For those of you who are interested in the business and technology side of things, here’s an interesting 45-minute interview in which Digg founder Kevin Rose chats with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom:
They chat about Systrom’s growing up with computers, his time spent at Stanford, and landing an internship at a startup destined to be worth billions. This ultimately led to launching Instagram which is now 15 million users strong and one of the fastest growing social networks on the planet!
Candidtag is a new service designed to make it easy to earn a little cash by photographing strangers you meet out in public. The idea is that there are people (e.g. tourists) out there who are too busy enjoying their lives to carry a camera around, but at the same time would like memories of their experiences. If you always carry your camera around, you can offer to take pictures for strangers and then give them a card pointing them to your Candidtag “collection”. The client can later visit the website to view the photos you took and purchase prints or digital copies. Photographers are paid by commission when sales are made.
Earlier this month, Kodak sold off its sensor business in an effort to raise some cash to stay alive and hopefully turn things around. Now the company is looking to get even leaner by selling off its online photo sharing business. Photo sharing? Kodak? Yup, it’s called Kodak Gallery. While it’s not surprising that the camera maker has online services, what might be surprising is the price they’re looking to sell it for: according to the Wall Street Journal, it’s in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Kodak first jumped into the online photo sharing and printing game in 2001, when it purchased Ofoto for somewhere south of $100 million. The service reportedly amassed 75 million customers worldwide and was bringing in $150 million in annual revenue at its peak. However, it has never been profitable and last month saw only 1.5 million visitors. In addition to the service itself, Kodak is selling off some of its valuable patents related to uploading and sharing photos online.
Miniature Moments is a new service that uses 3D printing to turn photographs into 3D resin “miniatures”. The small passport photo-sized creations measure 46mm x 37mm, and don’t look very impressive until they’re held up to light. Once it’s illuminated from behind, then it turns into a highly detailed photograph that resembles developed film. Read the rest of this entry »
Casetagram is a service that makes custom iPhone cases using Instagram photographs. The case comes in four different templates, and cost $35 each with free shipping worldwide.
Unlike most videos you find on the web, images aren’t very easy for the average person to share. Rather than hotlink photos from their original source, as is done for videos, most “sharing” involves downloading the photos, uploading them somewhere else, and then publishing that new version of the image. Picuous, a new service that launched today, aims to change that by bringing one-click Vimeo-style sharing to online photographs. Read the rest of this entry »
Daily deals sites have become quite popular as of late, with Groupon and LivingSocial leading the charge. Photo Dough is a similar service that’s geared towards professional photographers. Every few days the site features a new service or product that’s heavily discounted thanks to group buying, allowing you to save money on things like photo editing programs, digital picture albums, and website templates.
Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection — both online and offline — accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they’re automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored in many different places to be available in one central location. Even photos emailed to your through Gmail can be picked up and back up by the service. Read the rest of this entry »
Adobe announced a new cloud-based photo storage and sharing service today called Carousel, which will let you store all your photos at a central location, making it easy to view, share, and edit them — using a Lightroom/ACR-based engine — on any device you own. It’ll only be available for Apple users in the beginning (e.g. Macs, iPhone, iPad), but Android and Windows versions are in the works. The service will cost $9.99/month or $99/year, and the free apps will be released later this month.
PillowMob is a new service that transforms photos of heads into puffy pillow heads. In addition to human faces, you can also use the face of your beloved pet. They cost $25 each with free shipping — it’s currently available to US residents only, but the company may begin shipping internationally soon.
