Selphee App is Snapchat Instagram and Vine combined

Just in case you were getting tired of the same old mainline options for taking fun, shareable photos and videos on your smartphone, here’s another app that combines Snapchat, Instagram and Vine together to create a multimedia post to share to your favorite social networks.

It’s called Selphee. (DOWNLOAD –> iOS and Android)



Although its name clearly invokes the selfie phenomenon, Selphee encourages users to post more than just faces. The Selphee app is making a still photo fade into a short video.

How to make a Selphee.
First, the Selphee app starts by getting the user to snap a selfie, and then choose how many seconds that image will be displayed for.
Then the app gets them to record a short video, switching to the alternative phone lens to encourage them to vary the view. The user can, other than Vine, override the defaults by selecting front or rear camera at any point.
Done. Your Selphee has been created. A Selphee is basically a still photo that fades into a short video or video clip montage. The original selfie or photo acts as a cover image for the subsequent animated content.
The app does also includes a series of optional frames/effects to augment the cover photo with if you desire, including a speech bubble, decorative frames that reference the World Cup, or other stuff like a heart-shaped frame or a box effect.

If you’re wondering what a Selphee looks like, here’s an example

What makes Selphee unique.
The combination of different media types is the differentiator between Selphee vs mainline apps that are more focused on sharing one type of media, be it photo or video based.

Success
Selphee, which launched at the beginning of February 2014 and is backed by $375,000 in Angel funding so far, has pulled in more than 30,000 downloads of its iOS and Android apps to date and has an active user-base of circa 60% “With the help of Curtis Lepore and Tony de Niro people really picked it up,” according to Dennis Albinus, founder of Selphee. Albinus says Selphee is not aiming to build a social network itself. The app encourages users to share their posts to mainline social networks such as Instagram. So it’s positioning itself as another tool in the social sharing landscape.

“We are trying to be a tool that users can use for the [mainstream]social media channels,” he tells TechCrunch. “Both Instagram and Vine don’t offer the users to have a free selected picture to start with. They only offer you to use a frame from the video that you took.
“With Selphee you are able to be more creative than just the traditional way of video… Everybody can use the Selphee app to create cool videos.”

Selphee is free to download here (iOS and Android)
Read more on: Techcrunch