We finally decided we need to give ImageKind it’s own blog. This will appeal mostly to our shopkeepers but its worth mentioning here. We share all kinds of interesting ways that people are promoting their work to a global audience.
Archive for October, 2006
This last weekend I woke up in Walla Walla after a healthy night of wine tasting to see what the latest news on ImageKind was. I noticed a lot of new member sign-ups and tracked it back to another unsolicited article in the Seattle Times newspaper called “How to get big prints out of your digital images.”
We are not even the feature of the article but this kind of activity is always great for business. In fact, we had our highest revenue day the following morning after the article was posted. A llocal car dealership ordered 8 prints for their lobby.
I can’t wait to share some other noteworthy things we’ve been working on. There’s a lot more yet to write about for this little experimental project called ImageKind.
Oct 26. Here I sit in San Jose Airport waiting to come home. It seems I spend as much time down here in the Bay Area as I do in Seattle these days. But, its exciting. We seem to have enough interest and access to any capital we need though we’re still happily funding internally for now. Maybe that will change in the near future. A few very big and potentially interesting deals on the table too. Pretty fun stuff. So, what’s next for Curious Office? 
As ImageKind continues absorbing new content, I’m ever more amazed by the quality of the material uploaded by members. A quick browse of our shopping page demonstrates some pretty incredible material. Most of this content is uploaded by regular people with regular jobs. It confirms what I always believed. That is, that the proliferation of digital cameras, digital capture devices (scanners) and increasing comfort and proficiency with digital editing software is allowing virtually anyone to fully express their creativity in ways that wasn’t possible 15 years ago. More importantly, the web provides the ultimate distribution medium for distribution and consumption of this creativity.
Curious Office didn’t do anything until it first embraced FeedDigest.com As small investors we take zero credit for the hard work put in by Peter Cooper but I mention it here because he deserves recognition. Check out these stats I share from his personal blog:
FeedDigest breaks 100 million per month
From my latest (rough) figures, Feed Digest has now broken the 100 million impressions per month barrier. This is approximately 38 digests per second, although I just checked and at peak times it’s pushing 62 digest impressions per second (equivalent to 160 million per month). This is pretty incredible. That’s more impressions than TechCrunch, Digg, Boing Boing, and Slashdot added together.
In other news, Feed Digest’s homepage has just got a PR 8 from Google, the same as MySpace, FeedBurner, or Technorati.
So, everyone and their mother has written a blurb about the YouTube deal and that’s hard to criticize. 67 people built a company over 2 years with $11 million and sold it for $1.65 billion. Now THAT’S an American success story.
However, as an avid Adobe stockholder I see another interesting (potential) impact of this deal. Anyone else notice that all YouTube video content was in the Flash format? It’s entirely possible that this deal is large enough to have fully solidified Adobe’s position as the streaming video format of choice going forward. Now, Adobe already has a monopoly in desktop publishing. Does anyone else layout webpages with anything other than Photoshop? No. Does anyone else produce print materials & magazines with anything other than InDesign? Well, maybe a few hold-outs. How about website development? The IDE of choice for most webbies is Dreamweaver.
I think Adobe is a big indirect benefactor of this deal. If Google rallies behind Flash as their primary video format I expect many others to do the same. It could be that the future of “Flash” is not necessarily as the winning alternative to Ajax but rather as the web’s video distribution format. Now wouldn’t that be interesting.
How long does it take for a start-up to be successful? I don’t know but I have some ideas. One idea is that I’d like it to happen faster. We all would and that’s why we consumers provide the ammunition for people to keep writing about sites like YouTube. One day they’re not even a company and the next day there are rumours of buyouts for billions. We all want that so we buy magazines at the airport with pictures of soon-to-be web 2.0 billionaires in hopes that we can get a glimpse of how they did it.
Here’s my view. It ain’t gonna happen that way. Sure, it can happen that way just like when people win the Washington State Lottery. But, that doesn’t happen very often and that’s an understatement. thePlatform started in 2000 and finally sold in 2006. AtomFilms started in 1999 and finally sold in 2006. Look at Divx. Been around forever. The list goes on and on and on. Now, in fairness I’d have to acknowledge that RealNetworks was founded in 1994 and went public in 1997. Just three years. But, if you look back on the tech sector that is actually very rare. From my (not so clinical) perspective, I’d say 5-8 years is about what you’re in for. What I’m willing to bet is that it’s not 1-2 years. You can’t build a company around the notion that you’re going to exit in two years. That’s of course very different than saying it is impossible to sell a company in 1-2 years. That happens. But, when that happens it is because a company buys another for its demonstrated potential and unrealized gains earlier in the process than normal. Someone told me the other day that 7 years was the magical number. Maybe true. But I’m pretty sure its not 1-2.
We’ve made some basic SEO updates to our print-on-demand art site over at ImageKind and we’ve got plenty more to do. What’s amazing is how measurable the enhancements really are. Here’s a few of the things we’ve learned in no particular order:
1) Title tags should match your description meta tag
2) Use H1, H2, H3 for headings vs. some other CSS name for text headings
3) H1 tags should match page title tags
4) All thumbnails and images should have alt tags
5) All pages should have keyword dense text that pertain to that page
6) Meta keywords in header file should contain the keywords relevant to THAT page…not the same meta description in header for all pages
7) Be sure that hypertext links contain all the keywords that matter. Don’t just link your company name.
People post to their blog regarding what they learn in your email updates. Send regular email newsletters to your membership base.
9) Offer incentives for people to write about you. For example, the best new feature reccomendation gets $100.
10) PR is the best traffic driver you can devise. Get articles via compelling stories you send to editors of blogs and newspapers.
And, now my bonus tip. Search engines like text. But, they prefer original text. So, your postings my paraphrase other copy you learn from other sites but the text cannot be the same. For example, say you want to write about the “top 10 blogging tips” based on something you read somewhere else. Do not use the same text even if you are crediting the author with permission. Duplicate text seems to be discounted by engines relative to original text.
