FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact:
Daryl Wise, OurStory
831.402.3712
Daryl at wisdomark.com
OurStory Launches Flagship Product at DEMO
Innovative Silicon Valley Social Networking Start-up Announces Online Service for Member-Generated Storytelling & Collaborative Family History
PALM DESERT and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif . – OurStory, a new online service that guides users to collaboratively create and share life stories and biographies, announced their initial product launch today at the prestigious DEMO ’07 Conference in Palm Desert, CA.
OurStory is a user-generated personal content web site that combines the best of blogging, photo sharing, digital storytelling, and family history. It uses a rich feature set that includes an interactive visual timeline, privacy controls, collaborative email requests and a library of over 2,000 prompting interview questions. OurStory content can be preserved online, backed up to a home computer and made into heirloom-quality books, CDs and DVDs.
While most social networking sites such as MySpace.com focus on adding "friends", OurStory encourages deeper sharing and a collaborative process of online storytelling among family, friends and groups.
Some of the major features of OurStory.com include:
- A Lifelong Timeline : Once and for all, OurStory’s drag and drop, visual timeline easily records any milestone, event, moment or memory. Enter stories with photos and videos in any order and the timeline sequences them chronologically.
- Collaborative Storytelling and Interviewing: Users can share multimedia stories with family and friends, gather comments and guest photos and exchange “life-interview” questions. Members can also work together to collect a group history with photos, comments and videos.
- Private and Secure: Connected to private circles of family and friends, users decide who can see each entry, and who can add photos and stories to their timeline.
- Preserve Living History: At any time, free downloadable software allows the user to import a copy of the complete timeline collection to a home computer for local backup. Heirloom books, CDs and DVDs can be created as gifts or mementos that document special events, births, memorials, anniversaries or family biographies. Books start at $18.95, and orders are fulfilled in five to seven business days.
Andy Halliday, CEO/Founder of OurStory shared his inspiration for starting OurStory, “Family tradition and personal history are captured in the stories we tell about our lives. But these are often lost or forgotten. At OurStory we set out to involve everyone in a fun and engaging process that uses the latest innovations on the web to make sharing and preserving important moments and memories easy, beautiful, and rewarding.”
Chris Shipley, analyst and executive producer of the DEMO conferences, says, “OurStory has created a helpful service for the consumer market with its feature-rich, Web-delivered services that enable digital storytelling, unique collaborative social networking and easy archiving of valuable family history.”
OurStory is a full-featured free service on the web with a premium subscription for $39.95 (USD) per year that adds features such as multiple profiles and timelines, unlimited privacy circles, style embellishment, and discounts on books and CD/DVDs.
More information about OurStory is available at www.ourstory.com.
About OurStory
OurStory is an online service where family and friends share and preserve life stories, photos and video, organized in a visual photo-history timeline. Through privacy controls, guided templates and interview questions, OurStory encourages users to securely capture, share and preserve stories from life’s shoebox and save them forever in a lasting format online, to a home computer for local backup, in books and on CD/DVDs.Founded by Andy Halliday and Chris Lunt in June of 2005, OurStory is funded by Benhamou Global Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Venrock Associates. OurStory’s free online service is available at www.ourstory.com.