Olapic is a New York-based service that helps companies and brands crowdsource photos and videos from their audience. The startup was covered by Mashable, who also uses their services, in September. The company is currently incubated at NYC SeedStart and have about four employees other than the three founders. Olapic is in the midst of closing a USD $1 million seed round involving venture capitals from New York and Argentina.

Pau Sabria, Olapic’s co-founder who oversees product development, got in touch with e27 through Echelon alumni Cardinal Blue to highlight the company’s focus on expanding into Asia. e27 managed to grab an interview with Pau to hear his thoughts.

Give us a brief explanation of what Olapic does

Olapic enables in minutes any site or Facebook fan page to collect photos and videos from their audience. The applications of photo crowdsourcing are boundless, and we are seeing a wide range of use cases: newspaper readers contributing breaking news, girls spotting trends, fans sharing their passion for their favorite team.

In a nutshell, any site can have photo galleries on their site and use our tools to collect photos: a js widget embeddable on any blog post, our Twitter collector (submit photos with a hashtag), our email collector (send photos as an attachment), and our Facebook fan page integration.

How did the idea of Olapic came about and who are the people behind Olapic?

We met while studying at Columbia University. We are José, Luis, and Pau, and we saw that people were increasingly using photos as a means of communication. While at school we decided to work on a prototype and we were one of the winners of the Lang Fund entrepreneurial competition, and we started working full time on this after graduation.

How’s the traction for Olapic?

We are still in pilot mode with most of the customers. But we already have some large newspapers in the US and brands using Olapic. We’ve been live since May and we’ve collected around 100,000 photos.

How is Olapic different from other services such as LiveShare by Cooliris?

Contrary to Liveshare and other competitors, we do not rely on our own app, but we take advantage of other existing apps (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). The end-user does not need to download a specific app, or learn how to use a new one. They just keep doing what they have been doing and still can contribute to

Why is Olapic looking to expand to Asia and what would be focus and also the expected challenges?

Our understanding is that Asia has traditionally been a culture very engaged with photos. And we see that Olapic could potentially be something that could resonate with many Asian markets. Culture and language are, of course, a challenge that we hope we can overcome with the help of a local partner.