Digital Photography on the iPhone

Digital photography on the iPhone is becoming more popular.  Although the iPhone is limited by it’s 2MP resolution, the vividness of color captured is very impressive.  What makes the iPhone different than all other phones is the availability of immediate sharing capabilities as well as quick access to apps to touch-up and modify photos on the fly right from the iPhone.  Check this out:

http://www.justwhatisee.com/

This guy is making money by selling prints from pics he takes on his iPhone.  Pretty cool.  According to the maintainer of the website, “Raw images out of the [iPhone] camera are 1600 X 1200 pixels, which will easily lend for a very sharp, very clear 4″ X 6″ or 5″ X 7″ print.”

Below are some of the most popular apps that are being used to create cool photography on the iPhone, you will probably undestand these descriptions better than I do.

• CameraBag, currently on sale for temporary price of $2.99 from Nevercenter Ltd. is an app that simulates five classic camera photographic qualities. It accomplishes this using filters, crops, etc.
• “Helga” mimics the Holga camera, an inexpensive medium format film toy camera that was first released in 1982. Photos take on a surrealistic, impressionistic scenes for landscape, still life, portrait and street photography according to the Wikipedia entry.
• “Lolo” mimics the Russian LOMO LC-A Compact Automat camera, known for its overly colorful, vibrant, and sometimes blurry picture pictures. See the Wiki entry for Lomography for more information.
• Ansel converts your photo into the black and white photography just like the artist of the same name is famous for Ansel Adams offering a smooth gradient from black to white.
• Magic Touch, currently on sale for $4.99 from Nick Drabovich is described as “simple photo retouching” app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• Photogene, currently on sale for $4.99 from Omer Shoor is an app that offers many features for photo adjustment that has a good set of features and a functional interface that makes it fun and easy to use.
• Picoli, currently on sale for $2.99 (regular price is $4.99) from Alazar GmbH & Co. KG is an app that allows you to perform different types of adjustments to your photos.
• Panolab, free from Originate Labs, is an app that claims to be the first to enable photographers to capture and assemble multi-frame panoramas and collages directly on the iPhone. All these can be created using photos from the iPhones photo library or captured on the fly.
• hotoboard, $.99 by Zest Prod is an app that allows you to manipulate and build collages of photos on your iPhone and iPod touch. This app emulates the interface of the Microsoft Surface.
• Collage, $1.99 by John Moffet is an app that allows you to manipulate and build collages of photos on your iPhone and iPod Touch.
• ImageTouch, available at $2.99 and as a free reduced-feature version by Intellcore, is an app that like Photoboard and Collage makes collages, but adds some features, including geotagging. It also has self-contained training video that was a nice touch.

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Sources:
http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/10/20/turning-the-iphone-into-a-digital-photography-tool/

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SD Attractions

Well, here is a good start… San Deigo is currently the 8th largest city in the US, and the 2nd largest in California according to the information I found.  I included a long list of links that should be a good start to creating a list of top places to visit.

• Beaches: Coronado Beach is nominated 1 of top ten best beaches in the United States. La Jolla Shores has a children pool that you can see seals napping and sun bathing. Mission Beach has a rollercoaster www.giantdipper.com , Imperial Beach,Ocean Beach and Oceanside has a pier, Pacific Beach, Del Mar, Torrey Pines State Beach.

• Balboa Park has 16+ museums,eight gardens and the most beautiful Spanish architechture. It’s a breath taking place. Imax theater and children’s museum. 1549 El Prado, San Diego, Ca. 92101 (619)239-0512 http://www.balboapark.org/ free Tuesdays admission to specific museums for active miltiary and San Diego County Residents www.balboapark.org/calendar/detail.php?EventID=370 For all art lovers check out the Spanish Art Village Center watch artists in action located in Balboa park between San Diego Zoo and Natural History Museum.www.spanishvillageart.com/studios.htm

• San Diego Zoo is the World Famous Zoo. Parking at the Zoo is free http://www.sandiegozoo.org/ free admission 1st Monday in October. Free Admission for kids in the month of October with a purchase of an adult ticket. Free admission for active duty military with vaild military ID. Spouses and dependants get a 10% discount. Available at ticket booth only (not in advance ticket purchase). (619)231-1515 Live web of the Panda exhibit www.sandiegozoo.org/zoo/ex_panda_station.html Sleepovers at the zoo http://www.sandiegozoo.org/calendar/sleepovers.html

• Wild Animal Park located in Escondido, Ca. 35 minutes north of San Diego www.sandiegozoo.org/wap/index.html a fun train to see whole zoo. You have an option to spend the night. Get the feel of African Safari with 3,500 rare and exotic animals . The park opens daily at 9am and is located six miles from the I-15 freeway in Escondido. 15500 San Pasqual Valley Road, Escondido, Ca. 92027 (760)747-8702

• Legoland www.legoland.com/california.htm They have special parking spaces for people driving Volvos (front of the park). Highlight for kids ages 3-5 and 6-13 can earn a drivers license in Volvo Driving School in Fun Town. Splash Battle in a Pirate Boat with guns to shoot water at other fellow Pirate Boats and innocent by standers. Over fifty fun rides, shows and attractions for the whole family. Some rides have a height restrictions. One Legoland Drive, Carlsbad, Ca 92008. It’s 30 minutes north of San Diego and one hour south of Anaheim. (760)918-5346 Call for closed Park days.

• Seaworld www.seaworld.com/sandiego The World Famous Shamu show. Pets Rule is a fantastic show. Actors are dogs, cats, pig, ducks, birds it’s really funny. Atlantis is a new water park ride. R.L. Stine’s Haunted Lighthouse 4-D movie, water rapids, Shark Encounters, swim with the dolphins,Seaworld Adventure Camp. Many local hotels offer a complimentary shuttle to Seaworld. 1(800) 25-SHAMU Live web cam on Shamu http://www.shamu.com/ click on Shamu live cam

• Birch Aquarium http://aquarium.ucsd.edu/Plan_a_Visit/Scripps Institution Of Oceanography. Ten Miles away north of downtown San diego. Open daily 9am-5pm. Awesome place to take the kids. Lots of different types of fish. A gift shop and a museum. Outside tide pools and kids are welcome to touch sea creatures. Children 2 and under are free. Courtesy 3 hour parking is included with aquarium admission. Shop online www.aquarium.ucsd.edu (858)534-FISH 2300 Expedition Way, La Jolla, Ca 92037

• Old Town http://www.oldtownsandiego.org/ www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=663 Lots of great mexican restaurants and shops! Just picture the old west. What a great way to spend your day! Museum, gems, wells fargo coach, townsquare, mexican pottery, arts and crafts. Colors and flavors of Old Mexico. Bazaar del Mundo Shops. 3985 Harney Street, San Diego, CA 92110. On the 4th of July there is a reenactment celebration of the old west.

• San Diego Trolley tours http://www.trolleytours.com/ Pick one up in Old Town. Or take their Seals Tours; A tour bus/boat. Tour San Diego on land and water. The Seal tour departs from Seaport Village. www.sealtours.com The San Diego Trolley Tour stops in Old Town, Cruise Ship Terminal, Midway Aircraft Museum, Seaport Village, Marriott Hotel & Marina, Horton Plaza, William Heath Davis House, Coronado, San Diego Zoo, El Prado Museums aka Baloba Park. Pick and drop off frequent at all of their stops. Free reboarding.

• CitySightseeing San Diego Double Decker Tours. Kids Under 3 free. www.citysightseeing-sd.com (619) 231-3040 Tour lasts 1hr & 45 minutes. Departs from Harbor Dr and Broadway. This tour will take you USS Midway,Seaport Village, Gas Lamp, Horton Plaza (the mall), San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park, Old Town, Ferry Landing at Coronado and more.

• San Diego Harbor Excursion Brunch and Dining Cruises. boarding location 1050 North Harbor Drive 92101 For reservations call (619) 234-4111 or (800) 44-cruise. www.SDHE.COM

• Hotel Del Coronado http://www.hoteldel.com/ Famous hotel where Presidents and Princes have stayed. Movies and Programs have filmed “Some like it Hot” with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe and Baywatch.

• Soledad Mountain www.magicaljourneys.com/USA/usa-interest-california-sandiego-soledad.html Best place in the city to get a 360 degree view of the county. Nice place to take pictures or be there with someone you love.

• Los Penaquitos Canyon Preserve www.sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation/parks/penasq.shtml

• Julian An Old Gold Mine Town http://www.julianca.com/ Homemade apple pies is what Julian is famous for. The main street looks like the old west. Lots a cute shops worth spending the day there. They have Old Time Photos dress up like the old west. They have bed and breakfast places worth trying. It’s the capital of southern California Bed and Breakfast locations.It’s an excellent mountain retreat. For mine tours go to this link …http://www.julianminingcompany.com/ Reenactments of the old west… skits comedic, gunfighting on Sundays at 1pm, 2pm, and 3 pm. About an hour away south from San Diego.

• Anza-Borrego Desert http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=638 Another good site by Ron http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/1600/ trail and hike info http://sandiegohikes.com/sandiegotrails.htm

• Seaport Village http://www.seaportvillage.com/ Nice place to take a stroll at on San Diego Bay. Lots of unique great shops. Carousel and restaurants on premises. Located downtown near the Convention center and Hyatt hotel.

• Pacific Beach Live Web Cam http://www.beachcottages.com/our_live_beach_cam.html

• Mission Bay http://gothere.com/sandiego/MissionBay/ Pictures of Mission Bay and all activities. Hotels near the bay also mentioned on website. Right next to SeaWorld.

• Fiesta Island go with friends or family at night for a bon fire. http://search.cityguide.aol.com/sandiego/entertainment/fiesta-island/v-96854 Located in Mission Bay

• Mission Beach Boardwalk. Shops, Food and a rollercoaster http://www.belmontpark.com/

• Cabrillo National Monument www.nps.gov/cabr/

• Point Loma Lighthouse www.nps.gov/archive/cabr/lighthouse.html

• Torrey Pines http://www.torreypine.org/ hiking/trails http://www.torreypine.org/activities/hiking-trails.html

• Del Mar Race Track http://www.dmtc.com/ Aka Del Mar Fairgrounds. Concerts, San Diego County Fair & Home and Garden shows.

• Golf Executive and Par 3 Courses http://www.golfsd.com/sd_exec-courses.html

• 18 hole golf courses http://www.thegolfcourses.net/golfcourses/CA/SanDiego.htm

• Miramar Speed Circuit http://www.miramarspeedcircuit.com/

• Fishing Poway Lake, Lake Miramar and etc… http://www.sdfish.com/

• Lake Cuyamaca http://www.lakecuyamaca.org/

• Santee Lakes http://www.santeelakes.com/

• Hiking Cuyamaca Mountain http://www.trails.com/activity.asp?area=11501

• Creation Museum www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/CASANcreation.html

• Summer Past Farms 15602 Olde Hwy 80, Flinn Springs, Ca 92021 (619)390-1523 Herbal gardens, gifts and classes. It’s 30 minutes east from downtown. http://www.summerspastfarms.com/

• Santee Drive In www.drive-ins.com/showing/catsant Old Fashion Movie Drive In. Great family experience. It’s a great summer time event but open year around.

• Gaslamp Quarter http://www.gaslamp.org/ Lots of restaurants and city night life atmosphere. Pick up specialty chocolate candy, hot chocolate and sundaes at Ghirardelli 643 5th Avenue (Downtown).

• La Jolla http://www.lajollabythesea.com/

• Rancho Buena Vista Adobe It will take you back to the early California years. The house is made of Adobe , beautiful antiques. Fun and educational. A must see!http://www.cityofvista.com/departments/parks/adobe.cfm

• San Diego Mission http://www.missionsandiego.com/ founded 1769 by Padre Junipero Serra

• San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau www.sandiego.org/nav/visitors

————————
Sources:
http://gocalifornia.about.com/cs/sandiego/a/sdtop10.htm
http://www.trolleytours.com/san-diego/old-town.asp
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~sandrade/san-diego-attractions.html
http://hubpages.com/hub/San-Diego-Best-Places-To-See

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PhotoBook Analysis after Phone Conversation

So here are some notes on the ideas we went through today.  I have separated them by the method we would likely market them: online vs. locally.  Under each idea, I have included a sample book title to remind us of what we had in mind when we brought up each idea.  These will serve as a starting point for us as we will likely modify these as we progress along.

Sold on Amazon:

• Tourist guide of top places to see in SD
  • “20 Places You must visit in SD”
• Photographer’s guide to best places to photograph in SD
  • “10 Best Spots to Photograph in SD”

Sold Locally:

• Controversial or risque photobook
  • “Top places to have sex outdoors in SD”
• Localized photobook that could be sold in retails stores
  • “In Depth guide to PB”
  • “Tour of Hollywood”
• Photograph Events that we could sell to the event organizer
  • ‘A Review of SD Fashion Show 2008″

Action Steps:

We need go through the motions of putting together a book to see what capabilites Blurb’s BookSmart has “out of the box”.  After some playing and tweaking, we can then see what if Amazon or local sales will be possible.  I propose we start with either the tourist or photographer guides to get started.

Profitability:

The question that I am left with is, what are realistic margins.  I did a little bit of diggin on pricing, and here would be our costs to have published through blurb.com.  We would have to mark these up in order to make a profit, but by the time we start upping the price from the original production price, we are getting pretty high…  Here are some numbers from the 10×8 standard landscape book size:

	Pages	Softcover	HC w/ Jacket	HC w/ Image
	0-40	$19.95	$29.95	$31.95
	41-80	$24.95	$35.95	$37.95
	81-120	$29.95	$41.95	$44.95
	121-160	$36.95	$49.95	$52.95
	161-200	$43.95	$56.95	$60.95
	201-240	$50.95	$64.95	$69.95
	241-280	$57.95	$71.95	$76.95
	281-320	$64.95	$78.95	$83.95
	321-360	$70.95	$83.95	$89.95
	361-400	$75.95	$87.95	$93.95
	401-440	$79.95	$89.95	$95.95

Shipping would be another $6+ for a hardcover book depending on the size according to their site.

If we decided we wanted to sell some books on blurb.com, here is how it would work:

1. Make a book and order at least one copy.
2. Enroll in our free Set Your Price program.
3. Decide how much profit you want to make per book.
4. Announce your book to colleagues, friends, family, your LinkedIn network, and everyone you’ve ever met using our complimentary Bookstore email announcements.
5. Earn money when people buy your book.

Closing thought to consider:

The high production price of the books may limit our market to niche groups, especially if we want to create any margin on the top.  We will need to due a more thorough cost analysis.  In my opinion, a high cost like this will necessitate a model more like the church group, sorority house, school sports team style fundraiser/community involvement marketing model.  That way potential customers may be more inclined to buy because of: peer pressure, fundraiser motivations, personal involvement and sentimental reasons.  This basically goes back to my original thought that high pricing will necessitate a high-touch selling model, rather than a passive internet sales model.  Let me know your thoughts after going through my analysis, if I am off base here, let me know.

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Sources:
http://www.blurb.com/create/book/pricing#standard-landscape
http://www.blurb.com/my/seller/info

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Okay, its time to start making some money.

We talk a lot but we haven’t actually done anything.  And that is fine for HUGE ideas and businesses, but we should be doing at least something small to generate money outside of our regular jobs.  I think that it is time to start doing something in our ‘off time’ that creates money. 

I get kind of down sometimes just going to work everyday and not building anything while we figure out what will actually work.  I think it would help to have anything at all that is an ongoing project.

so here are a couple of things we should start working on that wouldn’t take a lot of time:

1. So there I was… book (we should start a list of our funny stories, then actually write them out.
2. Blurb books (self created, or put together for other companies/schools)
3. more Blurb books (educational, photography, area based-best places in SD with photos, how to make money on Blurb, etc)
4. Selling on Ebay (find items to turn around, or just clear out crap from home)

I think I would be a lot happier if I was working on SOMETHING while planning out a big business.  What do you think?

Also, think along the lines of CutcoPrint, is there any way to serve Vector/Cutco people?  Selling Cutco inspired T-shirts through Zazzle, a funny demo stories collaborative book, A cheap Twitter program for PDI?  From being a DM, any things/services you could have used to better run your office? 

Update: what about creating a Blurb photography book featuring the best # (20-30, etc) places to see while in San Diego.  It could have photos of these places taken by me (a local San Diegan) who knows areas that only locals might.  We could then sell them to higher end hotels in the San Diego area to leave in each room.  We could even get sponsored from the areas or businesses in the book to feature them.  Your thoughts?

Eventually we might be able to spin this into a voting system in each area on the top favorite things to do/see as voted by people who live there.  Once the top places are determined we could ask local photographers to shoot these places (could also have a competition with them too).  The result, is a locally produced book of the top sites to see (as voted by the people) and amazing photographs of them (as produced by local photographers).  We could then sell them to either hotels, CVB’s (convention and visiters bureau’s) or local businesses featured in them.  What do you think about that option?  We could probably use partnerships with 944 and DiscoverSD to do the first run of voting if we took that route.

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Notes on this afternoons brainstorm

I wanted to get these thoughts down so we can expand upon them in our brainstorms.  They seem like fun ideas at the core, and a with a proper market survey, we could test the feasibility.  It is far from a get-rich-quick idea, but would provide some residual income as it grows.

Key takeaways from our chat today:

• The two ideas favored at this point are the Team-Fundraising idea and the City-Tour idea
• Both ideas have very low startup costs
• Fund-Raising Idea notes
  • Demo photobooks would be put together to help sell the idea
  • The company could be a non-profit (can play with this idea)
  • We would position the company as a philanthropic service that helps develop student’s skills
  • We give business talks at high school classes, and recruit motivated students to help
  • Utilize our student relationships to increase awareness and sales
  • As it develops, we could set up the company so students do a majority of the work
  • We would focus on new accounts and growing the customer base
• City-Tour idea
  • Create a line of photobooks under a trade name i.e. “20 spots you must see in _______”
  • We would take cool photos of landmarks and other city spots and include brief descriptions
  • We would create new cities as we travel
  • Would be a good fit with motorcycle touring
  • Register for ISBN and list on Amazon
  • Create our own website as well to boost sales
  • Very little maintenance as sales will be handled by blurb.com or amazon.com

These are the basics, feel free to modify whatever you think is necessary.

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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.

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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)

 

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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.

 

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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)

 

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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.

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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.

 

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