We're taking more photos than ever, and running out of storage more often.

We surveyed 2,324 people, and the most frequent frustrations experienced by people who love taking photos were:

"I take too many photos, and I keep running out of room."

"I hate deleting photos to make room for more. It kills the moment."

"The more photos I have, the more disorganised they get."

"I can never find the photo I want to share on my smartphone."

The Goal for IceCream is to Free Up Space on your iPhone, and do it Fast.

   1 . Free Up Space On Demand

   2. Do it Fast

   3. Space-Saving Camera

1. FREE UP SPACE

Imagine a clever app that allows you to Free Up Space for 250, 1000, 2,500 or even 5,000 more photos on demand. Wouldn't that be a dream come true? Imagine if the app could tell you when you only had space for a few more photos, or even intelligently began freeing up space for you? That's what IceCream does.

IceCream backs up a fixed number of original, full resolution photos to the secure IceCream Cloud (build on Amazon's massively robust, scalable and safe data centers). It then optimises the images, reducing the file size by 90%, keeping beautiful gorgeous copies on your phone, even offline. We then help you remove the big images from your device (now that they're safe in the Cloud).

2. SPEED IS GOOD

Through some amazing technology, and our experience at Imperial and MIT, we've been able to make both the backing up process, and the image optimisation process super fast. We have Free Up Space for 250 more photos in about 40 seconds, and for 2,500 photos in about 2 minutes. That's magic.

3. A Space Saving Camera

IceCream also gives you a great alternative to the default camera app. With the IceCream Camera you can take full resolution, gorgeous photos - and back those up to the secure IceCream Cloud instantly. But we keep only an optimise version on your device to save space. That's clever. And means you can take 10x more photos. That's sweet.

Don't Apple and Dropbox already do this?

NO! They don't. We've been devotees of Apple and Dropbox for years, but we don't think their solutions are good enough. Let's explain why:

1. Limited and Expensive Storage. Dropbox costs $120 (£70) per year for the cheapest option (and they only give you 2 Gb of storage for free). Apple is also expensive, with the cheapest option (not launching until late 2014) costing $12 (£7) per year but it only offers a fraction of the Dropbox storage.
   
   
2. No Organisation. Too Complex. Unfortunately Dropbox is not integrated with a camera app, doesn't auto-organise your photos and doesn't make it easy to create or share albums. Apple, similarly makes it complicated with three different products - Camera, Photos and iCloud. Why can't it be one single app? Why can't it be organised a lot better?
   
   
3. Anti-Social. Dropbox is designed for files, not photos. As a result its not particularly social. It doesn't even have a friend list to show you who's sharing what with you? Similarly, Apple has never managed to make their products social. Even the iCloud Photo Stream feature is clunky at best, and could be made soooo much better.
   

LOVE PHOTOS? GET INVOLVED:

• We're raising £10,000 to complete the prototype IceCream app
• The first version will be for iPhone only (Android will come later)
• You can actively test the app and tell us which features you like and what you'd like more of
• We want YOU to help us craft our strategy moving forward

We love a delicious treat here at IceCream, and there are serious perks on offer in our appreciation of your involvement (Check them all out on the RIGHT).

A Great Team

We have a solid team of developers and computer scientists: with backgrounds in image optimisation, compression, storage and machine vision. We're going to combine that deep knowledge into an app that is super simple, and fun to use.

The Team is led by George Berkowski App of the Year Award Winner from Apple (for the HAILO app) and one of the earliest team members and led the Product Design and Development.

A team of engineers with a decade of experience building iOS applications for startups and big corporations are running the tech.

Researchers from Imperial College and MIT are behind the powerful image processing and machine learning technology that makes the app magical.

Future Challenges

We haven't solved all the challenges just yet, but we have the team who can.

• Image recognition and tagging. We already have some amazing image recognition working to categorise your photos automatically - so that you can search for them simply, quickly and intelligently. While it is already robust, we do foresee significant ongoing investment in this area to keep improving the service.
  
  
• Lowering storage costs. We are constantly striving to rollout better technology and hardware to store your photos more cost-efficiently. The better this technology becomes, the cheaper and more robust we can make the service.
  
  
• Unforeseen challenges. Naturally, there are plenty of unforeseen challenges which will arise. It's great news that our team has launched numerous previous startups before, and managed a number of successful exits. We're ready for the challenge!

You Can Always Help

Everyone takes photos on their smartphone:

• That means you have an opinion - and we'd love to hear it
• What is the biggest pain you have now? We want to solve it.
• If you have a wish list ... tell us...

Get in touch with any questions: hello@givemeicecream.com

And please share our campaign on Twitter and Facebook!