Piczo Zone Launches, Enabling Easier Sharing of User Generated Content

– UK’s Largest Teen Destination for Self-Expression Enhances Tools for Its 28 Million Users Worldwide

Piczo (www.piczo.com), the UK’s leading teen destination for self-expression, today unveiled Piczo Zone, a new feature that allows users to create and share content across their sites. With Piczo Zone, users can quickly browse for creative Piczo sites and add content they want to use on their own pages.

Piczo content showcases the creative talent of the 13-18 year olds that use it. Now they have a platform to share their content with their friends more openly while operating in Piczo’s safer and more controlled online environment. Piczo Zone includes descriptive data and tags which enables users to share the creative content on their page with the rest of Piczo’s user community.

Making creative content from Piczo more easily searchable also means advertisers now have the ability to be more targeted in their approach to the UK teen market in their online campaigns. By using the tags and descriptions that the users choose to share in describing their content, such as “Harry Potter” for example, advertisers can now gain access to a secure and private social network with more targeted messages and more profiled audiences.

Chris Seth, European Managing Director, Piczo, said: “Teens have always decorated their lives. From their bedrooms to the clothes they wear, our members use every aspect of their lives to express their passions and creativity. Piczo Zone is a way for our users to decorate their profile pages, in the same way.

“For advertisers, the Piczo Zone offers a range of increasingly-sophisticated communications solutions. As users build a progressively detailed profile of themselves, advertisers can begin to offer far more appropriately-targeted advertising,” Seth added.

Piczo Zone has over 35 categories including sport, music and design. Under each category users can search for graphics, photos and videos and of course, post their own content. Crossing the boundaries between social networking and publishing, Piczo Zone is a self-populated library of cutting-edge content that users can develop and share to customise their user profiles and express themselves. As each piece of content includes descriptive data and tags, popular content will rapidly spread virally amongst users.

Seth continued, “There is a requirement from the online advertising community to enable more focused, content driven advertising campaigns. By further understanding user interests, age and demographics, we believe Piczo Zone will give brands the opportunity to see a greater return in both interaction and brand awareness, as well as engage more closely with the elusive teen audience.”

On Piczo Zone, users are able to modify their pages with glitter, graphics, badges, stickers, videos, style sheets and other effects to find exactly what they need. They can also instantly add creations that they find directly to their Piczo site with just a few clicks or take the embed codes wherever they want. By enabling users to share their own images, graphics and video on Piczo Zone, Piczo is also giving them the opportunity to discover and connect with other members with similar interests.

About Piczo, Inc.

Piczo empowers teenagers worldwide to creatively express themselves, build personal communities, and share ideas and experiences with their friends in a safer online environment. Piczo’s customisable content, colourful graphics, glitter text, video, games, and photo editing tools spotlight member creativity without requiring any technical know-how. Piczo has offices in San Francisco, New York, and London.

Piczo facts
More than 28 million registered user accounts
Over 12 million Monthly Unique Visitors generating over one billion monthly Page Views
Created for teenagers worldwide, Piczo users are typically 13-to-16 years old
A top 40 site in overall world rankings by monthly page views, Piczo was ranked as the fastest growing website in the UK in 2005.
Contacts

Piczo, Inc.
Joan Lockwood, 415-263-3485
jlockwood {at} piczoinc(.)com
or
Hotwire PR
Tom Malcolm, +44 (0) 20 7608 4639
Tom.Malcolm {at} hotwirepr(.)com