Disrupting the photo + video space, one glmps at a time

I sometimes struggle to answer the question, “What do you do?” because the real answer is anything and everything to make my businesses successful. Some days I’m a marketer, other times a sales person, and on the really awful ones I’m an accountant.

I haven’t blogged much about my latest venture but you’ll be hearing a lot about it in the weeks, months (and hopefully) years to come. In fact, let me introduce you now:

GLMPS.

If you’ve been within earshot of me within the past few months you’ve heard all about it. I swear it’s like having a baby or being in a new relationship – I can’t go more than a few seconds without thinking about this product.

So, if you haven’t been around to hear the spiel in person, GLMPS is a social photo app for the iPhone that lets you push play on your photos. It automagically captures a video clip of every picture you take and then creatively packages the photo + video together so that your pictures can come to life in a whole new way, like this:

I’m addicted to it. I take glmpses of everything these days. In fact, my own love for the product is what has me convinced that we’re on to something really special. We’ve had a closed beta test going on for a couple of months and every time a new version is ready I feel like a kid in a candy store – it’s.so.exciting to see the features we’ve been discussing and debating actually come to life, and work.

We’re a tiny team of three co-founders: Paul Robinett, Nicholas Long and myself… plus we’ve got Mike of Knock Twice who is helping us on the PR side.

What’s seemingly crazy is all three of us met through YouTube – Paul & I became friends in 2007 after he posted a videoblog that resonated so deeply that I couldn’t help but send him an email. The stars aligned when a business meeting brought him 20km from where I was getting my master’s in England and we were instant friends. Over the years we spent countless hours on the phone talking about life and business and just had this strange feeling we were meant to work together on a project, which finally materialized with GLMPS.

Ironically Nicholas also found Paul through his videos on YouTube and suggested they build something together a year ago.

Because we’re all so passionate about social video this product is infused with both love and years of hands-on research – and I’d dare to say that Paul is a visionary when it comes to video community. I trust his instinct.

We’re not the usual tech startup by any means. Two guys, one girl. We’re all Silicon Valley outsiders located in separate cities in Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin who met through the social tools we’re innovating on. We see the road ahead is undefined and since the technical landscape literally shifts on a day-by-day basis we’re building a company based on a culture of innovation – we’re not married to anything other than the idea that we want to create tools to enable people around the world to share meaningful moments, like Peach’s 6th birthday.

We’re a social-mobile-local company and we’re out to break the rules.

The very classifications of “photo” and “video” don’t work because we’ve created a new thing. A glmps is more than a photo but not just a video. It’s a new kind of visual status update and we believe that ultimately it’ll be our users who will determine what a glmps is just like it was the community, and not Twitter, who defined what it meant to tweet.

My kids are constantly saying, “Mommy, can you take a glmps of this?!”

They love being able to touch anywhere on the photo and replay the moment. They’ll snap glmpses of each other and then laugh hysterically when they get to go back in time and see the silliness in action.

I’m not going to lie – being a mompreneur is hard. It’s a constant balancing act that requires sacrifices of time and a shuffling of resources but I couldn’t have it any other way. This is who I’m meant to be. And I’m constantly inspired by other women and moms who have blazed the trail, especially in the tech world.

Being able to connect with other women through events like BlogHer bet is instrumental to my sanity. It’s also how I see us growing GLMPS because I believe collaboration with other people/organizations will be key to our success, which is one of the reasons we’re working hard to integrate share functionality across a wide spectrum of social platforms from Facebook to Foodspotting.

I know blogging has gone through a lot of phases – I first started with a Geocities site and then went to Livejournal and Xanga. By the time I was comfortable on WordPress there was Facebook and Twitter, and now Tumblr makes it even simpler to put up a post.

GLMPS makes it even easier.

When I shot a glmps of my new haircut today my first thought was, “This is as good as writing a post and uploading a photo” – and it only took me a few seconds to snap and was then uploaded & shared in real-time across all my networks and could even be sent as a blog post via Tumblr.

So yea.

We have big dreams. Lofty goals.

And a little team.

But a lot of supportive friends.

And whole slew of folks excited for us to release GLMPS in the App Store in a few weeks.

I hope you download it. And love it just as much as I do.