Feather, Aviary switched from Flash to HTML5, meaning sites can embed Feather as a widget. They have also made it easy for third-party sites to customize Feather so it offers just the editing capabilities their users need.
Hot New York startups like Fashism and Market Publique are some of the initial partners for Feather. The advantage for these companies is user engagement, since editing with Feather happens without ever leaving the site, as users would with a service like Picnik or Pixlr.
The advantages of a service like Feather will be even more pronounced on mobile, where browsing multiple pages is a pain and support for Flash is much thinner. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a new consumer direction for Aviary and not a one-off experiment.
bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper
