Rough Draft Backs Fresco News
Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Fresco News, a service that allows news agencies to quickly license user-submitted photos of breaking news events. Fresco was founded last summer by 19-year-old app developer and recent NYU dropout John Meyer.
You could say that Fresco is nearly seven years in the making.
Growing up with software
Meyer started writing iPhone apps at 13, making him one of the youngest app developers at the time. By his sophomore year of high school, he’d coded over 35 apps, six of which reached the top 25 list in the App Store.
One of his early successes was a flashlight app called Just Light, submitted by Meyer less than 24 hours after Apple released the API to control the iPhone’s camera light. The app, now a feature built into iOS, was the first of its kind.
When he wanted to attend Apple’s WWDC conference, where the minimum age was 18, he had to get creative. According to Meyer:
“I was 16 and anyone under 18 wasn’t allowed. It was right after the successful flashlight app. My dad got the ticket from Apple, flew back home and left me in San Francisco.”
Apple probably didn’t mind, though; Meyer’s app development company Tap Media has had several hits, receiving over 5 million downloads for apps like Real Aquarium and Perfect Shot, a camera app that uses facial recognition to ensure that everyone in a photo is smiling before taking the photo.
Fresco is born
Meyer enrolled at NYU in the fall of 2013, and launched the first version of Fresco after his second semester. He made headlines this summer after turning down a job offer at Apple to work on Fresco instead. He explains in an interview with Business Insider:
“I am, at heart, an entrepreneur. I won’t be happy working for someone else.”
The original version of Fresco offered a novel way to digest news: heavy on photos, light on text and crowdsourced from people on the scene. Think Instagram meets Circa.
In September, after turning down the job at Apple and seeing some early traction with Fresco, John announced that he was dropping out of NYU, where his mom is a professor.
“Waiting four years to get a degree before I can completely focus on what I’m passionate about is impossible in my mind.”
What’s next
John hopes to evolve Fresco into a platform that traditional news media — print and television — can use to license images from amateur photographers on the scene of breaking news events.
And it’s going well so far. Following a seed investment from an unnamed Hollywood star at the start of December, Meyer has had interest from Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera America about running trials of the service.
In recent years we’ve seen an incredible surge in photos on social media following breaking news events. Fresco offers news agencies a way to leverage this on-the-ground citizen journalism, an increasingly less expensive and more timely source of media.
The investment from Rough Draft will help Fresco scale to cover breaking news events and build out their iOS app.
Congratulations, John! Onwards and upwards.
