Sequoia invests $1.5 in slideshow start-up RockYou.. & other valley news

The deal was first reported by VentureWire (sub required).

It is competing against other photo slide companies like Filmloop, Bubbleshare and Slide. On the middleman side, there are host other sites like Photobucket and Zooomr trying to let you transport your photos to other sites.

The trick, now that the virgin territory of this Web 2.0 photo industry is shriveling as quickly as the glittering shocks of Sacramento gold back in 1849, is to give you really easy tools to use. At at least RockYou makes it dead simple. See below for some of the tools it offers (click to enlarge)

Sequoia invested in the hot video sharing company, YouTube. This then looks like Sequoia's bet on the photo side. Sequoia Partner Greg McAdoo worked on the deal, and so it is not only Roelof Botha (see our Q&A) who is investing in Web 2.0 for Sequoia. Lightspeed Venture Partners contributed to the round, according to the piece.

The company is based in East Palo Alto and has four employees, including the two founders.

(Caution update: There are some racial slurs and hate mongering on this site -- just as there is on others. RockYou's homepage featured a slideshow that used the "n" word in its caption, and we breezed by it this morning, assuming it was an exception. But a reader came across several others, including this one.

Update II: Chief exec Jia Shen told us the slideshow we linked to above had been defaced by a third party. Shen did not elaborate, saying only he'd plugged a security hole and has taken down the offending slideshow. He has dedicated one employee to monitoring slideshows, and takes it seriously, he said.

Shen also noted that the YouTube analogy is pertinent. While YouTube is an embeddable video widget, RockYou offers an embeddable photo widget. The point is to offer users the same simple, non-download technology that made YouTube so popular. He said that Slide, a competitor, started with an installed version, but switched to something similar to RockYou a couple of months after RockYou emerged in November.]

The move comes on the heels of serious maneuvering by other companies. Photo sharing leader Photobucket, of Palo Alto, last week announced the Jwidget, a tool that enables any Web site to provide free image and video hosting for its users. It lets consumers say on a third-party site and upload their content without have to toggle to their Photobucket account.

And then there was flap last week between Zooomr, the company launched by 17-year-old founder Kristopher Tate, and Flickr, over whether Zooomr had the right to access Flickr's accounts (via the API) to allow easier transfers of Flickr photos to other sites. Flickr at first refused, but apparently has had a change of heart.

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