Earlier this month Pelago’s mobile service Whrrl launched an updated version at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX. Today, the company is revealing some useful enhancements to Whrrl v2.0, with SMS and email integration along with digital camera functionality.

You may recall that Whrrl is a mobile-to-web service that enables users to create collaborative stories around a particular event, contributing content through photos, videos and more. With location-based capabilities and an inherent community that can be built up around these collaborative events.

With the new SMS and email support, more users can become much more mobile with their ability to add to a Whrrl story. Just as Twitter has a broad appeal with its simplistic text-message format for sending in updates, Whrrl too can expand the types of mobile users that can add to a Whrrl story. The added email support also simplifies the story-telling ability of a given contributor.

A partnership with Eye-Fi is also providing means for direct digital camera photo upload to Whrrl stories. As the Eye-Fi service pulls photos from your digital camera wirelessly, the process for adding photos to your computer, then to a photo-hosting provider and onto Whrrl has been collapsed into an automatic updating process. With this option photos can be uploaded in real-time.

Eye-fi is simplifying and mobilizing unconnected digital cameras to a large extent and I imagine that a number of other services will continue to look to this third party solution for more hands-off approaches to media-sharing as Whrrl has done. To see a short video interview we did with Whrrl, see below.

Top Stories
 
Mediabistro Events
EVENTS
Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.