Sector: Photo sharing, shameless self-promotion

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Management: Max Levchin is co-founder, and a former CTO of PayPal, with a management team that helped to build eBay, Adobe, PayPal and Openwave.

Funding: Raised a third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund, with return investments from BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.

Secret Sauce: Web-based but desktop friendly, Slide’s super simple interface allows anyone to step right up and instantly share photos, videos, and other media, adding customizable graphics, shuffle speeds and a dizzying selection of screen transition styles. Very youth-oriented snowflakes and floating star themes round out the visually taxing options. The ’slides’ can then be linked from anywhere; Slide users favor MySpace, primarily, though the site makes it easy to share on Facebook, TypePad, Piczo, Xanga, Blogger, et al. Slide recently added unlimited image hosting, allowing it to compete with Flickr and Photobucket.

Slide has also been able to integrate itself as a widget app by creating specific branded formats for working with eBay (as a member of the eBay Developers Program) and Apple iPhoto photocasts. For a company that emerged from beta in August the Slide web presence is huge, Slide ranks as the sixth-most-visited U.S. photo entertainment site.

What’s the problem then? Monetization and scaling. Competitor Filmloop has gone the route of the ad model but will the kids who use Slide like crack go for ads? How else can they grow in a realm (photo sharing) that’s already jammed up with free features just like it? The inherent reliance on Myspace and others for traffic could prove to be another hurdle should Myspace choose to pull the plug on their linkage (or aquire its own photo feature – but why would they when all the free stuff is out there anyway?)

Seen and Heard: Mashable is a ‘massive fan’ and says…”these guys are trying to build a slideshow application that spans blogs, social network profiles and the desktop. My own experience suggests that they’ve gained some traction…”