Utah is gorgeous. Relaxing in Utah, visiting the parks and playing with High Dynamic Range Photography (HDR) even HDR time-lapse... more later on that. Here we are at Arches National Park in Utah: Shawna, Baxter & me. Good clean fun...
Well... we sold Simple Star! We will be joining the Sonic family.
PhotoShow will become part of their consumer division, Roxio, and bring an online spin to their product portfolio that includes popular desktop applications, Easy Media Creator and Toast.
Things will pretty much be business as usual for us. We will continue to evolve our PhotoShow multimedia sharing platform as well as the PhotoShowTV and PhotoShow DVD services. We will continue to work out of our Brannan Stoffices in soma which beats a commute down to Sonic’s office in Santa Clara or up to the one in Novato!
The Sonic team has been very cool. It is a great group of smart technologists and marketers who we are excited to have the opportunity to work with. Culturally there is a very strong fit. I also like they have also built their business in part through large partnerships with companies like Dell, HP & Sony (so they know how important that part of our business is).
I will be staying on with Sonic, taking on a strategy and corporate development role, which should be good fun. Mike Edmunds, Simple Star’s SVP of Products and Technologies will be partnered with Yann Connan, Sonic’s VPof Web Products and Services to help run web products and services for the Roxio division.
I will keep you posted about the exciting times ahead!
Here is a funny Time Warner Cable TV ad that mentions PhotoShow 5 and won a Gold Addy award!
Here is an archive of a recent Radio interview with RSS Ray on how to use PhotoShow as a marketing tool...
At Simple Star we have always believed that you should be able to enjoy and share your memories however you want. For the last couple years we have let people easily publish PhotoShows to blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Ebay, their personal web sites, etc... now we are taking this one step further!
Last week we launched some cool new video services on PhotoShow.com. You can now easily podcast your favorite PhotoShows to iTunes for synching with iPhones, iPods and Apple TV. We are also allowing you to send PhotoShows out as a video RSS feeds. This can be great for getting your PhotoShows to digital picture frames, connected TVs or to DVRs like Tivo which recently announced that they will support video RSS feeds in March.
We are also enabling PhotoShow.com creators & visitors to download a video file of any PhotoShow. This is great for uploading your personal content to YouTube, importing a PhotoShow into Power Point or a video editing program like iMovie or Movie Maker. You can even easily burn a DVD with this downloaded video file as a quick way to enjoy memories on your TV. For more on these great new PhotoShow video services please visit the PhotoShow News blog.
I promised that I would share some photos from my new Lensbaby kit that I purchased at PMA. I was at a friend's Chinese New Year party last night and tried out this new selective focus lens. In short, it is a fun creative toy that takes some time getting use to. The general idea is that you have bring attention to a "sweet spot" by having that one area in focus and everything else gradually more and more out of focus.
The Lensbaby 3G that I purchased allows you to shoot in two modes. You can shoot in a very free form manner where you are compressing the lens to find your sweet spot. You can also lock the Lensbaby in a fixed spot and use the fine focus ring to find your perfect area of focus. I found this locked in manner easier for me to use as a very novice lensbaby shooter. Here are some of the shots...
I just visited the Photo Marketing Association’s (PMA) annual event in Las Vegas and wanted to share some of the show highlights.
Two big themes that were being discussed were the recent success of digital picture frames and continued high growth and emphasis on photo books. Being a huge proponent of storytelling and screen based viewing I was happy to see these trends finally be at the forefront of the imaging world who can often times spend too much time talking about how do we get consumers to print more pictures that they don’t want.
· Infotrends predicts a 43% industry wide growth in revenues from photo books from 2007 to 2008
· Lyra says that 6% of homes with digital cameras have digital picture frames and that 4 million units will be sold in 2008 (which sounds low from what I have heard from a few specific major vendors) and growing to 40 million units in 2011.
What I want…
I always want some new toy after visiting PMA. This year it is the newly announced Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX35
Why: Small form factor, great Leica lens that has a nice wide angle due to it’s 25-100mm zoom lens. Also, it is one of 3 digital still cameras supporting HD video with an HD video mode that captures (1280x720 @ 30fps). Kodak and Casio have also both introduced DSCs that capture HD video which is a great new feature set to have in compact digital still cameras. This camra will be released on April 20th and Amazon says they will be selling it for $349.
What I bought…
http://www.lensbabies.com/products/lb3g/
I did treat myself to a show special of the lens baby kit which allows you to achieve selective focus as a creative way of shooting. I’ll post back in with some examples and more on lensbaby once I get a but better with it!
Hey Facebook fans. You can now make PhotoShows right on Facebook. Check it out here. You can of course make PhotoShows on www.photoshow.com and easily post them to your Facebook profile too. One of the nice things about the new PhotoShow Facebook app is you can pull in photos right from your Facebook account. Let me know what you think!
Just a few days after launching our new developer tools the first site to integrate PhotoShow went live today. Tribbit is a very cool site that enables collaborative tributes. This first to market example is an "instashow" implementation, so there is no discreet PhotoShow authoring in the site (yet). Any photos that get posted to the tribute are pulled together and fed into the PhotoShow. Here is an example.
This is a super easy and fun way to collaboratively create a PhotoShow that you can then post to any site you want or order a DVD of. That is pretty cool. Mad props to the Tribbit team for a fast and very cool integration of PhotoShow into their new exciting and emotive service. What are you going to pay a tribute to?
This week we launched new developer tools!
You can learn more and see a demo at http://developer.photoshow.com. We have two primary tools that were released this week:
1) PhotoShow authoring widget that anyone can put in their web site. Here is a screen shot of it:
2) We are also letting developers automatically create PhotoShows from a defined set of photos, such as all of a particular user’s photos or all images tagged with a certain word. These "instashows" are created automatically and can then be edited to the end users preferences afterwards.
Some very cool things about these tools are:
Pull photos from anywhere: People can pull photos their already have on that site, from their PC or from a web URL.
Share your show anywhere you want: After making a show the creator can publish it to that site, post it on any blog or social media site, buy a PhotoShow DVD or even broadcast it to cable TV with our PhotoShowTV service.
We look forward to seeing PhotoShow creation showing up on social mediasites that want to add multimedia sharing, photo sites that want to offer our DVD service and cable broadband portals so that their users can create shows to broadcast to TV. As always, it will be amazing to see all the cool uses that people come up with for integrating PhotoShow into their service.
