Motorola Announces Financial Investment in Tilefile

Motorola Ventures, the venture capital arm of Motorola, has announced a financial investment in an Australian social networking startup called Tilefile. Details of the financial investment were not made public. With this investment, it seems that Motorola is trying to carve out a space in the social networking arena, something that some of its chief rivals (like Nokia) have done successfully.

Tilefile platform has a unique concept in social networking: The “platform wraps videos, photos and audio into a single content-neutral format called a Tile”, and all social activities revolves around these Tiles. The interface is well organized and polished and it makes excellent use of AJAX; there are few very browser reloads while navigating the interface. The slideshow feature is one of many cool navigational features of the Tilefile interface.

Tilefile makes use of feeds in sharing content, such that all media that you upload into Tilefile is automatically shared with your friends, and managing content within Tilefile is a simple drag-and-drop process. Tilefile is still beta software, and some of the features did not work from my Linux machine. The media upload feature, for example, failed to work. Aside from that, Tilefile is fun to navigate and use.

A mobile Tilefile application is said to be under development, and will soon be released.

Comments

2 Responses to “Motorola Announces Financial Investment in Tilefile”

Nathan de Vries on November 16th, 2007 8:04 pm

Hi there,

Thanks for checking out Tilefile and giving us a writeup. I thought I’d give a quick comment about Tilefile’s lack of support for Linux. Unfortunately, the Adobe Flash Player for Linux does not support file uploads (which is a pain, since I use Linux too). This will hopefully be fixed in a future release of the Flash Player, however as an interim solution we will be releasing a Java applet based uploader.

Cheers,

Nathan de Vries
Software Engineer, TIlefile.com
Publisher on November 18th, 2007 3:07 pm

Thanks, Nathan. I’m looking forward to the release of the Java applet, and will do a update post when that happens.