Aviv Gadot, co-founder and CEO of Israeli start-up Pixtr, is a fairly good looking man who is clearly too young to remember Billy Joel’s 1977 album The Stranger. His wife is also quite attractive and owing to this, Mr. Gadot enjoys taking pictures of her and posting them to Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). Unsurprisingly, his wife is not the fan of seeing herself on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) like this. Hard to believe, a woman who is insecure about her appearance.
“My wife was always grabbing my phone and deleting most of my pictures. She’s beautiful and she feels bad about how she looks in photos. That’s wrong. I wanted her to feel good about herself,” he said.
In 1977, Billy Joel wrote “(I Love You) Just the Way You Are”, for his business manager and then wife, Elizabeth Weber. Gadot has gone a completely different route by creating an app that, at the end of the day, changes who you really are. A different approach for sure, but Billy Joel wasn’t living in a digital age, though nearly every one of his singles can be found on YouTube today.
Gadot, using his engineering skills, decided to create an iPhone app that would make “minor” changes to the photo. Changes like slimming a nose or a jawline, trimming eyebrows, correcting camera distortion. Okay trimming eyebrows and correcting camera distortion can certainly be deemed minor changes, but if you look at a before and after picture of his wife, the eyes, nose, and chin work done by the app can hardly be called minor.
That sort of work would cost you six figures in the hands of a plastic surgeon that paid a lot of money for med school as well as years of study and practice. To call this minor would be tantamount to saying your wife is “kind of pregnant.”
Somewhat ironically, of the downloads that have been made of this app, the majority of them are centered in areas normally associated with beauty: Denmark, Italy and in Los Angeles.
Pixtr is one of 13 cloud computing companies that just graduated from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s second Azure accelerator program in Israel. It is using a unique monetization plan, the app is free to all but users but will be charging $1 per batch of photos retouched, no altered.
Now, I’m just hoping that one of these other 12 Microsoft grad companies are working on an app to fix my wife’s morning breath.
