PicDeck by Ontela

Sector: Mobile Applications, Photo, Enabling Technology

Headquarters: Seattle, WA.

Management: Dan Shapiro, formerly of Microsoft and RealNetworks, is co-founder and CEO, Seattle venture capitalist Tom Huseby is chairman. The website shows a job req for VP engineering.

Funding: Angel funded.

Secret Sauce: Ontela’s PicDeck technology makes it easier to do stuff with camera phone photos. Like get them off your camera phone and onto your computer or website at high resolution. But its mobile imaging software can also enable lots of other applications. Think business card scanning with your mobile phone, m-commerce applications that let you buy or comparison-shop for books or music based on a pic of the barcode, etc. Other features PicDeck touts are how it makes it a lot faster and easier to install mobile software, and that its technology–unlike MMS–transfers pictures at full resolution; useful with the megapixelage of camera phones increasing by the day. Ontela came out of stealth-mode earlier this year, and the technology is not available to the masses just yet. But it sounds like PicDeck could make it easier for carriers and content publishers to give their consumers access to new tools that let them do more with their mobiles.

Seen and Heard: John Cook of the Seattle Post Intelligencer said, “At first, I thought Ontela would compete directly with Vizrea and PixPulse–Seattle startups that allow camera phone users to share and organize digital photos. While there certainly is some overlap with those two companies … Shapiro said the technology goes deeper. For example, a camera phone user who was browsing history books at Barnes & Noble could take a photo of the bar code on a biography of Harry Truman and then get a text message a minute later with a link to the book on Amazon.com.”