Online services designed to keep friends and family connected are a dime a dozen, but Tiny Pictures Inc. is banking on the camera phone to do the trick. Investors are buying in, with the company announcing Monday morning that it has closed a $7.2 million Series B round, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and including Series A investor Mohr Davidow Ventures. The company, which creates the Radar service for real-time sharing of camera phone photos and video clips, had previously raised $4 million in first-round financing, including seed funding from angel investors Joichi Ito and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Tiny Pictures is the brainchild of John Poisson, a 10-year veteran of the film and TV business who headed up mobile media research and design groups at Sony Corp. in Tokyo and founded the Canadian digital animation studio, Meteor Studios. (The photo of him above was taken by Ito.)

"It was four o'clock in the morning on April 4, 2004, and I was hanging out with some friends in this tiny bar in Tokyo," Poisson tells Tech Confidential, recalling the moment when he decided to start the company. While in Japan, where camera phones and other handheld gadgets are ubiquitous, Poisson had come to understand "what it means to have these devices in our hands. It's really about a deep and intimate connection between us and the people in our lives."

Unlike other social networking sites where users publish posts, photos and video clips for all and sundry to consume -- think Flickr and YouTube -- Tiny Pictures is designed for intimate groups to stay in touch, with casual, personal photos at the center of their discussions. "What I want to do is share experiences, not photographs," says Poisson. "We can communicate really effectively by sharing pictures of what we're doing right now."

His idea seems to be attracting a hip, young, camera phone-carrying crowd -- as well as some innovative advertisers. For example, Warner Brothers used the Radar service to promote the Will Smith sci-fi flik "I Am Legend," encouraging people to take photos of its "God Still Loves Us" logos all over the world. Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am is joining Tiny Pictures' advisory board this month and plans to use the service to promote his projects.

Investor Tim Draper first heard about the Radar service from his son, a student at UCLA.

"Radar is a remarkable service, combining everything that's powerful about mobile and focusing on a burgeoning opportunity of global scale," says Draper in a statement. "We fully expect Tiny Pictures' approach to picture-driven communication to change the world." Nothing tiny about that. - Mary Kathleen Flynn

See Jan. 21 review of the Radar service from SMS Text News