Tech startup: Pixorial Inc.

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: Andrés Espiñeira retired from a tech career in Silicon Valley and moved to Colorado, then sailed across the Atlantic with his father the next year. “The genesis of the idea (for Pixorial) came over that summer from digitizing Super 8 and 8-millimeter film for my father,” Pixorial CEO Espiñeira says. “Transferring is often a problem for people. I wanted to take this video and put it in the cloud online and give them tools to edit it.” A few years passed before Espiñeira came out of retirement to launch Pixorial with Vice President of Operations Gina Miccio. IN A NUTSHELL: “We make old and new video portable and give you the tools to put it anywhere,” Espiñeira says. Users can either upload video files at Pixorial.com or request a shipping kit to mail old reels and tapes in most every major legacy format for Pixorial staff to digitize into their libraries, which are stored on enterprise-class Hitachi hardware at the highest resolution possible. After digitizing content, users can log in and edit it using Pixorial’s online tools. “It’s aimed at people who have no video editing experience at all,” Espiñeira says. “It has about 70 to 80 percent of the functionality of a heavy-duty video editor.”