SmugMug launches SmugVault: protecting your digital negatives has never been easier

June 24th, 2008

SmugMug has always been in a category of its own. I have been using it for longer than Flickr because it addressed my need for a sound place that will take care of my best pictures. Their mission to keep my pictures in perfect (digital) conditions makes me feel safe. They secure the photos in their larger formats without altering them, making them available online in a very intuitive interface and, if I wish to order a hard backup, they can send me backups on DVD.

On the contrary to SmugMug, Flickr’s fluid interface makes it easier to stream and distribute publicly a few, lower quality, pictures that I wouldn’t mind loosing. I do not expect from Flickr to be a reliable backup service for pictures.

The good news is that today, SmugMug founder’s Don MacAskill has reinforced its commitment to safegarding my digital negatives above and beyond what already existed. The extended service is called SmugVault and allows to easily store all negatives or assets around a picture. But most importantly, it is possible to upload the RAW files directly and pricing is based on your actual usage.

I gave up a long time ago on using hard drives or DVDs as backup. Instead I moved all my personal archive to a dedicated S3 account. With a slick new interface targeted at photographers, this messy solution won’t be necessary anymore.

Pricing is as follow and uses Amazon DevPay:

  • Storage costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month. If you upload the contents of a 2 GB memory card, you’ll be out 44 cents/month for storage.
  • There is a $1/month recurring charge.
  • Data transfer in is 30 cents per gigabyte. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gigabyte.
  • Monthly addition to your home electrical bill: Zero.

CenterNetworks mention that a few people say this solution may be expensive. If you look at the actual value of having a flexible archive in terms of size without making investment in hardware or the uncertainty that your backups will not be corrupted or lost, having an archive online is well worth it. Moreover, prices are bound to drop overtime. Gartner estimates (in a 2006 report) that disk storage cost decreases by 50 to 60% per year.

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FACE Paris: first edition, stimulating entrepreneurship through success

June 23rd, 2008

Even if a small ecosystem of entrepreneurs already exist in France, what you hear on the street, in the media and in the mouth of officials is that it needs to be stimulated to reach a level that we can see in other countries. And who are better than north american startups in Technology and Life Sciences to demonstrate a significant number of success stories,  to exhibit the breadth and the reach that some brands can experience? Sometimes it’s about the financials, sometimes it’s about adoption, sometimes its luck but everytime there is an entrepreneur’s vision, energy and commitment behind it.

This week, founders will be converging to Paris for the French-American Conference of Entrepreneurs (appropriately shortened to FACE). These people may not all be current CEOs but they have one thing in common, each of them founded known company or technology. FACE is the first event of the Global Entrepneurship Week that will be held to instigate creativity, initiatives and innovation in cities across the world in November of this year.

Of the 55 speakers present from both technology and life sciences sector, there are two worth mentioning:

In 1982 Janet Baker co-founded Dragon Systems with her husband James. Dragon was a company based out of Newton, MA that made voice recognition systems accessible to all. The technology was issue from their research and the company grew to 400 people and became the leader even defeting IBM’s own attempts at addressing that market. The last few years were more difficult, Dragon was acquired by Lernout & Hauspie for about $500m in an all-share transaction, then L&H went under chapter 11,  then was bought over by ScanSoft, who then acquired Nuance (a small voice recognition startup from Montreal) and finally renamed itself Nuance Communications. I was lucky enough, about 10 years ago, to be a software engineer intern at Dragon. At the time, I was part of an international team, a small group of people working at preparing and adapting the technology for each of a dozen languages.

Will also be presenting is Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn. The largely successful social network that we all know. Reid Hoffman is now chairman, president and evangelist to the company and, in early 2007, left the CEO chair to Dan Nye. Just last week, LI realized a new round of financing of $53m indicative of a $1 billion valuation. Today, Reid is an adviser, investors and board member to many startup companies.

Other speakers will include Larry Sanger founder of Wikipedia, Craig Newmark founder of Craigslist, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet founder of PriceMinister.com and Martin Eberhard founder of Tesla Motors.

As an entrepreneur, networking and thinking internationally is absolutely essential for imposing a global product, brand or technology. Being locally focused may work for some (PriceMinister), but most of us are reaching far beyond the traditional frontiers of our countries and the only limiting factor is how we have been taught to think.

What: French-American Conference of Entrepreneurs
Where: Paris, Musée du Louvre and CCIP
When: This Thrusday and Friday, June 27th and 28th
Web registration: www.face-paris.com
More details: Hugues De Revel @ hderevel(at)advancia-negocia(dot)fr

Update: Also, a few non-entrepreneurs will be speaking, including Ouriel Ohayon from Techcrunch France, Florence Ribes from IRIS finance and Eric Shine from Inc.Magazine.


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Around the web this week

June 22nd, 2008

Another week passed, and its now officially the summer. With it comes Firefox 3 and a few stories:

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Apple shifts [recurring] revenue source from AT&T to ME

June 15th, 2008

Digital ink has flooded since last Monday’s announcement by Steve Jobs of the release of the next generation iPhone, named appropriately the iPhone 3G.

That day, the first shockwave happened when Steve announced that the price of the phone would be dropped to $199 for the entry-level model. Everyone rejoiced. The aftershock was felt quickly thereafter through a discreet and traditional press release by AT&T mentioning that the phone would be subsidized the same as all other handsets.

This meant one thing : AT&T would NOT be sending $20 per month per phone to Apple.

What struck me as closely related is that a few minutes before announcing the new iphone, Jobs introduced MobileMe, the rebirth of .Mac. And introduced it as a paying service for $99 per year. While a user won’t need MobileMe to make full use of the iPhone 3G, push emails, contact and picture sync come very handy especially now that Apple didn’t introduce wireless sync (as in wifi). Each customer wanting the full potential of the phone will most likely subscribe to the service. Is this a coincidence that the $120 per year Apple was getting from AT&T is replaced by about $100 per year directly from me?

Operator = 100% of monthly plan - minus the financial cost of subsidy
Apple = handset, MobileMe subscription, 30% of 3rd party software

MobileMe seems to be an integral part of making the iPhone 3G appear less expensive by removing the first barrier to entry. Complementing it with the 3rd-party software store guarantees another continuous stream of revenue. Very clever way to get more iPhones in the hands of the consumers while Apple and the operator increase their overall revenues.

Apple shifts the source of its revenue stream from the operators to our own pockets. Not surprising then that operators are more likely to list the iPhone as they don’t have to manage a new type of partnership. Subsidizing a handset has been part of the operator’s everyday practice for a very long time. The iPhone 3G, by actually launching in more countries (70) than initially planned (25), looks like they’re admitting they failed at imposing a new royalty mechanism to the operators worldwide.

Quote from AT&T press release “The new agreement between Apple and AT&T eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which AT&T shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple. Under the revised agreement, which is consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements, there is no revenue sharing and both iPhone 3G models will be offered at attractive prices to broaden the market potential and accelerate subscriber volumes.”

Related posts about the iPhone launch

3 and a half minute to introduce the iPhone

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Around the web this week

June 14th, 2008

This week as led by to major news.

  1. The release of the iPhone 3G second generation. People (including me) have been waiting for it, predicting its arrival day, its features and the ones lacking. Most were right on it. The new iPhone was announced monday, will be released in 22 countries on July 11th (July 17th for France) and will be on sale for 199$ (all across the world). Let’s say that I have some doubts on Apple’s interpretation of currency rates. Can you really imagine the iPhone at 129.50€? All your questions answered in the iPhone 3G FAQ by Gizmodo.

  2. The second big news was that Yahoo stopped all talks with Microsoft and makes a deal with Google. Will outsource all paid search to Google. The market did not really appreciate the news and YHOO dropped from around $26 to under 22$. Microsoft deal around $33 is long gone. TechCrunch has an in depth analysis of some of the clauses of the deal. Very interesting read as it highlights loopholes in case of anti-trust inquiries or buy-out (by Microsoft).

  3. Actually there was something else going on this week that was unfortunately a bit burried under the buzz. It’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference that was happening June 9-12 in Boston. As Josh Bernoff put it earlier this week in a post titled “The real business model for Web 2.0: corporate clients“, if you are starting a business, early-adopters are great to spread your ideas, but don’t listen - too much - as companies may be your real customers. Check David Spark’s extensive content produced during the show.

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Around the web this week

June 8th, 2008

Back from an exciting week at La Baule for the World Investiment Conference & CaliforniaTechShowcase, I had to play catchup with the news this weekend. Here is what happened during the week:

  • [ENTREPRENEURSHIP] There was a Seedcamp in Paris this Friday, interestingly enough the insights from Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK are fairly accurate in view of what I have been seeing for the last few months. Here are his notes on the event and the startup that were presenting.
  • [BROWSER WAR] Also there is a lot of talks around the web on the expected market share of Firefox next week. Prediction is that Firefox will hit an global 20% share. This comes as we are getting closer to the release of FF3 while the Release Candidate 2 is available for download.

Oh, and before you start the week with your business lunches and dinners. You should consider this new location for your next board meeting.

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Online translation engine doesn’t digest french food

June 3rd, 2008

Aside from being very funny, here is one more proof that computer-based translation tools can have some real life collateral damages. This Paris bistro announces “we speak English” on its front door and proudly prints its menu in both French and English.

Looking quickly at the menu, I was amazed at the choices available. Today for lunch, do you feel like having a crunch mister, an omelette with grasses or better yet, nets of herrings?

Jokes aside, I tried to have a chat with the barman (the only guy serving) who told me he could not speak a word of English and says his menu is perfectly fine because it was translated by a professional! I did not laugh but instead felt quite sorry.


Menu page 1 & page 2. Sorry they are a bit fuzzy.

My best guess was that it has been translated online. So I pointed the browser to the nearest google translate page. It didn’t take long to realize that google was pretty good with food and dishes, translating most of them quite accurately.

The next stop was to go to Systran’s version. From their home page “SYSTRAN is the market leading provider of language translation software”. There they were, the results were amazing, with Omelette Jambon de Paris becoming Omelette boiled ham and Glace becoming Freeze. After a quick chat with a reseller of Systran’s boxed product, he told me that google translate used to be powered by systran server but was replaced a few month ago with their own translator engine, a definitely more sensible alternative.

The only thing these online tools should be used for is trying to understand quickly, and unreliably, the meaning of a text in a foreign language. I’m sure there is ways and areas where the translation must be near perfect, but still, nothing should be published without a human looking over it.

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Why we need an “Early-Adopter Name Reservation System”? [opportunity]

June 2nd, 2008

This morning, both Loic Le meur and Mark Evans mentioned they would love to see a name reservation system. Bouncing the idea further around coffee earlier, we think it can have great potential with incentive on both side of board, for the startups and the early adopters.

30 some words to describe EAR?

The EAR service allows user to register for one or more names in priority sequence. Every time a new startup launches, it sends a standard request to EAR that will dispatch the news to all of its users (by rss, email, sms, im, …) and invite them to reply and secure their favorite name within a period of time.

Incentive for early adopters

As mentioned in the posts, it’s obvious that reserving your username for services like twitter, friendfeed and all the likes is great. We all like to be known under the same name. Mine for instance is only 3 letters (@LFP) but I could not secure it on all services so I’m also known as @laurentfp and @lofp… annoying. And I would have loved to be simply known as @laurent.

On some systems it’s particularly difficult to locate people and having that same name is reassurance that you can be found. Isn’t it the goal of all those social networking? Moreover, its a great way to prevent someone from stealing your identity on a new service.

Incentive for startups

As a startup, this is a great way to be known. Attracting many eyes at once, most of them being early adopters (who else uses twitter?). And as a result it could brings a good quantity of new users reaching critical mass quicker. This without mentionning the resulting press coverage.

The indirect benefit is that while reaching all those early-adopters, through EAR you also reach already interconnected users, meaning, you have new users AND their connections!

Financial

So, I’m willing to pay $20 per name I reserve in the list (depending of my priority). That’s already 80$ from me @laurent, @lfp, @laurentfp, @lofp. Moreover I’m willing to pay an extra $0.50 per service I choose to register, knowing that this money (the 50c) is going directly to the startup.

Extra benefit for the new product = funds.

Can I have some stocks with this?

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Around the web this week

June 1st, 2008

I’m having a hard time getting through all the news every week now. I really hope aideRSS will soon work under FF3 to help prioritize.

  • Anyhow, Android has been the big item this week at Google I/O. Everyone likes it, but where is the slick phone to go with it? read Android Is Out For iPhone Blood,  and see what Scoble has to say about the buzz around.

  • In response to the intense discussions going on for the last few weeks, Disqus posted on a Comments bill of rights.

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Google changes favicon, Netscape’s old spotted

May 31st, 2008

Is this really news worthy? I’m not sure. But here it is, google has updated its favicon to leave the upper case G behind while replacing it with a smoother lowercased “g”. Closer to the vertical infinity symbol ∞. And for the sake of day dreaming, could this announce a redesign of their logo?

Funny, just a few days ago I spotted an old Netscape favicon. Bringing quite a few memories back to the surface! And imagine, it was on HSBC customer site.

Update 6/7/2008: Google VP Calls For Comments On Favicon Design

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