Ferris_GroupShot2At a birthday party in Aspen, Colorado, Paul Boukadakis and Chris Shaheen couldn’t find a good way to capture all the moments around them.
That’s where and when they came up with the idea for a social video sharing application called Ferris.
“This app was born out of frustration for us,” said Boukadakis, CEO of Ferris. “A few of us were hired to film a friend’s birthday party and to capture the moments of the birthday party. We quickly realized as we were shooting there was no way to capture all the moments we wanted to capture.”
They would see a cool scene across the room, but by the time they got there the moment was gone.
“We were missing all of these incredible things that were happening,” he said.
But a lot of the guests were just shooting moments on their iPhones.
“That’s when the light bulb moment happened,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if there was an app to bring all these moments together.”
The Austin-based startup has raised a very small angel round of investment and today Ferris launched its app in a public beta at the Apple iTunes App Store. It’s available for free download.
“We want to create a great community of users,” Shaheen said.
Ferris has four founders and they’ve been working a year on the project. In addition to Boukadakis and Shaheen, the team includes J.B. Hager and Brian Daugherty.
“This app to us was created because there are too many missed moments in life,” Shaheen said.
Ferris works by joining together user-created video clips into a stream of content.
Ferris’ users can record video directly with the mobile interface and share clips up to two minutes in length. Once a video is posted to Ferris, it self-updates, joining any number of streams based on user, location, date and time, hashtag and category. The app allows multiple people to contribute to video story with little editing required. The result is a collaborative story told through video.