PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mural.ly, an innovative platform to create murals of content, launched today and is now available for free for users throughout the world. The platform allows users to aggregate links and other web content and displays them in a customizable space that resembles a physical bulletin board or wall. It also serves as a social network for “ideators”, individuals who can co-create engaging murals and learn more about each other’s personal interests or business ideas. Mural.ly also announced the acceptance of a seed round of venture capital from Intel Capital, Alta Ventures, 500 Startups, and various angel investors from the Americas. The funding will enable user attraction and retention efforts. A future round of funding is currently being sought, which will allow larger-scale promotions and expansion. Some of the company’s management team is planning a move to the United States in the coming months in order to best enable growth in that region.
Mural.ly was previously released in private beta, and quickly attracted more than 3,000 users who provided valuable feedback which was reflected in the new launch. The web-based platform allows users to map together different content formats including images, embedded video, links, and social media content onto one unified mural.
“Mural.ly is a simple way to collect web content, arrange it visually, and then share it with a group,” said Mariano Suarez Battan, Mural.ly CEO and co-founder. “We envision people from around the world using our murals collaboratively as works-in-progress, a phenomenon we call ‘social visual ideation.’ We come from the social game space, where we successfully launched Bola, a Facebook soccer game played by millions of people. With Mural.ly we are leveraging the best features of video game user interfaces and mechanics and inserting them into our aggregated content murals. Our goal is to become the ‘Github of Visual Ideation’ and the clear leader in that space.”
Adding content to a custom mural can be done through simple drag and drop. Users can pull in content from multiple sources including YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest, Google Maps, DropBox, and myriad others. Each piece of content appears as a stretchable shape on the mural and can be layered or organized freely to leverage the brain’s spatial memory. A zoom feature and a multi-directional pan function allow users to quickly browse through larger murals to find the right content section.
“Mural.ly caught our attention for its ease of use and potential to transform the way in which individuals and businesses collaborate by utilizing HTML5 along with multimedia computing technologies applied to a new content format,” said Dave Thomas, Managing Director of Intel Capital for Latin America. “As seasoned entrepreneurs, Mariano and Pato’s past experience building a successful video gaming company is a valuable asset in helping them to build a new method of communication and collaboration. This is a powerful service and we look forward to working with Mural.ly to help achieve sustained long-term growth.”
Similar to Google Docs, multiple individuals can work on mural content in real-time, making it an ideal collaboration platform for global teams. Users can invite others to edit murals through an individual invite email function or through a shared link that is ideal for sharing with larger groups. Completed murals can also be showcased with a full-screen presentation mode, ideal for multiple environments such as sales meetings, creative presentations, or interactive classroom settings. Both public and private murals are available for users who want to either open their content to group input or control the sharing of proprietary information by keeping the mural within a closed work or personal group.
Mural.ly is free for all public mural users. For more information about Mural.ly, visit www.mural.ly or follow the company on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mural_ly.
About Mural.ly
Mura.ly is a startup firm based in Buenos Aires, Argentina that offers a free online platform that allows users to group together multimedia content from various sources into flexible Murals, that are used for group ideation and visual sharing. The company received funding in 2012 from Intel Capital, Alta Ventures, 500 Startups, and various angel investors from the Americas from. Mural.ly was founded by Mariano Suarez Battan, Pato Jutard, and Agustin Soler. Mr. Battan and Mr. Jutard both previously founded Three Melons, a maker of social games which was acquired by Playdom/Disney in 2010. For more information about Mural.ly, visit www.mural.ly.