Beet is a brand new app born and bred here in Eugene. App creators Jonathan Miller and Sean Thielen came up with the idea after a friend studied abroad.

“There are a ton of videos online where people take short video clips and then compile them into one big video, but there was nothing that allowed them to do this in a simplistic way,” said Miller.

The app combines short clips users have taken in their day-to-day lives. Instead of going through each individual clip, the app combines it all into one continuous video. It’s a social video platform that allows users to share with friends and gloat to people around the world.

Both developers are University of Oregon students from California, as well as roommates. Miller is a business major and Sean is an English major, and neither imagined that by their senior year they would be developing an app and talking to investors.

Thielen, the developer behind the app, took three months building the app and critiquing it according to user feedback.

“We spent a lot of time getting feedback from people in our classes and our friends as to what they thought of the initial concept and what they wanted the app to do. We got some good feedback, tweaked the app and then submitted it to the app store,” says Thielen.

How does Beet compare to other picture and video capturing platforms?

Beet offers video merging that hasn’t been offered by any other mobile app. Instagram users can edit and personalize their video clips and photos, and Snapchat takes on the opposite approach to Beet by allowing users to share images and video that can’t be saved.

This is meant to heighten the security and privacy of the media that gets shared with friends and the world. Snapchat, for example, settled with the Federal Trade Commission, after the company failed to “secure its Friends Feature [that] lead to the New Year’s Eve data breach of 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers,” according to PCmag.com.

New brands like Beet have seen the importance of securing media that is posted through the Internet. The company’s policy is that, “The video clips you upload to Beet belong to you, and you alone.” There is also a privacy setting on the app that allows users to select which individuals view their content.

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