StoryPress Archives - SiliconHills

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The latest version of StoryPress officially launched Monday, said Michael Davis, the company’s CEO and founder.

“We’ve relaunched as the Instagram of stories,” Davis said.

The two-year-old startup originally began as an app for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices intent on recording family histories and biographies. But it has evolved into an everyday storytelling app, Davis said. With StoryPress’s app, people just speak, save and share their stories on all kinds of social media outlets, he said.

“We made it really quick and simple to tell a story,” Davis said.

StoryPress, which did a successful Kickstarter campaign last year and raised $15,299 from 176 backers, has also raised $500,000 in seed stage financing during the last year, Davis said. The company has four full time employees now, he said.

StoryPress 2.0 entered public beta testing in July and just ended last month.

The StoryPress app is still audio centric but the latest version incorporates pictures, video and other types of media, Davis said.

“The core of a StoryPress story is still someone’s voice,” he said

StoryPress has worked with Austin Pets Alive, Meals on Wheels, Habitat for Humanity and other nonprofit organizations to help them tell stories of the people and animals they help.

This week Slice of Silicon Hills News Host Andrew Moore interviews StoryPress founder Michael Davis about his new iPad app for creating and saving family history through audio stories.

“StoryPress is trying to change the way that family history is preserved and passed down from generation to generation by making it fun and easy to record stories with you own voice,” Davis said.

Davis got the idea from his grandmother. A year and a half ago she had just received an iPad, and was looking for a recording application to record personal stories. None of the available applications were satisfactory – simply providing her with a big MP3 file which she had no idea how incorporate into something bigger. Davis created StoryPress to fill this need.

“Not only do we have the right interface to make it fun and easy, but we came up with the prompts so it’s not intimidating,” Davis said.

The StoryPress app can essentially interview its users by giving them a series of prompts grouped together in topic modules. After choosing one of the modules, users simply respond to each prompt given. When they are done, StoryPress automatically ties all the narration segments together into one audio book. If users feel the prompts are too constricting, they may also do a simple self recorded narration.

The current version app – launched last December — allows users to create audio books with custom book covers images, but future versions will allow users to add pictures and other media.

“The goal is to make it a real multimedia experience where the user can add pictures, background music, videos, and have the story live on one permanent URL,” Davis said.

Future versions of the app will also provide stock photos of iconic American imagines through several eras, as well as musical accompaniments, which users can purchase and add to their audio books.

Users will be able to create their first five stories for free, but will have to pay a yearly cloud storage cost of $49 of they want to create more. If users want a more tangible copy of their audio books, they can also order CD versions from StoryPress for a fee.

StoryPress has seen 4000 downloads so far, and they will be kickstarter April 1 to access more funding. StoryPress will be releasing an Android tablet in mid April.

Tag: StoryPress

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