One-Line Pitch: Kapture is an iPhone app that connects users with brands and businesses in New York City through photos.
Why It's Taking Off: Users earn rewards instantly for taking photos of the brands they love and sharing them on social media.
Whether of meals, clothing or favorite destinations, you smartphone owners tend to share photos of all the things you love. Now, a mobile app startup wants to reward you for doing so.
Kapture is a free mobile app that uses photos to connect users to the brands and businesses they love in New York City. By taking a photo of the brand and sharing it via social media, users instantly earn rewards in the form of discounts or items.
The location-based app, which launched on Wednesday, shows users a list of businesses nearby in entertainment, fashion, food, home, shopping and travel. Each business has a "moment" that users need to take a photo of to earn the reward. If you select "Strand Bookstore" for example, the moment is to "kapture a photo of your new book" to earn a $5 gift card.
Each photo on Kapture is transformed into a polaroid-style image, which features a watermark of the brand’s logo. Users have to upload photos to Facebook or Twitter to claim their prizes.
From up to 300 businesses in New York City, users can earn a variety of rewards, ranging from meal to discounts to free drinks, bags and clothing. Users can redeem their rewards instantly, save them for another time or give them as gifts to friends.
"Kapture turns anyone taking a photo into a brand ambassador," Michael Szewczyk, founder of Kapture, told Mashable in an interview. "This allows businesses and brands to benefit from the billions of photos that people take each month, and users to earn something outside of just social."
Kapture has raised $1 million in funding and plans to launch an Android app in 2013. The company has not developed a business model yet, but is considering generating revenue through analytics reporting.