Last December we went to a small local theater to see my 3-year-old daughter perform in her school’s annual ballet concert. We managed to get front-row seats to the event, which made it easier to take photos of our kids rather than the audience’s heads.
Anyway – when the show was over we went for dinner at a popular family restaurant across the road. As the waiter ushered us to our table I noticed how the parents from the show were handing each other phones and I could imagine them WhatsApp-ing those photos to each other when they are done.
Wouldn’t they also love to see some of the front-row seat photos we took? What if we could all share our photos with each one another, not to mention the sponsored photographs from professional photographers?
Sharing these memories with family and friends is easy enough – and can be done with WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, but sharing the images with people you don’t know is a completely different story.
Yes, it would be technically possible to share these memories with strangers via some pre-defined solution such as Dropbox or even Twitter – but the user experience would totally suck.
Hence, MinglePic was born.
Originally the name was going to be Smashup but it ended up sounding a little violent if you didn’t figure out it is ‘Social’ and ‘Mashup’ joined together. It also didn’t help that the current domain owner for smashup.com wanted an insane amount of money.