Zeega Offers a New Way to Tell Stories With Interactive Media

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Name: Zeega

One-Liner Pitch: Zeega is a new way of storytelling using interactive media.

Why It's Taking Off: Zeega curates music, pictures, GIFs and more from a range of websites to help users create their own interactive, engaging stories.

Whether it's through photos, videos, music or GIFs, social media has given us many ways to share our stories with the world. Now, Zeega is pulling all of this together to create a new form of interactive media for storytelling.

Zeega curates media from SoundCloud, Tumblr, Flickr and Giphy, and lets users combine this media with their personal content to create interactive stories they can share on the web.

"Our team stepped back and looked at the evolution of social media and the focus on creating and sharing photos, videos, etc," Jesse Shapins, CEO of Zeega, told Mashable in an interview. "Then we thought about now, and asked, 'what if we could have a new media format that is only made possible because of the Internet and what's in the cloud?'"

Creating your own Zeega is fast and simple — just choose your media from the cloud, or upload your own media, and drag them onto slides. You can combine or overlap images and GIFs on individual slides, and add text to personalize your story. Once you're done, press play and the music you chose will play continuously as you click through your story. You can then share your Zeega on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Users don't have to worry about citing the media they use from the cloud. Zeegas are always live streaming as soon as you hit play, so the media is not copied. Zeega automatically generates citations for the media by adding icons as the bottom of every slide that directs you to the original source.

The Zeega team also creates a "Daily Zeega," which includes media from the cloud related to what is happening in the world in terms of pop culture and news. They send it out to their community as a fun piece of content, but also to show its users what media is available that they can use to make their own creations.

Launched in February, Zeegas are becoming popular among teenagers who enjoy experimenting with the different ways to tell their stories. They're also popular in the music community, because the platform makes it easy for musicians to create quick interactive music videos.

"Zeega really taps into the ability to express our emotions in ways that are different from other social media," says Shapins. "There's the expression of emotions, feelings and ideas in ways that are truly distinct, fun and engaging."

Zeega is part of the first group of startups in Matter, a San Francisco-based startup accelerator that supports and invests in media entrepreneurs that are changing media for the better. Matter invests $50,000 to its teams during its five-month program.

Although the startup does not have a business model in place yet, it is considering giving specific brands the opportunity to make their own media available to the Zeega community.

In the future, the Zeega team plans to launch a Zeega app, and give users the options to integrate Vine videos, follow their favorite Zeega creators and remix Zeegas to create their own versions.

Image: Mashable composite; iStockPhoto, A-Digit, kimberrywood, Zeega