Photocasting nothing new, move along
It’s been said over and over, but there seems to be some confusion. Let’s see if I can clear the air. 🙂
Kudos to Steve and his team at Apple for ‘photocasting’. It’s a great name, I wish we’d thought of it.
However, it’s nothing new. SmugMug has had it for many many moons, and Flickr had it before we did. Everyone (like Pixagogo and Fotothing) has it, and has for quite some time. Some call it photofeeds or ‘image podcasting’ or a variety of other names.
(And for the record, I think Apple’s doing just fine with their XML conformance).
Bottom line: Cool that Apple’s publicizing it, and cool the iPhoto “just works” with our feeds (and I assume the rest out there), but not so cool that they seem to think they invented it.
Welcome to the playground, Apple.
The newest smugmugs!
I’m now a dad not once, but twice over. I’m not sure it’s totally sunk in yet. In the space of less than an hour we went from being pregnant (and expecting to stay that way for at least a little longer) to being parents. Crazy!
My wife is doing a much better job at blogging this than I am, so go read hers for the regular, frequent, detailed updates. But I do have one story to tell that she can’t: The C-Section. If you’re squeamish (like I am), you may not want to continue reading…. or click any of the links below. 🙂
Those who know me well know that things like needles, blood, cutting flesh, and the like make me go woozy. I get faint enough to pass out most of the time. For the entire 7 months of the pregancy (our twins were born early at 31.5 weeks), everyone had been telling me not to watch the C-Section.
I watched.
And boy, was it cool! No sign of wooziness here, I can tell you. And yes, as a good smugmugger, I had a camera with me the whole time (Baldy’s Canon 20D for those of you keeping score at home). And I got some great shots!. Almost as soon as I got in there, I peeked over the curtain as a trial run to see if I could handle it.
What I saw on the other side didn’t really resemble my wife, or any human for that matter. The surgeons had covered her entire abdomen with a plastic sheet which adhered to her skin, and then began cutting through it. It was too surreal to be gross, and things only got more surreal as the operation progressed. It only lasted maybe 10 minutes, but it was crazy.
Perhaps the strangest thing for me was that they seemed to be treating my wife more like a slab of meat than a person. They were so anxious to get the babies out that they were exerting *lots* of force on her, pulling her every which way. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t feeling anything, but she wasn’t -she felt human on one side of the curtain, but looked like a side of beef on the other.
Then, after they’d cut through her skin, fat, and muscle, I saw something white poking out of the new hole in my wife. Thinking it was some organ, I almost turned back to my wife to chit-chat a little when I realized that wasn’t an organ – it was a tiny foot! Fascinated, I watched as the surgeons tried to grab said foot, only to fail. Leia, my little girl, was busily kicking them off of her as soon as they tried to grab it!
Finally they got a good grip and *yanked* her out. I don’t mean gently eased her out – they *hauled* her out and tossed her down on my wife’s stomach for a few seconds. (Yes, tossed. Again, like a side of beef). She looked more like a baby-shaped sausage than an actual baby – all white skin and wrinkles. Certainly not the pink baby I expected, and the doctors weren’t treating her much like one either. Leia lay there for a few seconds, obviously alive but helpless. She slumped down and patiently waited to see what came next – and I was in love. As soon as they snipped her umbilical cord, though, the nurses whisked her away and began to clean her up. Almost instantly her skin got all pink and she began to cry. Elizabeth and I beamed.
Looking back, there was now a surgeon with half his arm buried in my wife’s stomach. Basically up to the elbow, obviously trying to grab another slippery, squirmy, kicking baby. Finally they manged to get Logan cornered in there (poor guy had no-where to hide!) and hauled him out too. Again, sausage which looked remarkably similar in shape and size to a baby. Again, love. This time I had the presence of mind to get more than one photo, so we’ve got a little more photo evidence of his resemblence to a sausage.
The fascinating (non-squeamish!) surgery part over, I ambled over to the two infant beds they had set up for the cleaning procedure. They were nice enough to let me cut Logan’s umbilical cord (again, no wooziness!) which was probably the first instant I really started thinking dad-like thoughts. The surgery was so surreal it hadn’t even begun to hit me that I was now a daddy. Beaming, I rushed over and told my lovely wife that I’d cut his cord, and watched her kiss her babies as they left for their reservations at Hotel NICU.
Now, a week later, I’ve gotten to talk to them (even sing a little, and I can’t sing!), touch them, change them, hold them, and (my favorite so far) read to them!
Thanks especially go out to the wonderful surgeons who delivered our beautiful babies, the nursing staff and doctors who were with us throughout the entire ordeal (short version: 2 years of infertility followed by miracle pregnancy and then 7.5 weeks of pre-term labor, with 5 trips to the hospital and my poor wife stuck in bed the entire time), and our family and friends whom we love so much. We couldn’t have done it without any of you.
I’m a dad – and my life has changed forever.
Dig deep, give generously
So we experimented a little bit with matching charity gift-giving earlier this year with Hurricane Katrina. And our customers came through -in a big way! We ended up donating $14,000, matching the $14,000 donated by our customers. What a great feeling.
It’s my pleasure to announce that we’ll be doing something similar for one of my favorite charities, Child’s Play. It’s put on by the funniest web comic around, Penny Arcade, who also happen to be two of the most generous guys around. Child’s Play is done 100% fee-free, so these guys aren’t collecting anything in return for all their hard work. In all, almost a million dollars worth of toys have been donated, thanks to their efforts and everyone’s generosity. (In the small world department, their very first comic strip was about a video game I helped make).
As a passionate, life-long video game addict, I’m thrilled that the video game community comes together and helps sick kids all over the world. In past years, smugmug has hosted the photos for the charity. I’m hoping we will again this year. Last year, we offered to donate $10 cash for every smugmug subscriber who signed up with the code ‘childsplay’.
This year, we can do even better. We’ll match every cash and gift donation from a smugmug customer with the same amount of cash ourselves, up to $10,000. I’d be thrilled if we can meet that goal – and given our customers’ past histories, I’m sure we can. We’re hoping to go to Oakland (the local hospital to us) and take some great photos of the toys being delivered, too.
If you participate, drop us a note with the subject ‘Child’s Play Donation’ and the body of your message telling us what your smugmug URL is and what you donated. We’ll handle the rest. We’ll answer questions and post status updates on digital grin.
So dig deep and give generously. The kids need us.
Found on smugmug
You may have already noticed, but Ben has put together an awesome blog about goodies we find on smugmug. With 43,000,000 photos (and climbing fast!), it’s amazing all the gems we manage to find buried in the pile.
Check it out if you haven’t already.
Themes have landed!
My favorite holiday is nearly here, so I wanted to get Themes out the door before it passed us by. You can see the results over at my smugmug site. Here are the release notes for our recent release, including Themes, if you’re curious.
What are Themes, anyway? Basically, they let you customize each and every page on your smugmug account however you’d like. No longer do your pages have to all look the same, even when you customize them. We’ve launched with just 3 Themes ourselves, but have no fear – we’re adding more. Want to help?
Power Users and Pros can, of course, create as many Themes as they’d like. Go wild!
Digital Grin is easily the best resource for figuring out how to build your own Themes, btw.
Video via iTunes – almost a hit!
Apple announced some neat things this morning, but the thing that really got me excited was the opportunity to buy TV shows right from iTunes. $1.99 per episode? Sign me up! Bye bye TiVo, hello iTunes! Thank you Apple!
Oh, wait, this is the real world, and companies rarely deliver what consumers really want. Even Apple. The stupid shows are in 320×240! Not 480×720 (SDTV & DVD) or 1280×720 (HDTV 720p) or 1920×1080 (HDTV 1080i). In other words, nothing anyone actually watches. Yes, ok, so the Video iPod only has a 320×240 screen – but some of us would actually like to watch things we buy on our TVs, PCs, projectors, whatever.
So, let me get this straight. The new Macs come with a spiffy remote so you can watch movies and stuff on your Mac from your sofa. They also come with big, gorgeous high-res displays. But you can’t buy and watch the videos and TV shows from Apple on them, because they’d be postage stamp sized.
Does the hardware team not talk to the iTunes team or something? Get with the program, Apple. You’re almost there – everyone wants to be able to buy [TV shows | Movies | Music Videos] on a case-by-case basis right from their home. But they’d like to watch it on all the devices they own, including shiny new Video iPods.
Bubble 2.0: Buckle up!
So I just got back from the Web 2.0 conference and there’s definitely a new bubble in the making. Let me first say that the conference was great, the organizers did a good job, I learned a lot and networked plenty. I achieved my goals, and the organizers achieved theirs. It’s not their fault that we’re watching The Return of the Bubble.
But that doesn’t stop the conference from feeling like Bubble 2.0 is coming. Marc Hedlund at O’Reilly seems to think we’re all wrong for thinking that there’s a bubble, but his rationale doesn’t address the biggest indicator: no real business models.
There were a lot of neat ideas at the conference. No killer apps, but the truth is that killer apps take time and they begin as neat ideas. eBay didn’t happen overnight. So lots of neat ideas = cool.
There was a lot of money at the conference. I ran into more VC than I could count, all looking for neat ideas that could become killer apps. That’s good, too, because neat ideas often need capital to become killer apps. Not always, and I think less often these days than in the 90s, but still fairly often. So lots of money in search of neat ideas = cool.
But after talking to at least a hundred guys with ideas and a hundred guys with money, I didn’t hear a single solid business model. Furthermore, there were no speakers on the agenda who even addressed this vital issue.
Most common business model? “Grow fast, get acquired.” (Heard that one before, have you?). Second most common business model? “Slap Adwords on it.” Third most common? Oh, wait, that was as far as it went. I’m sure there were companies there who were selling things to consumers, or doing subscriptions, or doing added service and support. I was there, afterall, and I’m sure there were others. But they weren’t a blip on the radar, let alone the majority.
So my bottom-line takeaway from the conference is that smugmug is even more special than I’d realized. We not only have a business model that works, but it’s been working for years. We have our hedgehog strategy and we’re sticking to it.
Theme Bounties!
Themes are right around the corner! And we’ve got a bunch of Theme ideas we’d like to have for launch, but haven’t (yet) had time to build them.
After seeing all of the great stuff some of our customers have been doing with the new CSS layout, we think you can probably do a better job with these Themes than we can. So we’ve got a new bounty system: Build a great SuperTheme for us, and if we use it, you’ll get at least $500 from us.
There are two types of Themes – for lack of better terms, I’ll call them Themes and SuperThemes. In my book, a Theme is a pure CSS implementation to change smugmug’s look & feel. A SuperTheme, though, is a combination of both CSS and new graphic art. By graphic art, I mean any or all of the following: new smugmug logo, new background image (tiling!), new shopping cart icons, new rating stars on comments, etc.
We’re looking for a bunch of SuperThemes and we’re willing to pay for them! Here are the ones we’d definitely like to see:
But if you think of more general purpose Themes we haven’t thought of yet, we’re open to the idea. You may want to post on dgrin about it first, to see if there’s interest in the idea.
Here are the details:
Once you’ve got a SuperTheme ready, simply email us with “SuperTheme” in the Subject and show us your work. Or, if you’re not shy, post about it on dgrin. Dgrin is a great resource for getting help with the Theme, too.
FAQ:
Q: What about plain old Themes without any new graphics? Can I do one of those?
A: Yes! We’d love to see some Themes too. Given that they don’t have new art, I suggest focusing on great color combinations and clean layouts rather than a specific idea such as Halloween. We’re probably not in the position to pay much for non-artwork Themes, but if we use your Theme, we’ll give you a lifetime Pro smugmug subscription.
Q: What’s with the “at least $500”?
A: I’m afraid that’s mostly just me hedging my bets. Since I’m not sure how many great Themes will come out of this little experiment, I want to make sure I stay within my budget. If your Theme is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, you may have a shot at more than $500. (In fact, I hope so!). We’ll see.
Q: How do I build and show off my Theme?
A: Easy, just use the existing smugmug customization tools on a Power User or Pro account. Remember, don’t use any HTML or JavaScript – just CSS and images.
Q: But I have a great idea for a Theme and don’t have a Power User account! What do I do?
A: Email us and we’ll get you taken care of. Be prepared to show off your great idea with a screenshot or mockup or something.
Q: But I have a great idea for a Theme and don’t want to screw up my current customization! What do I do?
A: Email us and we’ll get you taken care of. We’ll look at your current customization, or any supplied screenshots & artwork, and probably give you a new account(s) to play with temporarily.
Q: Is there a cutoff time?
A: Nope, I imagine we’ll take submissions for years if they meet the criteria. But we’d like to launch Themes soon, so if you want to be part of the initial release, get your submissions in!
Q: How will my Theme work, exactly?
A: If you’re selected as an official Theme, every single smugmug customer will have the option of using YOUR Theme for any and all of their galleries. When creating a new gallery or changing the settings on an old one, your Theme will be in a new dropdown box. Something similar on their Control Panel will allow them to select a Theme for their non-gallery pages, too.
Q: I have a question not answered by the FAQ! What can I do?
A: Easy! Post on dgrin, our support forum!
Phase 3 – ready for primetime
So Phase 3 is ready to go. We’re in final testing now, and it could potentially be released tonight.
There’s a thread & poll on dgrin about the changes, including a preview image. JT also had another thread about the CSS changes you can use to customize your look & feel.
Go read the threads if you’ve got a minute, vote on when we should release this stuff, and let us know
"perennial also-ran?" As if!
So Download Squad seems to think we’re some sort of photo-sharing loser. I’ve seen this story so many times, it’s not even funny. Let me recount a few of the Silicon Valley’s best. There are plenty more, but I’ll leave those as an exercise to the reader.
Every year we’ve been ‘also-ran’ to someone different. In the first year big brands, like Adobe, Canon, and Microsoft all shut their sites down. In the second, the P2P photo-sharing apps flamed out. In the third year, we were ‘also-ran’ to sites that ran out of money and got acquired. Now look who’s first out with hot new features.
smugmug’s less than three years old, and I’m positive that our sales and profitability are ahead of both eBay’s and Google’s at the same age. We’re profitable, have no outside investment or debt, and have possibly the best customer service on the web. Best of all, we’re all having a great time building a great company.
Gandhi maybe said it best: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Just look at eBay, Google, and smugmug.
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 