Rappers Jay-Z and Will Smith have joined forces for a new business venture.
Will and Jay-Z are teaming up with singer Shakira, and Twitter founder Biz Stone to bankroll a new iPhone app called ‘Viddy’.
Viddy is a startup company that’s a lot like Instagram (a company Facebook just purchased for $1 Billion), but for videos.
It’s an easy way to share videos on mobile devices, and it even has filters to make the videos look better.
“We help people capture 15 seconds of their life,” co-founder Brett O’Brien said. “Instagram has photo features and Viddy has production packs.”
Viddy launched last year and already has about 10 million registered users. It’s one of the top free photo and video apps in the App Store, behind Instagram.
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Viddy though. In February it was yanked from the App Store for allowing subscribers to share too many porno videos. After 36 hours and some cleaning-up of the content, Apple reinstated Viddy.
Co-founder Brett O’Brien told the New York Times, he hopes Viddy’s famous investors will help the company become the next big thing in the app world.
So far, O’Brien’s plan seems to be working. Viddy is adding nearly 300,000 new users a day.
Jay Z already has a number of ongoing projects with Will Smith – he signed Jada & Will’s singer/actress daughter, Willow, to his Roc Nation record label in 2010, and they are currently working on re-imagining the hit musical “Annie” for the big screen.
They also previously teamed-up as co-producers to bring another top musical, “Fela!”, to the Broadway stage in 2009.
