Shutterfly Acquires ThisLife

Shutterfly (NASDAQ: SFLY), the market leader in digital personalized photo products and services, today announced that it has acquired ThisLife, a cloud-based solution offering intuitive photo and video organization, storing and sharing. The combination of ThisLife with Shutterfly's seamless creation paths, multi-channel platform and robust cloud, which stores 18 billion images, provides a unified, end-to-end solution for customers to intelligently organize, store, share and create physical and digital products across web and mobile devices. “Since 1999, Shutterfly has made it easier for consumers to be more creative with their memories,” said Jeffrey Housenbold, president and chief executive officer of Shutterfly. “The combination of ThisLife's best in class cloud organization and storage solution with Shutterfly's award-winning product creation paths, uniquely positions Shutterfly to be the leading full service solution for storing, organizing, and sharing life most important memories.“ In the coming months, Shutterfly will layer ThisLife's technology onto the Shutterfly platform to enable richer storytelling and easier product creation. Consumers will be able to safely and easily preserve, organize and share their memories, regardless of where photos are stored – from Facebook to Picasa to mobile phones. ThisLife's intelligent organization platform offers features like facial recognition and presents photos and albums in an elegant timeline for convenient sharing and product creation. ThisLife's employees, including founders Andrea and Matt Johnson, will join Shutterfly. “As parents, Matt and I love to capture our family's special moments, but by the time our oldest was a toddler, we were inundated with cherished photos and videos. These wonderful memories were scattered across the web, various devices, memory cards, and throughout our home,” said Andrea Johnson, founder of ThisLife. “That is why we created ThisLife; it is a simple, safe, organized home for all your photo and videos. As long time Shutterfly customers we are thrilled to join the Shutterfly team and we look forward to combining our platform with their mass audience. Our technology, combined with Shutterfly's rich product creation paths, will deliver consumers a best in class experience to store, share and create precious memories.” The ThisLife platform also includes mobile capabilities for the iPhone and iPad. By leveraging the recent acquisitions of Photoccino and Penguin Digital, Shutterfly is building the next generation, fully integrated, platform agnostic solution for organizing, storing, sharing and creating physical and digital products from the web or mobile devices. The company will share additional details about the acquisition on its Q4 2012 earnings call.