ruly

If you're like most people, you take a lot of digital photos. In fact, the whole world is taking more photos than ever before. Just how many? Over 500 million are uploaded every day to services such as Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Snapchat.

The problem is, the vast majority of people rarely spend time organizing all these photos. Why? Because it's a time-consuming, painstaking process. After all, you have to review every photo one-by-one-by-one-by-one...but, the more we neglect our growing pile of photos, the worse it gets. Pretty soon there's a massive mountain of unruly files. They're rarely accessed or viewed and many of your favorite photos are forgotten altogether. Can you relate to this?

At ruly, we picture something better -  Digital Photo Concierge. What's that, you ask? It's a team of highly trained photo specialists who take care of all these tasks for you. All you do is take photos and ruly thoughtfully organizes the files and beautifully edits the photos. And the best part? With every photo you take, you're helping ruly create tech jobs for women living in poverty.

It all starts with your disorganized mountain of photos. Customers send their files to ruly through Dropbox, then our photo specialists get to work. First, we assess every photo individually to separate out the Klutter and identify the Keepers. What is Klutter? They're the photos that don't pass our technical and photographic criteria. For example, they are: unnecessary duplicates, out of focus, mistake shots and embarrassing facial expressions.

Once the Keepers are identified, ruly photo specialists then find the Highlights. These are the really fun shots because they tell a story and have the best photographic qualities. They are the 25 best shots that you'd show your friends and family after a trip to Hawaii, even though you took over 400 in total. In the time it takes to finish off a latte, you can essentially give your friend a guided tour of your week-long vacation.

Once the Highlights are identified, ruly edits them so they look great - totally ready for you to share, print or create a photo book.

Lastly, ruly aggregates all your Highlights from the whole year into a folder called Annual Highlights. This might be our coolest feature, because it makes end-of-the-year photo projects really easy. Do you like to make annual family photo books? Or maybe holiday gifts like photo calendars? This feature is perfect because you don't have to sort through all the photos you've taken during the year. All the Highlights are in one spot and they're edited and completely ready for any creative project you have in mind.

We started ruly to create tech jobs for women living in poverty. Why? Because we want to see the end of extreme global poverty. It has ravaged too much of the world for too long - and it has been especially brutal for women.

But instead of aid or charity, we've set out to create a sustainable business that generates transformative jobs. Not just any kind of job, but tech jobs that teach valuable skills and bring the world's most marginalized citizens into the 21st-century digital economy. We believe this type of job creation is a force that will change the economic future of women, families and communities.

ruly has an incredible partner called Samasource. They're a nonprofit organization whose mission is to alleviate worldwide poverty by connecting unemployed women and youth in impoverished countries to digital work.

One of the first organizations to engage in impact sourcing, Samasource workers are trained in basic computer skills and paid fair wages for their labor. Over 92% of new workers starting with Samasource are unemployed or underemployed. On average, these workers increase previous income by 114% after six months of Samasource employment, and 89% pursue additional means of formal employment and/or education after working for Samasource.

Through our partnership with Samasource, we're launching the ruly workforce in Nairobi, Kenya. The ruly Photo Concierge Service was specifically designed so almost all of the human elements will be performed by the ruly/Samasource workforce.  

Ruly recently announced the start of its Beta Test Program, which was launched as an Indiegogo campaign. It can be viewed at igg.me/at/ruly. You can also visit our company website at www.getruly.com.