ShoZu extends one-click image uploading to YouTube

Few days ago, ShoZu Inc. announced that users of its free one-click image uploading service can now transmit video clips directly from supported camera phones to their accounts on YouTube, the Internet video-sharing site that gets a staggering 80 million video views a day. ShoZu’s support for YouTube eliminates the need to transfer the files to a PC or struggle with wireless email or MMS messaging. It also adds to the dozens of web destinations to which ShoZu users can upload photos and videos captured on their handsets, from snapshots of family or friends to breaking news, concert footage and oddities of all kinds.

With ShoZu’s image sharing service, consumers can “shoot and send� camera phone photos and video clips on the spot without a PC and without the complex commands, loss of image quality, or interruption of other activities associated with other uploading methods. The service allows users to make phone calls or take more photos while an image is transferring, and it automatically resumes from the point of failure in the event of a dropped connection rather than forcing users to start over. Descriptions and tags can be added before or after uploading, and only one upload is required even if the file is sent to multiple destinations.

These and other capabilities make ShoZu the fastest, easiest and most cost-effective method of sharing images from handsets. The service offers the additional advantage of providing a wide choice of destinations without requiring installation of multiple applications on the phone.

Destination sites currently supported by ShoZu include photo and video sharing communities such as Buzznet, Flickr, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Textamerica and Webshots; personal blog sites such as Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress; any MetaWeblog-enabled blog; and citizen-contributed photo galleries like CNN, the BBC and Scoopt. In addition, images can be sent to any FTP site or to any email address for easy image sharing with family and friends.

ShoZu is scheduled to add more than three dozen additional destinations over the next six months, ranging from extra photo communities and blogs to social networking, photo hosting, photo printing and document/whiteboard scanning sites.

The company also recently announced that Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) is now making the ShoZu application available directly from its online Fun & Downloads portal in 65 countries, with the option to download the ShoZu software either from a PC or from the handset itself. ShoZu is currently negotiating similar agreements with other handset manufacturers.