Here’s a tale of two photo apps. One has 27 million users after a year and a half, and comes from a company with 13 employees and $7.5 million in venture funding. But there’s nary a revenue model in sight.
The other app is smaller with just over 4 million users in less than a month. But it’s packed with in-app purchases of filters. Plus, the company behind it is totally bootstrapped and has enough revenue to profitably support a headcount of 100 employees.
Nothing illustrates how varied the path to success in the app store is more than these two. They’re Instagram and Camera Awesome.
So it’s fitting that Camera Awesome’s maker Smugmug is sending an update to the app store today that links the two and lets users publish to Instagram. → Read More
SmugMug has released a set of new features that further cements itself as a first-rate photo sharing website. The first of these constitutes just a user interface upgrade, but a very attractive one at that. SmugMug realizes that users often change the size of their browser windows – and switch between devices with differently sized screens – so it has implemented dynamic resizing of photos, a feature it’s calling “SmugMungous”. Change the size of your browser window and the photo that you are viewing will automatically get bigger or smaller while preserving its quality and resolution. The rest of the page’s interface will accommodate the new size as well, with thumbnails appearing or disappearing dynamically to fill the additional or remaining space. SmugMug’s not only about photos, though; videos hosted by the service will now also resize automatically in response to changes in the browser’s window size. There are a few other new features related to video in particular. High definition video encoded in H.264 and with a maximum size of 1280×720 can now be uploaded to and played through SmugMug using Quicktime (and, soon, Flash). When you upload high resolution video, it will automatically be encoded in a variety of sizes (“Web”, “iPod/DVD”, and “HiDef”) so you can play it back in a variety of settings. Video collections that you share publicly can now be exported to iTunes as podcasts so that family members and friends can watch up-to-date videos on their computers and play them on their Apple handhelds. And finally, SmugMug’s iPhone interface now supports video so you can browse and play videos through Quicktime on your phone. SmugMug, a family-run business that will celebrate its fifth year anniversary this Friday, says it has over 450,000 paying customers and makes over $10M in revenue per year. There are no free accounts on SmugMug; users must pay a minimum of $40 per year, but they have access to unlimited storage and bandwidth. The company has yet to take any outside money, and seeing how well things are going, probably won’t. Update: We’ve embedded Robert Scoble’s video coverage of SmugMug and this announcement below. Footage of the actual release doesn’t start until around the 12-minute mark. http://www.podtech.net/player/podtech-player.swf?bc=e2c0f1ec588c44b18dadd9718d37d96cYour browser does not support JavaScript. This media can be viewed at http://www.podtech.net/home/4694/smugmug-brings-us-mugnormous-photos-and-videos CrunchBase Information SmugMug Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who has said “maybe I just don’t get this ‘Web 2.0′ term” in the past, is proceeding to teach those of us who claim to know exactly what it means a thing or two. The company launched a suite of stunning new features tonight. SmugMug, which took its first customers in late 2002, is the go-to service for serious photography nuts. 100,000 paying customers have uploaded over 100 million photos. The company has 19 employees, is profitable, and has never taken outside funding. Revenues are in the $10 million per year range, MacAskill tells me. There is no free version of the service. People pay a minimum of $40 per year to upload photos to the site. Pro accounts, which are $150/year, give photographers a number of tools to add watermarks, and sell downloads as well as prints of their work. The higher level accounts also allow customers to use templates, fully customize the look and feel of their albums (or “galleries” as SmugMug calls them), and even use their own domain names. The site has most of the sharing and community features of the prototypical Web 2.0 company, Flickr. RSS feeds, tags, comments, a public API, etc. Yahoo, Flickr’s parent company, meets with the SmugMug team regularly and the Yahoo user interface team has recently sung the praises of SmugMug on a Yahoo blog. For many (but not all) serious photographers, SmugMug is simply a more powerful way to show their photos. SmugMug has also become the poster child for Amazon’s S3 storage service, famously claiming to save at least $500,000 per year by switching. New SmugMug Features SmugMug launched a number of new features and architectural changes tonight that come close to constituting a complete relaunch – 95% of SmugMug’s page views are affected. The key change is the complete re-writing of the photo viewing interface from HTML (with some Ajax components bolted on) to dynamic javascript. Clicking among pictures no longer requires a page refresh at all, speeding site navigation significantly and not bringing people back up to the top of the page after clicking on a new photo. And like Yahoo Maps, SmugMug has gone through the painstaking process of updating URLs as people navigate the site. This is a problem that plagues Rich Internet Applications. Without a page refresh when navigating a Flash or Ajax application, the URL doesn’t update. SmugMug → Read More
Flickr wasn’t the first photo sharing site, and it isn’t the most popular. In fact, it isn’t even the most popular photo sharing site owned by Yahoo – this is. But Flickr caught our attention and, at least with the technology-savvy crowd, it has become synonymous with photo sharing. A whole new crop of services are gunning for flickr and the title of “coolest photo site”. I call these the “Flickr Gunners” and I’ve written about them often. Yahoo Photos and Webshots, two newly rejuvenated services, are also combining new and exciting features with their massive existing customer and photo base. Photo sharing sites are sticky by nature. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of uploading your photos, tagging them and creating albums, it’ll take something very special to get you to move. Flickr had this “specialness” – the social tagging and viewing features built a network effect that made flickr more valuable to a new user as it grew. But Flickr has weaknesses. First, as I said they are not the biggest photo site. Yahoo Photos, Webshots and others dwarf them both in terms of users and uploaded photos. These larger services can afford to wait and see what works best and then duplicate it (and Yahoo Photos is rolling out new stuff that isn’t available on Flickr. Second, flickr hasn’t done much in terms of new features lately. They missed the video boat entirely, and YouTube now has a big lead in that category. And third, there are a number of UI issues that could easily be fixed but remain unchanged, stubbornly: the need for sub albums, better batch editing features and the ability to view more photos on a page. Yes, flickr has been working hard on scalability issues, but that shouldn’t stop them from evolving the UI and feature set. And brand new or very young services are rolling out new features regularly. These small companies are hungry and obsessive and will do anything for market share. Here are three I’ve been tracking: BubbleShare I really like BubbleShare. As I’ve written before, it takes about 10 seconds from hitting the site for the first time to actually viewing pictures that you’ve uploaded. You don’t even need to create an account. BubbleShare has added new features often since launch. Recent upgrades include Audio Caption, BubbleBar (a way to bring photos right to your desktop, similar to Slide → Read More
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