Video-creation service Animoto has teamed up with SmugMug, the destination for storing and sharing photos and videos. With this teaming up of Animoto and SmugMug, users are able to access their stored SmugMug content in order to create videos on Animoto. As videos on Animoto are created with photos put creatively to music, such a partnership is dually beneficial for both parties.

Animoto emerged a couple years back as a strong candidate for becoming a leader in its space. The technology behind Animoto works well for its purpose as a consumer-sided product. With this, Animoto’s finished products are clean and polished.

From a business standpoint, Animoto has begun to encourage an integrated medium for multiple media types, including music. Providing an accompanying market for musicians to promote their work as the “sountrack” for people’s video creations puts Animoto in an interesting position, one it can take advantage of moving forward.

What’s been particularly useful for Animoto since its launch is the integration of third party content sites with its own service. This makes video-creation easier for users, as they can pull from content they’ve already uploaded on another site. Removing such obstacles within a given service increases its chances of seeing a high rate of adoption.

To this end, Animoto has forged a few other partnerships with companies including iStockPhoto. Animoto has also created applications to run on social networks such as Facebook for additional interaction with its existing and potential user base. With multiple points of access and the support of multiple media-sharing sites, Animoto has placed itself in a strong position for the future.

For participating partners, Animoto provides another tool to be extended to consumers. This provides an additional perk to existing users member to partner services, continuously freshening their ability to re-xeperience their uploaded content.

What I’m particularly keen on watching is how Animoto continues to move with trends, including mobile trends. Especially as Animoto seeks out partnerships for the growth and distribution of its own product, there are a great number of opportunities for such in the mobile realm.

by Michelle Lentz

I occasionally worry that backing up my world – particularly the world of my business – onto a 2-1TB drives is not smart. Sure it removes the files from the local machines, but if there is a fire or some other catastrophe, I doubt I’ll remember to grab my external hard drives as I run for safety. So I sometimes ponder whether or not to invest in some sort of off-site storage. I use, on a limited basis, GSpace. GSpace is a Firefox plug-in that turns your Gmail accounts into off-site storage. This works for current client files, but certainly not for everything I routinely back up.

Enter SmugMug. Yesterday they announced that they are offering SmugVault. Using Amazon’s network of datacenters, you can now store more than just your photos at SmugMug. You can store all of your files. They suggest you do this because of what? Natural disaster. They’re preying on my own worries, so they must also be the worries of others.

To the best of my knowledge, SmugVault requires a SmugMug account. With your SmugMug account (one of three different pricing tiers), storage of image files is included. You can store other files, such as DOCs, PDFs, and more. Amazon will bill you for storing those file types.

- Storage costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month.  2GB = 44 cents/month
- There is a $1/month recurring charge.
- Data transfer in is 30 cents per gigabyte. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gigabyte.

For many folks, this gives the opportunity to back up RAW image files or the full video, pre-edited, without the web resolution. This is just pure data.

So, is the price right? Would you use a service like this? Let us know!

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.