Could Photos Be the Sav...

Did you know that Google+ is currently running a conference in San Francisco specifically aimed at photographers? Me, either, but it’s true. The conference description goes like this: Scott Kelby is bringing Google+ photographers together for a history making conference to help photographers refine their photography skills, grow their online brand, and get the most out of Google+. This amazing conference brings together some of the biggest photographers on Google+, some of the best instructors of photography and some of the geniuses of social media. You’ll learn from these a-list instructors during two jam-packed days of photo walks, live photo shoots, one-on-one portfolio reviews, panel discussions and photography workshops. Here’s a picture from the event courtesy of the conference Google+ page: Hmm. . . looks like the photographers need a few more lessons. Venture Beat covered the conference and they say Google+ is working hard at becoming the biggest site for online photos. They want to be the next Flickr or maybe even the next Pinterest. Or maybe just a social network that people want to visit everyday. Photos could work. Hangout is one of the few Google+ successes and Facebook is horrible as a photo album, so maybe Google+ can make this work. Vice president of product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz told the crowd that he thinks the secret is in gathering more data, right up to the blood pressure of the person taking the shot. He says this will help determine how emotionally attached the photographer is to the event being photographed. His wish is to have everyone store their photos on the great Google cloud, then edit them with a variety of web tools so that each photo can make a statement. It’s a good idea. People love sharing photos online and right now it feels like the tools haven’t caught up to the dream. If Google+ can find a way to make a family photo album sparkle it could be the key to their continued success. The only issue I see is one of priorities. Can Google+ lean heavily on photos and chat and still become a wide-reaching social network? Or maybe a better question is, does it matter? Maybe they’d be better off if they concentrated on the visual niche and left the socializing to Facebook. What do you think? Has Google+ got a chance of becoming a powerhouse in any form? Or are they already over? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Vinylmint Is A Jammin’ ...

Vinylmint is a Norfolk-based startup that aims to assist musicians in creating their music. It’s essentially a recording studio in the cloud. You record uncompressed audio right into the computer, the service uploads it to the cloud, and then you can listen to and edit tunes in your browser. Think of it as a mixing board with microphones all over the world. “Musicians can seamlessly store and manage their music projects from a single location,” said CEO Byron Morgan. “Whether it be a professional or amateur musician, Vinylmint easily fits into your existing production methods. Vinylmint enhances the creative experience ultimately providing our users efficiencies in speed, cost, and productivity.” The service is launching today and there are plans for a freemium model that offers faster turnaround and more storage space. All of the founders are avid musicians who just wanted to make the process of jamming online a little better. Click to view slideshow. Q & A: q: I think you did a fabulous job telling the story. I love that you’re tapping into trends that are out there. Collaboration is happening all around us. And the human desire to be on the internet is just as strong. Where do you see the business in two or three or four years? Who pays you, and how do you build revenue around that? A: First and foremost, accessing VM is subscription based. the other part is that the underlying tech allows individuals to share raw data files at a quick rate. That’s a scalable technology. Media and film and 3D modeling industries are looking to transfer raw data files as well as allow two remotely different systems to communicate and collaborate with one another. That’s where VM sees an evolution. Q: What are the barriers to entry? A: Our API fits into those systems. It allows us to tap into their users so they can collaborate and then create content through that. It also functions as a repository for that content. Our API also allows individuals to customize the solutions to their needs. They can add productivity tools to the system, and other collaboration functionalities and add-ons. We then function as a project management tool. Q: But what is the barrier to entry? If you discover a huge market and Apple says that they like the idea, why can’t they do it themselves? Well, Apple confines themselves to their own devices. There are other tools that users are always trying and using and that’s where we lie, outside of the Apple universe. New tools continue to arise every day. What kind of feedback have you had from musicians, and what’s most surprising? I’m a music producer myself, and working with other music producers across the world, I’ve learned that the issue is wanting to be able to reach or access sounds in other places. Because that’s where new things develop. There needs to be a central location where people can access each other and collaborate and that’s essentially where VM built its niche early on. We’re saying here’s a tool where you can now manage your products you’re creating with each other and collaborate in real time and overcome any technical obstacles you may be having like bandwidth speeds, etc. Q: Is there a discovery aspect of this? If I’m in Namibia and want to connect with a drummer in Munich, can I do that on the site? A: We’re in our early development but that’s part of an update in Version 1. Q: You talked about this being subscription based. Are you planning on charging subs straight from the get-go or making it free and then charging subs? A: It’ll be a 60-day trial period. From there, a user would pay for a container of 30 projects for $10. They can put as much as they can in that container until they have to upgrade. Q: Why doesn’t the product exist now? A: Competitors want to confine people to different recording systems called DOS. These sites are confining individuals to these DOS systems. We don’t want you to learn anything new. Use the tools you’re comfortable with to create your content. That’s where our value add is. Q: Once someone has collaborated and created music, what tools do you provide for editing, exporting and format? A: What’s currently in development is allowing them to render files from our platform. In the meantime, you can download tracks from the recorders. Then they can use ProTools or Reason to render the files and edit the files outside of the recorders. We give power to the users. Q: Have you thought about helping musicians promote their music after they use the platform? A: One of the cool things we’re interested in is using crowdsourcing initiatives and using the power of our content creation community to teach people who are using the site and help advertising campaigns to better promote them and our platform. Q: Have you thought about distribution? A: We’re currently in talks with digital distribution partners. There’s a supply chain there, and we’ve identified a place where we fit in the supply chain until we can continue to grow.

In Which The Maker Fair...

A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers . An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only just in time. It was exactly the tonic I needed after my inability to get excited about the Facebook IPO and my ongoing sense that most of the Valley is focused on building meaningless mobile/social/local/scrapbooking sugar water . This was a place full of people building real, tangible things for the sake of sheer awesomeness. Oh–and while they’re at it, almost as a side effect, hidden behind their Burning Man-esque decor is a community and technology ready to turn the whole planet on its ear. The maker movement has hit an interesting flux point; its amateurs and enthusiasts, much like the computer geeks of the 1970s and 1980s, now stand on the verge of watching their hobby erupt into big business that will reshape the way people everywhere live. Do I sound hyperbolic? Don’t just take my word for it; listen to the mighty Economist , which in its British understated fashion recently called digital manufacturing no less than “ The third industrial revolution .” “What happens when you give the tools of the industrial revolution to the creative class, for the cost of a bad coffee addiction?” asked Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop , a company that offers its members access to workspaces armed with industrial-strength toolsets. Then he reeled off some impressive examples: James McKelvey built the first three prototypes of the Square card reader — in two weeks — at TechShop in Menlo Park. That’s also where Phil Hughes and Bob Lipp built their initial fanless liquid-cooling system for server farms, which went on to soundly defeat IBM in a “chill-off.” TechShop’s Mark Hatch. But I’m most interested in the economic effects once the maker movement hits the developing world, where the demand for custom parts, recycled materials, and mechanical repairs is immense and inexhaustible. Or consider another of Hatch’s examples: the Embrace low-cost infant warmer which is reportedly on track to save the lives of 100,000 premature babies over the next five years. And we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. When maker technology and spaces like TechShop begin to metastasize all over the planet, so that anyone and everyone can plausibly build their own solutions to their problems rather than waiting for some industrial-scale corporation to do so, that’s when a lot of lives will really begin to change. And TechShop is indeed expanding, although, alas, only in the USA for now: there’ll be “more than one open on the East Coast by the end of the year,” according to Hatch. In the interim, drop by a Maker Faire if you can, to catch a glimpse of this nascent future in its larval stage, while it’s still messy and exuberant and fueled by amateurish enthusiasm. (Bay Areans: it’s open until 6PM today.) And the next times your eyes glaze over at the sight of yet another SoLoMo app, consider looking into what’s happening in the world of hand-made hardware instead. If nothing else, it’s awfully colorful: The Ragtime Castaway Band , a fully robotic giant calliope band. Laying down a beat with a piano made of bananas and a drum kit built from limes. That dragon again.

Kickstarter For Groups ...

The rush of interest around crowdfunding is spawning many variations on the theme, and one of the more original of them — Crowdtilt , part of the most recent crop of Y Combinator startups — is today announcing a funding round of $2.1 million for its platform that lets groups of friends come together to fund an event or project, like a house party or group vacation. The company tells us that the seed round is coming from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures, and it follows on from a very impressive three months of growth. James Beshara, the CEO and co-founder, tells us that it has now seen nearly $1 million of events funded since launching in February 2012. Apparently, we’ve heard that Crowdtilt had some of the biggest inbound interest of all the startups after the YC Demo Day, and the company caught our eye too: we put it on a list of 10 YC startups to watch — along with Pair, a social network and app for couples (or other groups of two) that  announced a seed round  of $4.2 million from an equally impressive list of backers. What makes Crowdtilt interesting is that it is filling a distinct gap in the market: while sites like Kickstarter are good for funding the development of a product or projects on a wide scale where some kind of equity is offered to the backers, they don’t cater as well to small, defined groups based around specific events. At the same time, there aren’t any well-used services out there to help people collaborate on paying for something together: I’ve found that when I plan something like a vacation rental with friends, it’s often done by email with a lot of chasing for payments in the aftermath (that could just be my own flaky friends, of course). “The main differentiation is that rather these big projects for the whole web you can create funding projects for small groups,” explains Beshara. “Instead of raising money from the crowd you raise money from your crowd.” He also admits, though, that “It’s just a better way of collecting money, rather than sending out emails, engage interest and all that coordination you can do it in one fell swoop.” And that, he says, could lead to having a more active and social life: “We believe friends can do this more often if they could.” So far, that seems to be the case, at least as far as Crowdtilt’s own business is concerned. He says that in addition to $1 million being processed through the site since launch (the number was $400k at the end of March, so picking up $600k since then is a sign of momentum picking up); Crowdtilt has been seeing that 34.6 percent of users return to use the service again, suggesting that people are planning more activities, given the tools to do it. In all, the site has picked up 10,000 users in the last 11 weeks, purely through word-of-mouth. So what happens with the $2.1 million? The funding, Beshara says, will be used to grow out its business with more enhanced services — without the need of worrying about raising money, which he says “can be a drain” when you are a small outfit. Crowdtilt has recently added code that ensures payments within 24 hours of a project closing — Crowdtilt takes a 2.5 percent fee of the transaction only if the deal gets completely funded; otherwise there is no fee. Other future services include expansion to international markets (currently the project originator has to be in the U.S., although the rest of the group can be based anywhere); building a mobile app; and possibly doing more with more public campaigns open to more than just a select, strictly private group of people. Beshara notes that there are more of these appearing already on the site, and “there was a reason we didn’t call the company ‘Grouptilt’” — another domain they registered, thinking ahead to one day serving more than just small, select groups. Beshara himself studied development economics in college and comes from the non-profit realm, and his last crowdfunding project was a platform he helped set up while volunteering in Cape Town, South Africa. “I thought about this a lot, the social dynamics of crowdfunding and why it is so effective online, and how it could be applied to campaigns among friends.” So perhaps in future, there may even be some charitable elements to the site.

Watch Out Google, Zoho ...

Web-based productivity suite  Zoho  is launching a new app today which, again, puts it head-to-head against its biggest competitor, Google, while filling a much-needed hole in Zoho’s business tools lineup. The company is debuting Zoho Sites , a drag-and-drop website builder that allows anyone to build a professional website in minutes, without needing to know HTML or CSS. The product takes on two of Google’s own offerings in one shot, including Google’s simple website builder known as Google Sites , as well as Google’s latest addition , a mobile website conversion tool powered by DudaMobile. The difference between Zoho’s offering and Google’s is that Google’s products work separately, and are designed for different purposes. One (Google Sites) is a very basic website and wiki building tool, which is more appropriate for personal use or for use in small teams, not as a consumer-facing webpage. Meanwhile, Google’s DIY mobile site tool is more of a way to convert a professionally designed website into a mobile-friendly site that syncs with its desktop counterpart when changes are made. Zoho Sites , on the other hand, is an all-in-one product. It allows business owners to build desktop-sized websites which are already optimized for mobile devices. Plus, it comes ready with third-party app integrations, including support for Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Maps, YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. These elements can be dragged-and-dropped into place on the website. The site builder is also integrated with other tools in Zoho’s productivity suite. For example, Zoho stores all content in the Zoho Creator database, and when that database is modified, the website automatically updates. Also powered by Zoho Creator, Zoho Sites offers a form builder which lets site owners handle things like support requests, again without writing code. The forms can kick off email notifications and other integrated custom workflows as well. A number of other features are offered, too, including themes, built-in blogs, domain registration and hosting, integration with Google Apps, and support for multiple authors or site moderators. Zoho Sites will be available both as a free service (two websites with two forms each, one blog, unlimited pages) and paid. The Professional Edition is $39/year and includes six websites, each with 10 forms, a blog, and unlimited pages). This is the only edition to support AdSense and a full rebranding. Below, a video tour of the Zoho Sites offering: