Photo Idea Brainstorming Continued

The idea here is to combine Web Technology with Photography.  I am going to layout some of my brainstorming ideas that you can then pick through and comment on what may work or not. 

Using http://www.blurb.com for professional quality self-publishing I think there are several possible ideas:

• Photo-based biographies/family tree
  • Creating a customized photo/limited text biography for select people
  • We would create a web link dedicated to that persons biography that they could link to
  • Example: we approach people and offer to gather their photos and create a memory log that they can sell to their friends, family, etc
• Photo-based documentary
  • Custom create a photo based documentary for businesses to sell to friends, customers, employees, etc
  • Approach different organizations — meetup groups, frats, sororities, motorcycle groups, sports team, church groups, etc. and offer to create a log of a particular event or series of events that we could then sell back to them and their friends/family
  • We could quickly create a custom webpage for that organization to visit and generate sales.  We could offer the business a cut of sales to encourage them to actively promote it
• Photo-based tour
  • After looking around on blurb.com and doing some searches on each city, I thought it might be cool to create a photo tour of cities
  • Possibly something like “20 Places you must see in San Diego”, and that could be repeated for any city we decide to visit.
    • I didn’t see any tourist type guides to St. Louis on Blurb, but I did find a $125 photo album of St. Louis.  Maybe we could create something similar to this, just costing a lot less ($20-30), and describing the significance of each landmark
  • We could then create a website with a collection of photo tours of various cities that we visit and sell them from the site.  It would require virtually no maintenance once we set it up.

If we actually want to make money of off photography, it will require crafty marketing:

• Marketing Concept 1 – Customers do the selling

Any of these ideas could easily be promoted through existing social neworking sites as well.  I believe the key to making money off of this concept will be by empowering the customers to do the selling for us – to their friends, family ect.  We make the core participants feel like they are part of the project and excite them to sell the books to who they know.

• Marketing Concept 2 – Crowdsourcing

We creating some sort of crowdsourcing photography element for an album, where church members (church is just an example) could all submit their photos to us.  We would pick the best ones and give cash donations to their church in the winner’s name based on a percentage of the overall sales.  This would create an incentive for everyone to buy the book.  

• Marketing Concept 3 – Fundraising

We approach a high school football team and offer to collect the best photographs and put it into an album that could be sold to team members, families and fans.  A percentage of profits will go to the team.

 

Closing notes:

As we get started, we could structure it so that the person/organization we are doing it for pays NOTHING out of pocket.  This would seperate us from a majority of photograhers from the get go.  Obviously, I am not even close to an expert in the field of photograhy, and I don’t really understand the photography bsuiness, but I think it is a start.  Hopefully this stimulates some thought, let me know what you think.

Read Full Post »

Photo Idea Brainstorming Continued

The idea here is to combine Web Technology with Photography.  I am going to layout some of my brainstorming ideas that you can then pick through and comment on what may work or not. 

Using http://www.blurb.com for professional quality self-publishing I think there are several possible ideas:

• Photo-based biographies/family tree
  • Creating a customized photo/limited text biography for select people
  • We would create a web link dedicated to that persons biography that they could link to
  • Example: we approach people and offer to gather their photos and create a memory log that they can sell to their friends, family, etc
• Photo-based documentary
  • Custom create a photo based documentary for businesses to sell to friends, customers, employees, etc
  • Approach different organizations — meetup groups, frats, sororities, motorcycle groups, sports team, church groups, etc. and offer to create a log of a particular event or series of events that we could then sell back to them and their friends/family
  • We could quickly create a custom webpage for that organization to visit and generate sales.  We could offer the business a cut of sales to encourage them to actively promote it
• Photo-based tour
  • After looking around on blurb.com and doing some searches on each city, I thought it might be cool to create a photo tour of cities
  • Possibly something like “20 Places you must see in San Diego”, and that could be repeated for any city we decide to visit.
    • I didn’t see any tourist type guides to St. Louis on Blurb, but I did find a $125 photo album of St. Louis.  Maybe we could create something similar to this, just costing a lot less ($20-30), and describing the significance of each landmark
  • We could then create a website with a collection of photo tours of various cities that we visit and sell them from the site.  It would require virtually no maintenance once we set it up.

If we actually want to make money of off photography, it will require crafty marketing:

• Marketing Concept 1 – Customers do the selling

Any of these ideas could easily be promoted through existing social neworking sites as well.  I believe the key to making money off of this concept will be by empowering the customers to do the selling for us – to their friends, family ect.  We make the core participants feel like they are part of the project and excite them to sell the books to who they know.

• Marketing Concept 2 – Crowdsourcing

We creating some sort of crowdsourcing photography element for an album, where church members (church is just an example) could all submit their photos to us.  We would pick the best ones and give cash donations to their church in the winner’s name based on a percentage of the overall sales.  This would create an incentive for everyone to buy the book.  

• Marketing Concept 3 – Fundraising

We approach a high school football team and offer to collect the best photographs and put it into an album that could be sold to team members, families and fans.  A percentage of profits will go to the team.

 

Closing notes:

As we get started, we could structure it so that the person/organization we are doing it for pays NOTHING out of pocket.  This would seperate us from a majority of photograhers from the get go.  Obviously, I am not even close to an expert in the field of photograhy, and I don’t really understand the photography bsuiness, but I think it is a start.  Hopefully this stimulates some thought, let me know what you think.

Read Full Post »

How to get people to pay for your content

Found this great post while reading about a company a.viary.com that does crowdsourcing. 

 

What do you pay for?

By Michael Galpert on August 26, 2008 | 10 comments

The web enables us to listen to music, watch tv shows and follow the latest news all without paying a cent. But while things are slowly but surely becoming free, I still believe people are willing to pay for certain value propositions.

Image courtesy of laffy4k

I believe the following 5 things are uniquely profitable in a world of free:

1. Convenience

People are inherently lazy. If you make their lives easier, they will pay you for it.

There are several ways to listen or download music for free, yet people are still paying for songs via iTunes or amazon.com. Why? Because of how easy it is to find and download music on those sites. People value their time more than the 99 cents per download. If you make things convenient and easy people will pay.

2. Quality

Price ensures a more serious and interested clientele. There are many online forums that are free (i.e.Sitepoint, DPreview), but there are also a handful you need to pay for to access (i.e. Webmasterworld,SomethingAwful, metafilter). I believe the reason people are willing to pay for those online communities is because the quality of the content is better. There is a higher signal to noise ratio. This same premise applies to dating sites. People will pay for membership to online dating sites, as opposed to finding dates through any number of free social networks.

3. Additional Functionality

Many websites give consumers just enough services to whet their pallets, and then charge for more functionality or more services, also called the “freemium model.” Notable examples include the 37 Signals‘ product offering, Flickr’s Pro Account, and Skype.

4. Customization

WordPress.com is a great example of this. They provide anyone the ability to have their own personal blog for free however they charge for the ability to customize the CSS or a the blogs domain name for additional fees. Smugmug is another example.

5. Privacy

People still value keeping their private information private. To protect their identity people are willing to pay GoDaddyan extra fee when registering a domain name to ensure the address remains undisclosed.

What do you value enough that you are willing to open your wallet for?

========

Note 1: I would like to delve into this further and have proposed a talk for next year’s SXSW conference on this topic. If this discussion is of interest to you, I welcome any feedback and would appreciate your vote.

========

Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine’s cofounder, has a really great list of attributes he asserts are “better than free.” These qualities people will pay for in a digital age and include:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Accessibility
6. Embodiment
7. Patronage
8. Findability

I asked my twitter followers and received some interesting suggestions:

* accessibility
* silence
* beauty
* freedom 
* peace of mind
* respect
* attention

Any other ideas?

Read Full Post »

How to get people to pay for your content

Found this great post while reading about a company a.viary.com that does crowdsourcing. 

 

What do you pay for?

By Michael Galpert on August 26, 2008 | 10 comments

The web enables us to listen to music, watch tv shows and follow the latest news all without paying a cent. But while things are slowly but surely becoming free, I still believe people are willing to pay for certain value propositions.

Image courtesy of laffy4k

I believe the following 5 things are uniquely profitable in a world of free:

1. Convenience

People are inherently lazy. If you make their lives easier, they will pay you for it.

There are several ways to listen or download music for free, yet people are still paying for songs via iTunes or amazon.com. Why? Because of how easy it is to find and download music on those sites. People value their time more than the 99 cents per download. If you make things convenient and easy people will pay.

2. Quality

Price ensures a more serious and interested clientele. There are many online forums that are free (i.e.Sitepoint, DPreview), but there are also a handful you need to pay for to access (i.e. Webmasterworld,SomethingAwful, metafilter). I believe the reason people are willing to pay for those online communities is because the quality of the content is better. There is a higher signal to noise ratio. This same premise applies to dating sites. People will pay for membership to online dating sites, as opposed to finding dates through any number of free social networks.

3. Additional Functionality

Many websites give consumers just enough services to whet their pallets, and then charge for more functionality or more services, also called the “freemium model.” Notable examples include the 37 Signals‘ product offering, Flickr’s Pro Account, and Skype.

4. Customization

WordPress.com is a great example of this. They provide anyone the ability to have their own personal blog for free however they charge for the ability to customize the CSS or a the blogs domain name for additional fees. Smugmug is another example.

5. Privacy

People still value keeping their private information private. To protect their identity people are willing to pay GoDaddyan extra fee when registering a domain name to ensure the address remains undisclosed.

What do you value enough that you are willing to open your wallet for?

========

Note 1: I would like to delve into this further and have proposed a talk for next year’s SXSW conference on this topic. If this discussion is of interest to you, I welcome any feedback and would appreciate your vote.

========

Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine’s cofounder, has a really great list of attributes he asserts are “better than free.” These qualities people will pay for in a digital age and include:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Accessibility
6. Embodiment
7. Patronage
8. Findability

I asked my twitter followers and received some interesting suggestions:

* accessibility
* silence
* beauty
* freedom 
* peace of mind
* respect
* attention

Any other ideas?

Read Full Post »

self publishing?

Self publishing photography? So there I was?  Any ideas?

I am editing this from previous post.  I was looking at a website called www.blurb.com which gives you free software that helps you put together really slick looking photography books.  They also have book store that once you put together your book, you can sell it independantly on their site.  ANyhow, I found an article on Blurb that I found pretty relevant with what we’ve been talking about.

They bring up the point that although technology moves at a staggering speed, most of the world moves at regular business speed and sometimes it takes the world a while to catch up to cool sites/technology. 

Blurb Wags the Long Tail

Stacey Higginbotham, Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 5:00 AM PT Comments (1)

 

Related Stories

• Anne
• Big Growth for the Internet to Continue, Cisco Predicts
• Andy Grove Wants 10 Million Plug-In Vehicles In 4 Years

Powered by Sphere

In a few weeks, online bookmaking site Blurb will launch a new community called BlurbNation, a section of the Blurb site where people can connect with a professional designer that will take their photos, stories, recipes or any other images and pull them together into a book. Such a move is aimed at expanding Blurb’s business beyond the 90,000 books it printed in 2007 — and to take it out of the red.

Blurb, which was founded in 2004, launched its site in April of 2006 and is on track to turn in breakeven results this year, is both a digital bookmaker and an example of yesteryear’s big Internet trend: The Long Tail (It seems so long ago, but it was only three-and-half years ago that Anderson wrote about the idea in Wired). Since we move at digital speed, we’ve already discarded that trend (and possibly refuted it) for social everything. But true business growth doesn’t take place at that harried clip, it typically requires the five to seven years allotted by VCs for their investment time frames.

00
Those time frames are there for a reason. Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins Blurb says the company exceeded its revenue expectations by 40 percent last year. (In 2007 she told Time she anticipated sales between $5 million and $10 million for the year.) And in the quarter following its launch late last year in Europe, sales from the continent have climbed to account for 17 percent of total overall revenues from a mere 2.5 percent.

To me this is a nice reminder to avoid focusing solely on the trend du jour, but also to keep in mind that much of the world runs at business speed, and that it’s the people out in the rest of the world that break a technology site into the mainstream.

Blurb makes books, nothing terribly technical about it, until you think about how impossible it would be, before the Internet existed, to source, edit, design and print 90,000 different titles in a single year. Its biggest customers are corporations trying to create memorable advertorials, though artists and average Americans also pull together their own works of art. Blurb competes with other online publishers LuLu and Xlibris, but has the lead in high-end photobooks.

The cool thing about marrying the digital medium with one that began in 1040 with the first Chinese printing presses (sorry Gutenberg), is that when it comes to user-generated content, Blurb may end up making UGC profitable before YouTube does. Profitability isn’t everything and I’m not sure how Blurb could ever reach more people than YouTube, but it’s nice to talk to an online service that can make money in the here and now.

 

Read Full Post »

self publishing?

Self publishing photography? So there I was?  Any ideas?

I am editing this from previous post.  I was looking at a website called www.blurb.com which gives you free software that helps you put together really slick looking photography books.  They also have book store that once you put together your book, you can sell it independantly on their site.  ANyhow, I found an article on Blurb that I found pretty relevant with what we’ve been talking about.

They bring up the point that although technology moves at a staggering speed, most of the world moves at regular business speed and sometimes it takes the world a while to catch up to cool sites/technology. 

Blurb Wags the Long Tail

Stacey Higginbotham, Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 5:00 AM PT Comments (1)

 

Related Stories

• Anne
• Big Growth for the Internet to Continue, Cisco Predicts
• Andy Grove Wants 10 Million Plug-In Vehicles In 4 Years

Powered by Sphere

In a few weeks, online bookmaking site Blurb will launch a new community called BlurbNation, a section of the Blurb site where people can connect with a professional designer that will take their photos, stories, recipes or any other images and pull them together into a book. Such a move is aimed at expanding Blurb’s business beyond the 90,000 books it printed in 2007 — and to take it out of the red.

Blurb, which was founded in 2004, launched its site in April of 2006 and is on track to turn in breakeven results this year, is both a digital bookmaker and an example of yesteryear’s big Internet trend: The Long Tail (It seems so long ago, but it was only three-and-half years ago that Anderson wrote about the idea in Wired). Since we move at digital speed, we’ve already discarded that trend (and possibly refuted it) for social everything. But true business growth doesn’t take place at that harried clip, it typically requires the five to seven years allotted by VCs for their investment time frames.

00
Those time frames are there for a reason. Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins Blurb says the company exceeded its revenue expectations by 40 percent last year. (In 2007 she told Time she anticipated sales between $5 million and $10 million for the year.) And in the quarter following its launch late last year in Europe, sales from the continent have climbed to account for 17 percent of total overall revenues from a mere 2.5 percent.

To me this is a nice reminder to avoid focusing solely on the trend du jour, but also to keep in mind that much of the world runs at business speed, and that it’s the people out in the rest of the world that break a technology site into the mainstream.

Blurb makes books, nothing terribly technical about it, until you think about how impossible it would be, before the Internet existed, to source, edit, design and print 90,000 different titles in a single year. Its biggest customers are corporations trying to create memorable advertorials, though artists and average Americans also pull together their own works of art. Blurb competes with other online publishers LuLu and Xlibris, but has the lead in high-end photobooks.

The cool thing about marrying the digital medium with one that began in 1040 with the first Chinese printing presses (sorry Gutenberg), is that when it comes to user-generated content, Blurb may end up making UGC profitable before YouTube does. Profitability isn’t everything and I’m not sure how Blurb could ever reach more people than YouTube, but it’s nice to talk to an online service that can make money in the here and now.

 

Read Full Post »

Here is where I spend my day

pretty creative huh?

Read Full Post »

Credit Crunch and the VC Startup Atmosphere

Here is a great comment left after this arti”cal” left on TechCrunch:

Clearly the credit crunch affects the entire economy. Venture financing does not exist outside of this. The better deals will get done with less capital than before and the marginal deals won’t get done. Naturally, the deals built around a revenue model will be these “better deals”. The days of managing burn and funding burn through successive rounds, while an attempt is made to capture sufficient eyeballs to segue to ad revenue, is over. VC’s will want an actual business to invest in now. They’ll immediately strive to reduce the ratio of “big winners to dead-poolers” by half what it is now.

Kind of goes along with what we have been saying.  Lets focus on how to make picFLiTE profitable and generate income in addition to advertising. 

This could serve as an advantage to us in terms of much less competition during tough times.

Read Full Post »

picFLiTE Brainstorm

After some more reading and thought, I am believing it is possible to carve out a little niche in this market, but it will likely have to be executed soon.  The geotaggable picture search engine idea is officially being upgraded to “Project” status.  I created a new Project Category called picFLiTE for us to start saving posts in (I also moved all old related posts into this category folder).

So after our conversation tonight and some more reading, I have come up with a few essential features that picFLiTE will need impltented to create dominance and rapid adoption in the marketplace.  The key features will be the following:

• Rapid Development:
  • Possible partnership with Cuil, Google, Yahoo, etc to license search technology
  • We would be busy creating relationships with parnering sites while also creating a standard for searching geotags and timestamps
• Easy integration with existing picture sharing sites: MySpace, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, etc.
  • Develop a standard way to record locational information and allow people without GPS to manually assign one to participate (could be as simple as clicking on a location on a map)
• Ease of use for the average user:
  • Apps created for participating platform to draw social networking traffic
  • Standalone website that is free to search
  • No “sign-up-for-a-new-account-before-using” type interface
    • Not ruling out an optional advanced feature offering for members though
• Viral Marketing Element: must possess a feature that stimulates sharing
  • We could create a competition that shows the most popular hangouts in a college campus, in a city, etc. by number of pictures shared in each location
  • Same concept could be applied to cities in the world, etc.
  • Create business participation by including FREE business logos and small ad for upcoming events by featured photos if the business becomes a contributing member
    • Example: The nightclub KIN in SD is advertised free on our site if they continually add photos to our search platform and invite others to participate
  • Create some type of user rewards (can be fake or real) that participants get to accumulate as they geotag photos and use our site
• Monetization:
  • Would probably have to utilize some sort of advertising-based revenue model
    • Possible revenue sharing with parnering sites…
  • Introduce a premuim ad placement for participating local businesses
  • The goal here would be more to generate a large user base and sell the business very soon, so short term revenue generation wouldn’t be as critical for us
    • The goal would be to develop the company so that it could interface very well as a “value-added” acquisition for a larger company such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.

These are ideas to stimulate more thought.  We’ll chat more tomorrow.

Read Full Post »

Sonic Lighter iPhone App – good viral marketing case study

What a simple app is my first impression. But what makes Sonic Lighter impressive is the sophisticated viral marketing genius behind this appearingly simple little lighter app.  Unlike its competitors, it’s effectively leveraging location awareness and social networking/human team building instincts to create a bit of a phenomenon. The result is a viral spread.

As TechCrunch comments:

I wasn’t impressed: there are no less than ten different virtual lighter apps in iTunes, which is what I’d call a saturated market. And it gets better, because Sonic Lighter costs $.99. The official Zippo iphone app is free. The basic functionality of all of these is similar – you have a virtual lighter, you light it and when you move the iPhone the flame moves around. 

So, how did the creators make it stand out?

You can optionally share your location information with the application, and when you light it you show up on a virtual earth-like globe. France and Japan are going absolutely crazy with users, which you can see quite clearly from the virtual globe and the screenshot to the right. The longer a person keeps the lighter going (I have mine sitting here burning while I write this), the more”KiloJoules” you burn. And that helps contribute to the geographical teams that are sprouting up and trying to be the brightest on the globe. Oh, and you can blow on the microphone and extinguish the flame.

Sonic Lighters can also ignite other lighters on other iPhones, which is a fun party trick if you’ve had enough to drink. Pretty soon iPhone users in the room who don’t have the app will be happily paying $.99 based solely on the geek peer pressure.  See the video below:

—————–
Sources:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/26/what-is-the-deal-with-this-stupid-lighter-iphone-app/

Read Full Post »