Panorama apps, Taking in a world view

There are apps that stitch together multiple pictures you've taken in a particular location to create one panoramic  view. Such panoramic pictures look fabulous, and ardent photographers are passionate about them. Apple launched apanorama option with the new iOS 6 on the iPhone 5. But even before that, there were panorama photo apps on the Android platform. 


One of the most popular among them is 360, developed by Bangalore's TeliportMe, a startup founded by Vineet Deviah. The app generates a hi-res picture of your surroundings and has the usual social frills. 

The TeliportMe team graduated from the 500 Startups mentoring programme and have received funding from some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, including Bill Gross of Idealab, Alessandro Piol of Vedanta Capital, Dwipal Desai, Max Pellegrini, Rob Wang and Steve Bennet. 

"I, initially, met Vineet through a strong reference from another investor. I spent some time with him and found him to be very sharp. More importantly, his product had strong traction and he had a strong team with him. We have invested $50,000 in the company," said Paul Singh, Partner,500 Startups. 

It has been reported that TeleportMe turned down a buyout offer in the $15-20 million range from Google. 

Deviah has an engineering degree from REC Surathkal in Mangalore. He completed his Masters in bio-medical engineering at Cornell in the US, got admission for a PhD programme at Harvardbut decided not to pursue it. 

"It's tough to go from zero to million downloads. It's easier to scale from then on. We went through the hard part. It's not like we want to build the software and get out. We are in for a long haul," he says. They recently updated their app with a slicker interface. The fluidity of their app was what captured the interest of Bill Gross. "I met Bill Gross at a conference in San Francisco. We told him we have a panorama app on Android. He told me that he uses a panorama app too. I know everyone uses Apple. But surprisingly, he took out his Android phone with the panorama app we designed. In two days he put in the money," Deviah says. 

The app wasn't easy to do because there are a myriad OEMs with different gyroscopes and motion sensing technologies for Android and multiple versions of the OS.