Sharpcast Press Release

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 13 /PRNewswire/—Sharpcast, Inc., a pioneer in personal media synchronization and management, today released Sharpcast Photos Beta, an all-in-one solution that delivers the absolute simplest way to share, sync, back up and access digital photos from anywhere. Sharpcast Photos keeps PCs, the web and mobile phones automatically in sync, so people can view and manage their photo collection from any time and anywhere they want, whether they are online or off. Sharpcast Photos Beta is available for free at www.sharpcast.com. Current Sharpcast Photos Alpha users can upgrade by simply launching Sharpcast Photos Alpha on their desktop to begin the quick auto-update.

Sharpcast Photos eliminates the complexities of accessing, sharing and backing up photos by keeping a person’s desktop photo collection automatically synced with the web, other PCs and optionally with a mobile phone. Based on Sharpcast’s patent-pending universal instant synchronization technology, Sharpcast Photos provides fast, easy access to a photo collection from any PC, the web or a mobile phone, organized the same way everywhere and continuously backed up. Any change made in one place, even while offline, is automatically made everywhere else.

The product stands out among contemporary offerings for its effortless sharing, offline access to photos from anywhere, transparent syncing to and from mobile phones, automatic back-up, and ultra-simple recovery, duplication or migration of an entire photo collection to a brand new PC with its organization fully intact.

“Sharpcast is pioneering the concept of applying synchronization as the single answer to several problems—managing multiple photo collections on PCs and the web, tedious web uploads and downloads, sharing and protecting photos, getting photos off your mobile phone, and accessing photos remotely,” said Gibu Thomas, founder and chief executive officer of Sharpcast. “Sharpcast Photos is based on the premise that sync works best when it’s completely transparent and you don’t have to think about it.”

Sharpcast Photos Beta includes several significant desktop and web improvements to the former Alpha version, including overall performance and usability improvements, user interface enhancements and more advanced sharing and management features.

The Company today also released the Alpha version of the Sharpcast Photos mobile edition, optimized in the U.S. for the Motorola Q, the Palm Treo 700w, the Sprint PPC-6700 and the Verizon XV 6700. The Sharpcast Photos mobile edition Alpha seamlessly synchronizes photos between mobile phones, PCs and the web without relying on a mobile web browser, effortlessly sending pictures taken on the phone back to the PC and the web and automatically and elegantly displaying a person’s desktop collection on their phone. Any change made anywhere—on the phone, PC or web, is automatically made everywhere else.

Sharpcast plans to deliver a client for other Windows Mobile 5.0 products later this summer, and expects to announce plans for more mainstream mobile phones by the end of this year. Other non-U.S. versions of the above-listed smartphones can run the Sharpcast Photos mobile client, but the company is initially supporting these U.S. versions.

Thomas added, “This beta release introduces a brand new category of all-in-one instant synchronization solutions for simplifying the management of digital photos. We will announce solutions supporting more media types later this year.”

Several major industry organizations have recently noted the significance of the user experience created by Sharpcast’s universal instant synchronization platform. In February of this year, the company was chosen among over 700 applicants to demonstrate its technology at Demo, the industry’s premier event for launching new products and technology. In April, Red Herring chose Sharpcast as one of the Red Herring 100 for 2006; its annual list of companies providing the most significant innovations to the hi-tech industry.

In May, Sharpcast was one of only five companies chosen by leading journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal to present at the annual D: All Things Digital conference held by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal in Carlsbad, Calif. And in June, the company was selected by the team of Kevin Werbach, assistant professor at the Wharton School, and Michael Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, as an inaugural Connected Innovator at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco.

About Sharpcast
An innovator in digital media and information synchronization, Sharpcast develops software and services that deliver the absolute simplest way for people to access, share, sync and back up their digital content regardless of what device they are on and regardless of whether they are online or off. A team of wireless and mobile industry veterans with a proven track record for building large-scale wireless data systems and successful software businesses founded Sharpcast in 2004 with a mission to make digital life simple. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.