Even easier cell phone video and photo uploading with ShoZu

After I wrote about the new YouTube mobile video upload feature, I heard from ShoZu, a company that focuses exclusively on mobile upload utilities. This company isn't about helping you post video to its own site, like YouTube; rather it makes it easy to post video and photos from your cell phone to whatever site you want to use.

For example, the ShoZu mobile app can post directly to your Flickr account, or to Webshots (a CNET company), Textamerica, or Buzznet. Support for other services and blog hosts is forthcoming. ShoZu will also support direct uploading to media sites, such as CNN and the BBC, for users who want to contribute news items.

The sweet thing about the ShoZu architecture is that once you've uploaded a picture once, you can easily earmark it for delivery to a different service. You don't have to upload it again, because it's already stored on the ShoZu servers.

ShoZu is a cell phone application, and to use it, you'll need one of the 48 ShoZu-compatible handsets. Unfortunately I couldn't get quick access to one (we're all Palm Treo junkies here at CNET, and the Palm OS is not supported), so I can't offer a demo. The company is working hard to get the application built into phones, so future users may not need to bother with the download at all.

This could become an indispensable application for people who want to get utility from their camera phones. Instead of being locked into your carrier's photo application or hassling with different upload applications and e-mail addresses, you'll have one app that will send your videos and photos where they belong: party photos to your Flickr account, whiteboard photos to your ScanR account [blog post], videos from a rock concert to Buzznet, and so on.