<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.\nName: Lightbox\nQuick Pitch: Lightbox Photos for Android wirelessly syncs your photos across all of your Android devices, and downloads photos shared by friends on social networks for an offline browsing experience.\nGenius Idea: Browse your friends' Facebook and Twitter photos without a wireless connection.\nJust as the rise of desktop computing gave us distinct PC and Mac cultures, the smartphone boom is creating to two distinct schools of thought: iPhone and Android. \nThai Tran, the CEO of Lightbox, is aligning himself and his startup with the latter group, hoping to serve an ever-expanding audience with a photo application experience and user interface that rivals what mobile users will find on iPhone.\nThe startup's first release, Lightbox Photos for Android, is a social camera application with a focus on photo taking, effects, sharing, syncing and consuming. It's not completely dissimilar from the popular mobile photo sharing applications on iPhone, expect it has some important and unique twists.\n\n\n\n\nAs a camera application, you can use Lightbox to snap, shot, share and style photos. The application includes ten different filters, and supports sharing to Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare. \nLightbox shines most in its unseen details. The application has been optimized to work with or without a network connection, so if  you want to capture and share photos from a signal-free subway car, Lightbox won't disappoint. The next time you have a network connection, the application will automatically upload and share your photos.\nLightbox is also working away in the background to sync photos from your Lightbox library to your Honeycomb-powered Android tablet (if you have the Lightbox app installed) and your online photo collection. The process is similar to Apple's soon-to-be-released iCloud photo features, except Lightbox syncs over WiFi and 3G and treats the cloud, not the PC, as the master.\nAs a social application, Lightbox is like nothing we've seen before. Connect your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr accounts, and Lightbox will use background processing to constantly look for photos shared by your friends. The application will download the 200 most recent photos shared by your social network friends and present you with a photo stream that is accessible whether you have a network connection or not.\nYou can socially engage with friends' photos offline as well. If you're offline, you can still retweet a photo from a Twitter friend and then choose to comment on or \"like\" a photo from a Facebook friend, and Lightbox will queue up the actions and perform them on your behalf the next time your Android phone is connected to the web via WiFi or 3G.\nLightbox Photos is the first of Lightbox's planned Android releases. The startup is taking a very aggressive Android-first stance because it believes the platform will become ubiquitous in the next few years. \n\"Android is going to take the market position of where Nokia is today,\" Tran predicts. \"Android phones will, within two years, be just as cheap as the non-smartphones you buy today.\"\nTran also believes that Android users, when compared to iPhone owners, are often presented with inferior or subpar applications. He sees Lightbox as countering the norm by giving Android owners a best-in-class application.\nLightbox is a five-person team based in London. The startup has raised $1.1 million in seed funding.\n\n\n\n\nSeries Supported by Microsoft BizSpark\n\n\nThe Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/06/15/lightbox/>