Fresco direct
19-year-old’s photo service making news
When a gunman opened fire last month at Florida State University, injuring three people, smartphone photos taken by students marshaled inside the school’s library during a lockdown showed up within minutes on Web sites of major news organizations around the world.
Inside a Midtown Manhattan office, 19yearold John Meyer worked as the quickthinking middleman.
Meyer is the founder of Fresco News, a startup that licenses photos from amateur photographers at the center of breaking news events — be they the naming of a new pope in Rome (above) or a school shooting.
Fresco trolls social media for newsworthy photos, reaches out to the amateur photographers to get their approval to license the pictures to larger, international news organizations and quickly verifies that the person signing the agreement is the one who took the photo.
In most instances, the photographer waives a fee in exchange for getting the phot wide distribution.
“They’re just happy to get their images out there,” Meyer told The Post.
Fresco has relationships with large news organizations — AlJazeera, Business Insider, CBS, Media General and The Washington Post will start trial subscriptions next month — and charges them a monthly subscription fee for access to all the photos on Fresco’s Web site.
In the fastevolving worlds of social media and giant media companies, Fresco is positioning itself as the nexus between the two.
The young but fastgrowing Fresco News has attracted the attention of some venture capitalists who, Meyer said, have expressed interest in investing in the New York company.
An early $5 million fund ing round is expected to kick off in the spring.
“This we’ll use to scale the company very rapidly,” Meyer says.
Meyer, who dropped out of New York University after completing his freshman year last May, has provided $40,000 in seed money to get Fresco off the ground.
But now he admits to being in “prime hustle mode” in terms of clients and investors.
Meyer said he turned down a job offer from Apple, despite worshiping — as did his father and grandfather before him — Steve Jobs.
Meyer maintains a relationship with Apple, how ever, having created some 40 apps for the company’s Macs, iPads and iPhones.
His biggest success occurred in June 2010 when, on the new iPhone 4, Apple for the first time included a camera flash on the device.
Within hours, the then16yearold Meyer had concocted an app that transformed the flash into a flashlight.
Although now a flashlight is a builtin iPhone feature, Meyer’s was the first of its kind.
And for the 2 million downloads it generated, its stilltinkering creator collected more than $100,000.