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Phozi: The Online Photobooth

Phozi is a freshly launched Flash-based site that lets you edit and widget-publish photos in the style of those bizarre photobooths you find in malls and bars: add goofy surrounds, hearts, “BFF!” declarations, etc. There’s no registration required, which is great for getting going quick, although it makes the mobile aspect cumbersome (see below).

Phozi let’s you connect a webcam (via Flash interface), upload a photo from your PC, or send a photo from your cell phone. Once your photo is up on the site, you can edit it, and then publish it with ready-to-embed widget code.

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I couldn’t get any photos to upload from my PC, but the mobile upload worked great: when you click “Send from Mobile,” the flash app loads with a one-time email address to send your picture to. Do so, give it a minute, and click “Check for Photo” - when it gets there, it shows up, and you’re ready to fancy it up. This is where registration would be useful: having a persistent Phozi email address to send pictures to (and have them queue up in my account) would be more friendly than having to thumbtype in a new phozi email address for each picture.

When you’re done with your photo, click publish and Phozi creates code that’s ready to embed in MySpace, blog posts, where ever. The embed code is pretty heavy, but copying and pasting works just fine.

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Here’s my embedded phozi photo:

That’s a picture of a foot standing on the cyanide poisoned ground of a former gold mine in Northern Manitoba which I visited for this WorldChanging blog post. The border denotes the toxic alien-ness of the landscape, the skull and cross-bones is self-evident.

All in all, Phozi was fast and intuitive to use. The flash tool is simply built and generally works smoothly, and the mobile upload is a neat feature even if the one-time email address is a little clunky. I’m obviously not in target demographic (young teens & kids, myspace types), but I could see the tool getting traction in this group - especially with the embed displaying a prominent (perhaps too much so) link back to the site.

A quick note on business model: So far, phozi seems to be exclusively ad-supported with a few tasteful AdSense placements on the top of the site.

mobile, mobileapps, photobooth, photobooths, phozi, pictures, web2.0 webcam

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