Mossberg's feeling Smug
Walter Mossberg recommends SmugMug in last weeks Mossberg’s Mailbox. There’s a lot of pain with many online photo-sharing sites, especially because many of them will hold your original photos hostage and delete them with little-to-no notice. I’m honored that he would recommend us to anyone feeling the pain from sub-par photo-sharing sites.
You see, Walt Mossberg is the world’s premiere technology journalist because he’s different. Instead of approaching technology from a geek’s point of view, where the technical specs, the buzz, and what the technology is supposed to accomplish is king, he approaches it from a consumer’s point of view: how well does it work, how easy is it to use, and how reliable is it. And then he tells you how it really is, no holds barred.
Pillars of the tech world such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates hang on his every word. AFAIK, he’s the only one to actually get them on stage together at the same conference. For the record, he doesn’t pull any punches at D, either – he asks the hard questions that actual consumers would ask if only they could get their hands on Steve or Bill for a few minutes.
I remember sitting in his office last year, watching him nod his head and resonate with much of what we had to say. It was thrilling. But the best part came when he asked us the really hard questions. The kind that make me want to rush back to the office and feverishly work on improvements right that second. The one I remember most was “Are my photos stored in multiple locations?” I was honest – we kept multiple copies of each photo, but only in one location. Clearly, he wasn’t buying it. And his point was a valid one – every year we have customers who are overjoyed to find out the photos they lost in the hurricane/earthquake/fire were safe and sound at SmugMug. Our data is extremely valuable to our customers.
We’re a customer-focused, customer-driven company. I’m afraid to say we don’t have much time to do competitive research because we’re too busy acting on customer suggestions and feedback. I wish I could say that I give every customer’s input the same weight I gave Walt’s, but it just isn’t true – the double-whammy of being a journalist I respect greatly and a customer gave him an edge. We put multiple locations high on the list, and we now have it – our photos are stored in multiple datacenters, in multiple states, at multiple companies. And one of those companies is worth billions.
For many other journalists, singling us out like he did would take courage. Afterall, we spend all of our time and energy answering customer emails and making the product better while our competitors are from huge companies with huge PR departments who go to all the trade shows, conventions, and call the journalists non-stop to sell their wares. But for Walt, I’m sure this didn’t pose a problem. He and his assistants actually use the products rather than just listening to the company’s pitch. His only criteria is the quality, reliability, and accessibility of the product, not the amount of PR dollars you spend.
We’re honored to be on his radar.
Quickies: Chicken Soup & free photo-sharing
If you follow my father’s blog, you’ve probably already read these entries, but in case you haven’t, they’re great reads:
Chicken Soup – The SmugMug story has been published and we’d like you to have a copy! Our story is in the newly-released Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul and my father, the author of our chapter, has more info about it and how to get your copy.
Free photo sharing? – Not for us, and here’s why. It’s taken us awhile to really understand the difference between a pay site like ours and a free one like some of our competitors, but we get it now and thought we’d share. The short version? You get what you pay for. 🙂
Quickies: Hack Day, Sun T1000, Amazon S3
Really quick…
Yahoo! Hack Day
SmugMug was in the house at Hack Day 2006, and we had a great time! Many thanks to Yahoo for putting on such a great event – we learned a lot about Yahoo technologies and put together a great demo. Anytime they want to throw another one, we’ll be there. Fantastic group of people over at Yahoo.
Best part about it is that our demo will shortly be a shipping product our customers will love and that’ll generate extra revenue for our company. Oh, and BigWebGuy got his official hazing there at Hack Day – he coded for 36 hours straight (no sleep!) his first week on the job even though he was sick! Welcome to the family, Lee!
Sun T1000
The Sun T1000 is very much still on our radar. I don’t want to do an in-depth update until we’re absolutely sure about what’s going on, but here’s a short summary of where we are.
I spent 5 hours over at Sun a few days after our initial results were posted with some very intelligent people. They were as perplexed at the results as I was, and were determined to get to the bottom of it. The good news is we now have a T1000 running Solaris side-by-side with a T1000 running Ubuntu which is side-by-side with our dual dual-core Opteron running Red Hat. The bad news is the Sun guys weren’t able to coax any more performance (yet!) out of the T1000.
We have a theory that we might be saturating the GigE port with raw # of interrupts per second, so it’s getting throttled there and starving the CPUs. So we have a gameplan for what to attack next – I’ve just been too swamped to deal with it for the last few weeks. We’ll get to it, though, I promise and I’ll share all the details.
Amazon S3
I still haven’t posted the in-depth technical details and code samples I promised about our use of Amazon S3, but fear not – I’m actively working on it and will post it as soon as it’s done.
Just wanted you to know I hadn’t forgotten about you. 🙂
Incidentally, Jeremy Zawodny is playing around with using it for his personal backup storage. Sounds sweet!
Shutterfly buying SmugMug? Say it ain't so!
It ain’t so.
Some of our customers are worried that we might be selling, based on Bambi Francisco’s latest newsletter at MarketWatch.
Bambi is a great journalist, and I’m flattered that we’re on her radar, but I’m afraid we’re not for sale.
We love our business, we love our customers, and we love the people we work with. Not only that, but it pays the bills – we’re profitable, with no debt and no investors! Why mess with a good thing?
Besides, I’m still trying to wrap my head around why anyone would want to invest in Shutterfly in the first place. Alan Meckler, CEO of JupiterMedia, has a write-up that resonated with me. Let’s take a quick look at their business (I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t really paid that much attention to the whole thing, being buried in our own business, so fact-check my stuff before quoting me):
- Devoured a massive (I believe >$100MM over multiple rounds) investment.
- Has trouble turning a profit ($24M of their $28M last year was apparently a one-time tax benefit)
- Incredibly competitive marketplace, complete with a nasty price war ($0.12 4×6 prints) and deep-pocketed competitors (Kodak and HP)
- First quarter loss increased by nearly 2.5X this year compared to last year
- HP’s Snapfish seems to have the best product, marketing, and awareness in the online photo printing space. (In other words, they seem to be winning)
We’re small, fun, happy, and profitable. Best of all, our customers love us. Does it get any better than this?
Apple + Movies = They don't quite get it (yet?)
By now, you’ve probably heard – Apple is finally providing DVD resolution full-length movie downloads. Better yet, they have a set-top box arriving in Q1 2007 and it sounds like it’s close to perfect. It’s not going to try to be some crazy media-center that replaces your DVD player and your TiVo and everything else. Instead, or so we hope, it’ll just focus on finally bringing downloadable content into your home theater.
But there are a few gotchas in the picture. The biggest one is so obvious, I can’t believe Apple hasn’t thought of it. Let me break it down, even though you probably already get this. Everyone gets it – but Apple.
- Most people like to buy or subscribe to music, not rent it. Why? Because you listen to your favorite songs hundreds and thousands of times.
- Most people like to rent their movies. Why? Because you don’t watch the average movie more than once, and even the above average movie more than a few times. Only an exceptional few really get watched over and over again (Disney, luckily for Apple, happens to generate a ton of these with their children’s movies.)
So where on earth is the humongous-rental-store-in-the-sky that’s open 24/7 for us?
People love pay-per-view because they get instant gratification. People hate pay-per-view because the selection sucks.
People love Netflix because the selection rocks. People hate Netflix because they don’t get instant gratification.
Does it really take a rocket scientist to see what Apple’s pre-announcement today should have been? Apple’s codename iTV should really be the “$299 24/7 gigantic rental store in your living room” device. Hopefully Netflix does it right and then Apple will see the light.
Oh, and what’s up with Dolby Surround in the downloads? Dolby Digital has been around a long time and it’s the de-facto standard. Why go with an ancient surround format?
PS – I know this is shameless, but if anyone from TiVo reads my blog, I’d dearly love to beta test the Series 3. We’d like to get SmugMug working on it. 🙂
EDIT: Wow, what timing. Series 3 is available for purchase today. Already ordered mine. Thanks TiVo!
Flickr doesn't suck.
Kord Campbell, CEO of Zoto.com, seems to think Flickr sucks. It doesn’t. His point is that the rest of us didn’t get enough credit when Flickr finally introduced geotagging. He mentions that Zoto, SmugMug, and Zooomr have had geotagging for years. He’s right, but who cares?
The Flickr wannabees are always screaming about how they don’t get any recognition and that Flickr steals all the press. One of the Webshots founders recently said ‘Pound for pound [Flickr] is certainly the greatest PR machine in net history.’ That’s very true, but again, so what?
Flickr isn’t even the market leader (Webshots is, and Yahoo! Photos is much larger even at Yahoo), but they’re still an incredibly cool site with a very low barrier to entry – no fees, simple signup, and a great community.
The press and people who don’t really understand business always latch on to a market leader or a company with a ton of momentum and declare victory. Remember when Google couldn’t get any respect because AltaVista had “won” the search engine wars? What’s their market cap? Remember when fatbrain.com was dismissed because Amazon owned bookselling online? So how’d they become a $100M-in-sales, profitable company? For decades, pundits have been speculating that one of the car companies will own the market and we’ll all drive the same make.
It’s not gonna happen. There’s plenty of room for everyone to play – you just have to find your market, find your business model, and go for it. Google’s approach was anti-portal with a little PageRank mixed in. fatbrain.com went after the technical and business market, and provided in-house bookstores for the likes of IBM and Sun. And duh, we’d not all driving the same car. There’s room for BMW alongside Toyota.
At SmugMug, we have a lot of respect for Flickr and what they’ve been able to achieve. They deserve all the credit in the world. Personally, I wish their innovation rate hadn’t slowed way down when they got acquired by Yahoo – but I can’t think of a single ‘large company buys small company’ event that hasn’t caused that. Can you?
We have no desire to play in Flickr’s market, and never have. It costs money to use SmugMug – we have no free offering. We launched years before Flickr did, and we were profitable before Flickr even entered the market. We still are. We have a very different approach to the business and to our customers than Flickr does. Does that mean Flickr’s wrong and we’re right? Of course not. Do we wish we got more press coverage? Of course we do, every company does. But we’ll buckle down and earn it.
Companies triumph over market leaders all the time. They do it by innovating and executing brilliantly. If Flickr is stealing your customers or your press, it’s your own fault. Victory is there for the taking – but I think the first thing to do is to acknowledge that your competition doesn’t suck. Once you realize they’re talented and aggressive, you can fight them on their own turf.
Duke Nukem's fate in question? 'Come get some.'
In a former life, I was lucky enough to make video games (actually, SmugMug is a happy accident based on what was a video game company – but that’s another story for another time). And the way I got into making video games was by hosting Duke Nukem 3D’s internet launch on my servers. It went so well, I did the same thing for Quake a few months later. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now, my old friends at 3DRealms are under fire. Duke Nukem Forever has taken an awfully long time to make (9 years at least), and Shacknews has a rather breathless article on the loss of some talent on the game. Now, Shacknews is my absolute favorite gaming site, and I love the addition of Chris Remo to the staff there – but come on people!
Every game developer I know loses people constantly – and on much shorter titles than Duke Nukem. We lost plenty of people making SiN, and that was a 2 year project, not 9. Losing people from time to time on a project this long is going to happen – people get bored, burnt out, want to do something new, etc. Big deal – it wasn’t the entire team that left.
I’m sure 3DRealms misses some of these people. Knowing some of the ones who left personally, they certainly lost some very talented people – but Duke’s fate isn’t in question. Even mentioning a phrase like that is ridiculous and silly. They’ll continue with the rest of the team (a game like Duke doesn’t get made with 7 people) and hire replacements as necessary. My understanding is that they didn’t all leave en-masse anyway.
Anyone can see that 3DRealms is doing fine financially (look at all the console Duke titles over the years, the Max Payne franchise, and now Prey) and they’re gonna take their time. Remember all the whining and moaning about Half-Life 2? How’d that turn out?
One of my biggest regrets (and I know I speak for lots of the other SiN team members here, too, some of whom are on the list of those who left 3DRealms) is that we didn’t have the money and time to make SiN truly great. We were forced by market pressures to ship the game before it was done – and as a result, we had an average title that had clear glimpses of greatness. Imagining what life would have been like if we could have polished it like Valve and 3DRealms get to do is a fantasy – but a beautiful one.
True game fans should stop whining about Duke and instead laud developers like id, Blizzard, Valve, and 3DRealms for taking the time to do their games right and ship them when they’re done. The wait can be worth it – just look at HL2 and WoW.
Take a peek inside our datacenters
Our customers often ask us what sort of hardware we use. I’ve meant to put up a page detailing all of the stuff we love (like Apple’s XServe RAID arrays and Rackable servers), but I’m a big procrastinator. 🙂
In the meantime, you can watch a video of me describing a portion of our storage infrastructure here, both our physical local storage, and little bit about Amazon’s S3.
Also on CNet is a video interview we set up with Equinix, the people who provide our datacenter space, power and cooling.
Take a peek inside, see what you think.
It's about time, Flickr
The news broke on TechCrunch first, but it’s now over on the FlickrBlog: Flickr has finally added real geography support. I guess the only real question is – why on earth did it take so long?
I’ve only spent a few minutes playing with it, but it’s really good so far. They did a nice job with the interface, especially “clustering” photos together as you zoom in and out.
I’m excited about this. Our customers have been enjoying geotagging support for more than a year (see Tim’s post about it), and I know Zooomr’s had good support for awhile, too. But Flickr has lot more market share, mind share, and PR leverage than the rest of us do, so hopefully this will get camera manufacturers to get on the ball and make this a standard checklist feature. Let’s hope so.
foo, nofoo, barcamp
I wasn’t invited to foo camp this year – and that’s a good thing.
I attend quite a few conferences each year, and wish I had a lot of time to attend even more. Half of them match up with the ‘Chief Geek’ half of my title, like MySQL UC and OSCON, and the others fall into the ‘CEO’ half of my title, like D and Web 2.0 (though I can’t for the life of me seem to get an invitation to Web 2.0 this year, despite being a previous attendee and a Web 2.0 CEO. Other people at SmugMug have, though. Go figure.).
But foo camp is the best there is. I learn more in the two days at foo than any two months the rest of the year combined. It’s like mind-melding with super-brilliant people and having your brain sucked while you’re sucking theirs. Not to mention the best Werewolf games I’ve ever played. 🙂
Over the weekend, there were some alternatives to foo in the area. Scoble had his nofoo fireside chat at the Ritz (you can read more about our discussions) which was a ton of fun, and easily had the best view. But it wasn’t foo.
On Sunday morning, I stopped by BarCamp Stanford for a few hours, and there was some interesting stuff going on there. One Stanford student showed us his HCI work with the Staples button which was fascinating, and someone from Yahoo showed us a really cool search widget using JSON. But it wasn’t foo.
And it finally dawned on me why foo is so excellent and so difficult to replicate. It’s because Tim & Co. apply a filter to those who are invited. Now, before your hair catches on fire, I’m not talking about a quality filter – there were clearly quality people at both nofoo and barcamp. I’m talking about a diversity filter.
At foo, it’s not all Web 2.0 geeks. You’re eating dinner that first night with one of the guys on the original US spy satellite program to snoop on the Soviets – and he’s got photos, diagrams, and details of exactly how the cameras worked, how they’d get the film back, and how they’d get it developed. During the Geodata & Geomapping session, it’s not just Google Maps mashup artists like us – there are hardware guys asking the mashup guys what they’d like to see next year, and whipping out prototype GPS chips that can be embedded in anything. One session you learn about bioengineering and the state of getting your own chunk of DNA printed. The next, you’re watching someone show off their chocolate printer. Yes, we went from printing DNA to printing chocolate.
The point is that foo is diverse and unique. They intentionally don’t invite the same people every year for this very reason (see? I really am glad I didn’t get invited this year). With completely open-ended things, like nofoo and barcamp, I’m afraid it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Web geeks show up because they read blogs and heard other web geeks were going to be there. Rinse, lather, repeat.
(I think it’s only fair at this point to mention that foo and its diversity does have its fair share of problems. The O’Reilly team puts this on for free for us every year, so I’m happy to help put chairs away, clean up trash, etc for a few hours every Sunday afternoon. So are quite a few other campers. But there’s a large contingent that just sits on the porch chatting away, watching the O’Reilly team lug stuff around. Seems rather rude if you’re really ‘friends’ of O’Reilly. I have a feeling everyone at BarCamp pitched in and cleaned up together.)
I’ve become a big fan of applying non-standard thinking to a given problem. Freakonomics applied economic thinking to (at least on the surface) non-economic problems – with fascinating results. The Culture Code does the same thing – applying psychology to marketing with amazing results. foo is like that – the application of brilliant, non-standard thinking from people who are not experts in your field is enlightening.
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 