Ok, i get it now. Positive Mental Attitude!

I'm thinking there's comment management going on here. Why not engage me? But read me through either way, if you can stomach it. Rebuttal of any of my points should not be hard, i don't imagine what i've said in this discussion is so watertight that a good explanation of well turned out long considered goals, will not make the contrary point. I am curious as to why a downmodded critique of an possibly affiliated company would be good PR on. I don't take it that way though, nothing personal about my words as to my comments in discussion here or who has replied etc. Instead i think commenters here are missing a lot of history as to the market this new outfit is working in. I overlooked this is a Y-Comb startup. Maybe, i'm guessing, but i feel bad at the mere hint of suspicion that my genuine comment was suppressed or reasons of misunderstanding. No worries if i'm wrong.But i'm no bloody shill for a competitor. Maybe it's a new deadly sin or crippling vanity to wonder out loud in the fashion i imagine someone might be who is not utterly green in the world.If i'm brusque writing now it's because i feel insulted. Not slighted. Just if my outlier suspicion is even partially correct, i'm actually insulted there was no reply calling me out for being somehow wrong in a explicable way. If my language is not cool, tell me so, and you have my apologies, but i don;t think my concerns are wrong. It's not even a political position.

pg's comment above is absolutely bloody true: the reputation of the market dealing in memories and particularly photography is so murky as to be abhorrent. I don't think that's much argument though to ignore hat i was saying, so i'll try to explain my background thoughts here . .

This is all anecdotalism, but meant to hint at data you can find yourself from industry bodies, from trade journals and from not a few online discussions. I'm attempting a vignette, a bt of narrative, not thorughness or empiricism.

One side, you've got good photographers loosing wedding gigs to weekend "pros" who just bought a (now cheap, even for great stuff) DSLR, and on the other side Costco minilabs who'll call the cops on you under DMCA for trying to print any photo you take which is "too professional". (Ok, invest in an inkjet, but i'm no fan of the expense of running those, or gold dust expensive ink being "expired" on a fixed date or printer manufacturers keeping in systems which by design wste a 100 bucks of ink just to declog a head that oddly other companies manage not to clog in the first place and on and on ad nauseam).

My (not modded down, yet) comment above mentioned a true scandal - that the world's most respected imaging company dumped less than substandard stock on their most lucrative and high profile customers for more than a decade.

On a photography bent, the last pro level camera i bought, a Nikon D2X cost $5k and was a literal bleeding edge piece of kit. You really had to know what was up with your exposures, the "auto program" mode was a sure fire way to unviewable images. The very best cameras are only now approaching the ease of exposure of film, though they've worked wonders with quantum efficiency so unheard of hand - held shots are possible in almost no-light which stack up in a gallery if processed well. Those really good ones cost similar money, a bit more with the Yen where it is. For those of you who know their photogtaphy, the comparison i have is to print film (negative or "color reversal" stock, to be pedantic. I can put that in a 2 dollar camera and the lattitude means i get a usable shot, corrected in the print often as not, but i can concentrate on what i want to photograph.

This all may seem a digression, but photography was in serious business decline from 1988, the peak of the SLR system camera sales era, epitomised by Minolta, who that year lost their founder and their entire ethic and direction. Right now there's a renaissance, which is wonderful, so wonderful that the cost of technically good photography has become so low, that i think camera companies themselves wish they could be in the services game like 1000Memories. Like in '88, growth has slumped, or levelled, bt at the same time some aspects of quality and ease of use have not improved a bit since 22 years ago.

I remember an Olympus exec, it may even have been Maitani, the famous teenage designer of the world's biggest selling camera ever, the PenF, lamenting how his designs were just "Kodak eaters". I called my hobby the "family Kodak tax". What we had since digital instead was the "5K camera body tax. They are only just stopping to put sensor equipment in bodies which are less functional than a $200 bottom of line design from the 80s and charging thousands for that as the scale cost of the sensors comes down. But unless you spend real money, you still get on the whole camera design and ergonomics unimproved from 20yr old budget models. Which is why i believe Nikon have skipped a long while in offering new cameras, possibly reckoning they hit a sweet spot.Another story there, but a possible indicator of a plateau.

I'm deeply, utterly, closest to my heart, passionate about this wider situation. If as a reader you sense i'm a bit wound up, that's because this whole market is so fast approaching saturation, all that's left for any but the absolute leaders, is fashion items and product cost reduction, and so few people know what a con it really can be i wish i could make it my purpose, yet this market is a subset of my career, not a sole interest if objective. What i want to argue, with proper data, but which would be difficult to give adequate context, may sound like a geek argument over processor instruction sets where the user just wants to word process. But there is a actual causation between the tech i learned, and getting seriously good photo print in the hands of the masses.

To be absolutely clear, ANY new entrant into this general field is good. The ones i'm aware of really don't impress. When i talk to friends and family, no matter how techniclly savvy they are, i just get a shrug, and a "good as it gets" comment, which further justifies the atrophy in the market. This is a pure LCD domain.

Name ONE online printing company which can work well with getting consistent color. The minilabs are still film (scanned bulk through unevolved tech) which laser expose normal print film stock. But not one of these labs, costing hundreds of thousands for a start, has been designed to manage color output consistently. So, you order a batch to send out to family, and you're lucky to even be sending comparable pictures. Kinda makes all those hours learning photoshop a bit of a joke, eh?

(yes chemical labs are still the way to bulk print)

Most people do not notice. Prints look different under changing light (Macaulay ellipses save the say sometimes, the best RIPs for pro inkjets suss this now) and you're not even doing side by side. There's tons of tech out there not patented but in the literature (WG Hunt, might just be your man, the only Brit to significantly affect this US industry and hollywood for his early work on Kodachrome formulation) but it's not used. I havent dared look at what patents ecist, since i became even partially aware of the patentability of "busines process" and other such bunk. It's been like the big pharmas who patent a new formula for out of protection drugs and withdraw the last one available. Treadmill to no improvement. R&D that only really tries to keep the mud of rent extracting business stuck on an encumbant's wall.

But i think customers for any online photo service, save Flikr, which is straight as to what it intends to be, are at a loss. Not only because comparables are technically obscure, hardly "customer facing" but because they use print tech which has been so unpopular there exist only a handful of people with the knowlege to run them at their optimum.

What i'm scared of, is that somehow someone will get a great marketing angle - and this one is pretty good, by the way, strong enough they grab a big customer base, and because they're in competition with WalMart and who knows who else, the list is extravagantly long, margin erosion means they never even start to deliver on the promise of the tech.

This is even before we start stretching the tech limits of what's available, mass market, cheap because of scale. You see, very very little of the silver halide game has been updated since Noritsu were massive in the 80s, followed by Fuji Frontier. Inkjet has really come along, but not yet cheaply, the best capabilities still involve loading thousands of $ in ink. And only on company tries not to waste that at every opportunity, and that market, is still waiting for R&D to be recouped from high end press print proof shops and advertising houses. And even though two high en inkjet companies include basic spectro calibration functiosn which should keep your colors and densities aligned and ink usage low (not too much, not too little, a bit of undercolor removal in the screening algo) those are aimed at proofing shops, not set up so you can load any paper and get a good result. (meaning more affordable paper, which suits the vendors not, presumably)

Incidentally, when i mentioned i had a comparable commercial interest project, some time ago now, it was 180deg off what 1000Memories is doing, so i've zero interest in denigrating anyone, i iced that project for reasons which may become apparent in this post. I was pretty happy to shelve what had become a noose around my neck, after serious, multi - year coming to terms with how viscious a market this is and the tremendously high hurdles for reinvestment - allwing you really shoot for the top - which made it a idea either too hard, or badly timed, or just plain unsuitable for an exit. But is this deal on offer more than a custom CMS? I don't get it. Media has a way of reinventing the wheel and not scaling well, to be good, it's very labor intensive. So, let's provide a great hub for collaborative family publishing. Cool. But this is where i get to really worrying about things like data integrity.

As to my own project, it delved deep into a number of tech areas, a big one of which was automated image processing, which, notwithstanding patent issues with toolchains, is incredibly hard to do intelligently. When you send your pics, digital or otherwise, still the chances are you are printed on a "wet" process, and sometimes there's USM, color balancing and other things applied. If you hav a sophisiticated / demanding user, you'd need some kind of EDL metadata if not sending finished files. But every and all tweak on an image needs to be done in mind of the output, so you'd need a two - way communication between say a PS or Lightroom plugin. And we're still not fixing the underlying tech.

Maybe if you had sufficient budget to run all your customer pages from a high end inkjet. But then you've cut, bind and collation and no nice Muller Martini kit to attach as standard

For all my griping, by the way, my latest office color laser, once i waded through indecipherable manuals, tweaked up so well, on some paper stock it to my eyes close to pro inkjet output of a few years ago. Maybe that will be the way for bulk print.

ALL THE WAY HERE i'm imagining that print services are a monetization plan for 100Memories. Well, it would make sense. People will want that, even if it is just working out a good PDF layout engine which can send a file back for you to print locally, which makes sense if shipping and handling is cost barrier. Even there, there's no neat way of ensuring a PDF file is set up to match the printer, and designing a protocol for that would be an excellent thing to do. (there are well over a hundred basic setings on my fairly modest "workgroup" color laser, but when set right, it's impressive to my very jundiced eyes) Which could then be sold to much bigger organisations than families. Remote proofing, as it's called, is very mature if you have the skills and not a small amount of domain learning. But making it actually usable, ad i mean simpler than "usable" like the Word "ribbon" which flummoxed experienced users, as the very least point in appreciating "usable" would be awesome. Then, you are taking out a big rump of the work design and print shops do. Funny thing is i've encountered so many print shops who do none of the care like this despite they have the kit, and whilst they're collectively the biggest customers of some very big companies indeed who dominate printer and ink supply (and do a bit of real IT on the side) i don't see them being much threatened by nice driver / firmware upgrades coming from their own supplier.

I may be utterly wrong in my hunch that this project 1000Memories is driven by the digial photography market. Sure it will i hope be driven substantially by the new web font technologies . . if anyone can work around the problems of fonts obfuscated / truncated for web so they can't readily be copied (you loose the kerning pairs and much beside), and with that tech actually get good print typography consistent with, even better than, web pages which come to be a kind of approximate proof.

Any of this is trying to note how taking the tech high ground might suggest that the Adobe hegemony might even be assailed. Or at least peppered with buck shot. Photoshop "Elements" if you've used it is no fun. Photoshop itself is steeped in the history of press tech, and requires a certain attitude. You're not even talking here about "Indesign lite" which is not available, though the product proper ate Quark for breakfast by adopting the TeX composition engine, oh, and targetting PC users as priority. But even Adobe is small beer compared with the photo industry. I use the word industry carefully, in the sense there's a steel industry, a oil industry etc. I mean a market with huge diversity and scale where a process can change economic growth rates, maybe even demographics.

Refecting on that word "industry", a photo hosting site is a business size service. Service is what you do to hook people for sure, but good servive, being the nice guys really can be done by a lot of people. And screwed up by the few, thinking of recent oil scandals. This is why i'm pretty mad about this "don't be a jerk" issue. That's obviously a minimum, who the heck wants to start a business with less than good citizen values? But services can be replicated easily, become hyper local so they won't scale, and you still need some technical advantage for anything to fly on the web. Privately ths is why i get the heebie jeebies reading how a web servive is atrophying because they are not rolling out continuous features. That seems to be a treadmill as well as a PR disaster waiting to happen because it's just watching a continuous race not necessarily about the things which matter to customers (thinking of FB alienating users this way). Somewhere along the line, your customer has to find out that something you do, which is protectable, is better than someone else can do. My recent fave point is how i may use a supposedly outmoded Nokia, but reception is better because of that near century long skill in radio (sorry, forget how long Nok have been about, but Ericsson are about a 100 years old) yet because of that historical focus they seem unable to catch any zeitgeist like appeal, or as a pal would say "can't market their way out of a wet paper bag". (maybe they will win against Apple, but it'll be a cash win, not a "stop using out ideas" win i expect)

If i'm even partially right, that photo services, even couched in terms of doing a specific social role very well, are economically correlated with the digital camera game, the problem becomes what happens when a behemoth in that industry, like Canon (Nikon are very small in comparison, have no print division etc etc) decides their camera unit growth is dwindling so fast they want in on the print utility game. Well, then i see it as a race to "featurize" underlying tech, finding things to do with images (like family books, obituaries and the like) which is really CMS plus layout and printing (but, no way is that easy, as i've been trying to talk about above) and they can move not just lots of money, but crucial bits of he underlying technology. When i think of what can be done for the print tech, i think the big gguys just sand-bag, drip dripping their best stuff when their numbers reuire it. I believe MS did this with the Cutler obtained VMS "experience".

In other words, for 1000Memories, i want to see how it really stands out. I picked - posssibly unfairly - on the storage integrity problem, which is another ticking bomb masked by $bln corps who have awesome sales reps in the thousands, and which problem will start to impact all but the smallest small businesses soon, and which is an industry wide problem for which there's no impetus to resolve now, or influence disruptive or otherwise to address the core issues.

What can 1000Memories do, first to shoot for the stars on some aspect of technical quality, then to execute against a market where a lot of underlying technical quality is buried so deep you may as well hardly try to stand out, and then further execute against big camera companies (I'd be more worried about Sony, if they could only do joined up handwriting in their plans again) who can find ways to restore the consumer confidence they lost in their previous pathetic forays into online "memory treasury". By the by i think those early efforts folded because of scrutiny by what was then a much higher skilled audience which was selected by the sheer cost of early digital cameras. Maybe the same old will wash now, but i'm not sure about that.

Sorry to go on about this, but "not being jerks" is a single aspirational goal, not an easy indicator or simple target to convey. Certainly not if the reason the market you're in stinks for a myriad of tech/econominc reasons, where good guys burn out because those tech/econonomic barriers have become entreched.

Behind every altruistic plan there's a very no b.s. guy or guys, i won't say ruthless, but as they say "no good deed" and you really have to be hard to push a vision which touches people privately and which means to do so you have to uproot big commerce interests, or at the least shake them up. I still find it hard to contemplate how difficult it really is to do all that and at the same time to project your ability to be a safe harbor for intimate valuables over decades. Maybe that's not the pitch precisely, but the minute a company talks about family legacy and inheritance, that's what i read between the lines. Solving the worry as to how our almost exponentially growing digital memory archive will be safely stored is a technical challenge, a marketing challenge, maybe even a collabrative challenge with big players you're not in business to compete with (until they run out of revenue growth) but absolutely no way is it something to be brushed under the carpet.

To my mind, all i see is the chance to take real high ground early in what will become a industry studded with memories of the tears of innocents who chose to upload to the guys with the half - plan, and the greater shedding of tears of those who appreciate just how bloody good the online archive / print results could be, even disallowing any development with new tech from the machine suppliers, printers, scanners or whoever yo uneed to have in plant.

Which is why i'm flabbergasted at being modded down earlier. I'm not good at being subtle i realize, and this is a very long reply to emphasise just one or two points which i thought would be obvious to readers which might exonerate my earlier negatively critical comments.

Hope if you read this far, you found something stimualating in between my perforce terribly forshortened argument.

kind regards to all, sypathy for those who would have preferred a TL;DR version.