Archive for August 2009
Introducing the Phanfare 50-50 Referral Program
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Phanfare 50-50 referral program. The Phanfare referral program rewards existing customers with Phanfare “store credit” when they refer new customers to Phanfare. New customers receive a discount of the same amount. It’s a 50-50 split of the bounty between the new and existing customers. Here are the details:
- A Phanfare customer who refers a new Phanfare Premium customer gets $10 in store credit. The new customer receives a $10 discount on their first year of Premium service, making the first year $39.99. Subsequent years are $49.99.
- A Phanfare customer who refers a new Phanfare Pro customer gets $20 in store credit. The new customer receives a $20 discount on their first year of Premium service, making the first year $79.99. Subsequent years are $99.99.
- You must be a paying Phanfare customer in good standing to receive the credit.
- Store credit in your account is automatically applied to renewals. To use it for merchandise, you must explicitly choose to redeem the credit.
- The new customer must use the email address that the existing customer has on file with Phanfare.
- The new customer can put in an email address of an existing customer who referred them either at the time he signs up for trial or the time he puts in a credit card and signs up for the first year.
- No limit to how much store credit you can earn.
The referral program has been a popular request among our customers for a while. We had one a few years back that was successful as well. We removed it when we tried out offering freemium because it made little sense. We are excited to be able to offer it again.
With the holiday season coming up in the fall, you can essentially earn your way to lots of high quality merchandise through this program. If you have not tried our books, this is a way to do so for free!
Apple responds to the FCC – 11.2 minutes to review an app
Apple responded to the FCC’s questions today about the rejection of Google Voice. It’s an interesting read, especially for Apple watchers like us. Apple loves secrecy and the letter is surprisingly open and forthright.
The details of why the rejected Google Voice are not all that surprising and will certainly be discussed by everyone endlessly. I am more interested in the review process since we go through it regularly.
In their response, Apple discloses that there are 40 full time reviewers dealing with 8500 new apps and updates per week. If you assume that Apple is neither falling behind nor catching up, that means that they spend 11.2 minutes reviewing each app (40 people working 40 hrs per week processing 8500 items per week – the average wait time of 14 days is not relevant to the calculation of throughput if my recollection of queuing theory is correct).
Apple said that every app is reviewed by two people, so that means that a reviewer has about 5 minutes to review an app. If true, the level of quality in the app store is remarkable since it takes us a lot longer than 5 minutes to QA an update of Phanfare Photon before we send it to Apple. It also means that Apple certainly relies on some degree of automation to test apps and make sure they conform in various ways. For example, I would guess that they check for the use of undocumented frameworks programatically.
Apple also states that they have reviewed about 200,000 apps in a little more than a year. But at 8500 apps per week, they are on a run rate of 442,000 apps per year, so the number of app submissions is accelerating.
Praise for Phanfare Photon for the iPhone
We have had our app in the iPhone store for over a year now. The reviews have been consistently positive, although the average rating is only 2.5. Seems like 1/2 the people delete it from their phone, write no review, and give it 1 star. The other half of reviewers give it five stars or close to it. Those reviewers are also more engaged and are the ones writing the reviews for the app. I know you all don’t spend your days refreshing the review page, as we do. Here are few recent reviews:
Introducing the Phanfare Affiliate Program
We are pleased to introduce the Phanfare Affiliate Program. Under the affiliate program, publishers are paid commissions on sales for referring people who become Phanfare subscribers. Commissions start at a whopping 40%.
The affiliate program is described pretty fully in the above link. But to get started, here is how it works:
- Read the details of our program to make sure its a fit for you.
- Become a publisher in the Commission Junction network if you are not already. This will also start your application to become a Phanfare Affiliate.
- Get links and advertising creative from Commission Junction and deploy those.
- When someone coming through one of your links becomes a Phanfare customer, you earn a commission, starting at 40% and going as high as 53%. When someone joins and becomes a Premium subscriber, you earn $20. When someone becomes a Pro subscriber, you earn $40.
- You get checks directly from Commission Junction, who administers our affiliate program.
Affiliate marketing has evolved into two distinct channels over the years:
- Traditional web publishers with traffic and pageviews. These publishers place Phanfare ads on their sites and get paid when the people clicking through subscribe to Phanfare.
- Search marketers who buy traffic on Google and other search engines and redirect that traffic through affiliate links to earn commissions on sales.
We allow both types of affiliates. Our main restriction is that we don’t allow affiliates to bid on our trademark, our URL or misspellings of either.
Phanfare Photon update has hit the Apple App store
Wow, it’s been nearly three months since the last update to Phanfare Photon for the iPhone and iPod touch and hence this version has so much good stuff that there is not just one major feature. Here are the highlights:
- Video is now synchronized to the iPhone over the air and will play offline in airplane mode.
- Properly supports the new Phanfare Site features, including sending sharing invites to Phanfare sites and publishing an album to your Phanfare site.
- Supports changing album properties under iPhone OS 3.0.
- Fixed the bug that prevented associating with a facebook account from Photon.
- Better support for album sections. You can see and edit album section descriptions.
- Support for shooting and uploading video from iPhone 3G S phones. Note that we are still not converting iPhone video properly on the service but are working to address that.
- Supports assigning albums to Subsites for Pro users.
- Follows the convention of other Phanfare apps (Mac,PC and Web) in showing an album as private (ghostbusters icon) if the album is not published to your Phanfare site.
- Deprecates the Phanfare social networking features. New albums are created with friend & family visibility turned off. Friends and Family features are off the main tab bar and appear in the “more” area.
- Numerous small bug fixes. For example, deleting the last image in album does not crash the app.
You will also notice that our extensions the camera view are gone. They were touch-anywhere-to-shoot, image-stabilization-assist and self-timer. These features were disallowed by Apple when they released the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS. The good news is that we believe that we can put these features back in using a future version of the iPhone OS.
Our data shows that more than 90% of photos taken using Photon don’t use the camera within the app. Most people prefer to take photos and videos using the built-in camera app on the phone, saving them to the roll. Then they import the photos and videos to Phanfare Photon.
The built-in camera still has a much shorter shot-to-shot time than the camera within Photon. This is due to limitations of the iPhone SDK. We recommend that all users shoot with the built-in camera. We would pull our camera control out but we are leaving it in since we believe we will be able to provide the camera extensions in a future release. Let us know how you feel about having it in.
Introducing Phanfare Pro
I am pleased to announce the introduction of Phanfare Pro. Phanfare Pro is targeted at prosumers and professional photographers who want a fully customizable archival photo and video hosting solution. With Phanfare Pro you can:
- Create your own website of your photos and videos without Phanfare branding at yourname.phanfare.com
- Create up to 1000 subsites, each one with a URL of yourname.phanfare.com/subsite. This is great for photographers who do work for clients and want to create a site for each client. Each subsite can have any subset of your albums and be optionally password protected.
- Customize colors to match other websites that you might maintain
- Customize the header and footer of album pages in one of three ways: with custom HTML; with a custom image; or by including an HTTP pointer to a third party page that contains the markup you want to include.
- Customize the background image that is tiled across your Phanfare web albums
- Use your own domain name through a CNAME record.
- Host up to 20 minute videos
Phanfare Pro also includes all the standard features of Phanfare Premium including
- Storage of full size originals
- The peace of mind of knowing that your images are stored in multiple data centers in multiple locations through Amazon S3.
- Non-destructive image editing. You can always revert to your uploaded original.
- Full control over whether viewers can download originals, buy prints and see EXIF data.
- Our intelligent video streaming that measures viewer bandwidth and CPU speed and delivers an appropriately sized video.
- Integration with Aperture, Lightroom, PIcasa and iPhoto.
- Integration with facebook and flickr.
- Integration with the Eye-Fi wireless SD card for photos.
- Full screen slideshows with music.
- iPhone integration. Synchronize your photos and videos to your iPhone via Phanfare Photon for the iPhone.
- Optional password protection on your Phanfare sites
- Detailed visitor reports with the name and email of each person who clicks through a sharing invitation sent from within the Phanfare system. Perfect to verify that a client viewed the images that you sent.
- The ability to use filenames as captions on images, useful for proofing.
Pricing
Phanfare Pro is $99.99/year for 20 GB of storage. Additional 20 GB storage blocks are available for $49.99/year.
Upgrades for Existing Customers
Phanfare Lifetime customers are now Phanfare Lifetime Pro customers. We have not offered Lifetime accounts for over a year. This is for legacy Lifetime customers.
Phanfare Premium customers can upgrade to Phanfare Pro and get credit for the remaining time in their Phanfare Premium account. Phanfare Premium customers with unlimited storage (accounts created prior to Aug 1, 2009) will retain their unlimited storage after upgrade.
Our customers have been asking for a Pro offering with more customization for a long time and we are excited that the day has finally come. Phanfare Pro is not “done.” Let us know in the comments what additional features you would like to see.
An Engineer 