Archive for July 2015
Chromebooks as Desktop Replacements
I mostly use some pretty amazing computers for my work, including a variety of Apple laptops and desktops. And yet I wonder, could I make do with a Chromebook?
The opportunity recently presented itself to find out the answer. I received a Nixplay Cloud Digital Photo Frame as a gift. I did some research online and it was pretty clear that the Nixplay is one of the best frames out there. That said, it sounded pretty awful. Even though it was marketed as Cloud compatible, it can’t pull photos from Dropbox randomly. Truth is, that whole genre of digital photo frames never really developed. Digital photo frames are mostly terrible. I decided I did not want or need the Nixplay. It retails for $150.
So I went looking on Amazon for something I actually want and don’t need, versus something I neither want nor need. The best-selling laptop at Amazon, an Acer 11.6 inch Chromebook fit the bill. At $140, it was basically an even exchange once Amazon charged me $8 to return the Nixplay.
My question was, is this a viable computer for me to do work on? And the answer is yes, with some caveats. The only application that I found did not work at all in my few days of testing was BlueJeans video conferencing. There are alternatives that do work, including Google Hangouts. The webcam was also really, really bad. So I guess this $140 does not make the grade for video conferencing. Note that I mostly use a web browser and Google Apps for my job.
Given that I sometimes code, this Chromebook could not be my only computer. But then again, I could just ssh to a AWS instance to code, versus code locally.
I also found the requirement to be connected to the internet only worked in a fixed location, like at home. On the train, commuting, I need much more disconnected functionality.
The keyboard is good enough. Not great, but good enough. The trackpad is annoying, but usable. The screen is mediocre, with low contrast and poor viewing angles – but I could use it. I just would enjoy an Apple Retina display more.
Speakers are usable, if not noteworthy. The design is fanless and it stays cooler than my Apple laptops.
But the Apple laptops are more than order of magnitude more expensive than that Chromebook. It’s easy to see why for most people, the Chromebook is enough. And that is why this Acer laptop is the best selling laptop on Amazon today. Chromebooks will win relative to windows or Mac OS machines for those who need mostly web access and a permanent keyboard. If I were trying to build a low cost call center and buying 200 computers for employees, I would buy this laptop.
So you can see the long term trend for end user keyboarded computing, which may very well be that Apple will take most of the high end and Chromebook will take everything else.
My Photography Workflow
Since the sale of Phanfare to Carbonite, my workflow has changed a bit and become pretty complicated.
I shoot mostly with a smartphone now and from time to time with my Canon DSLR. That probably makes me like most prosumers.
When I was CEO of Phanfare, I did not keep any deliberate local copy of my photos and videos. I did have photos and videos on lots of computers but not organized. After the sale in 2011, when it became clear that Carbonite was going to let Phanfare languish, I downloaded a full copy of my account to my local hard drive.
I took the local copy of my Phanfare account, about 250GB, and put it in Dropbox. That’s a big directory and I don’t want it mirrored to all my computers, so I now have selective sync turned on most places.
I tried to get into Dropbox Carousel, but never found it very engaging. The sharing is not great – initially there was no way to really view on the web at all. And Dropbox does not do much to auto-organize your collection.
For smartphone photos, I usually share select favorites on Facebook, usually within minutes of shooting. Those photos also get mirrored To Dropbox, since Carousel is on my phone. You can’t beat Facebook for getting the immediate gratification of having your photo seen and acknowledged.
I have iCloud Photo Library activated on my laptop, desktop, iPad, and iPhone and it does a reasonably job of keeping my Apple-ecosystem photos synched. I rarely open the desktkop version unless I need to grab a photo for use in email or iMessage from my home computer. But I do like seeing my whole collection on my iPad.
Turning on iCloud Photo Library quickly used up my 5GB free limit from Apple so I pay them.
When I shoot with my Canon 5D DSLR, I acquire the photos into Adobe Lightroom on my home iMac desktop and then create a dated directory within my Phanfare archive in my Dropbox folder of the form ‘2015-07-15 Geocaching with the Kids.’ Sometimes I share a few on Facebook.
Recently, I discovered Google Photos. Google Photos is much like iCloud Photo library in that it will sync your content across your devices and keep a master copy in the cloud, but much, much better.
Google Photos automatically brings together sets of photos as stories, organizes all your photos by face, and groups them by scene (skiing, boats, golf, etc). They also create videos, panoramas, animated gifs and ask you if you want to add them to your permanent collection. It is the most successful attempt yet of cracking the problem of organizing your long tail of personal photos and videos automatically.
If you shoot with a smartphone, Google Photos has location info for each photo and a timestamp and does a terrific job of creating stories of your photos that include location and dates. They can pretty much figure out when the excursion started and ended.
Google photos is more hit and miss with older media that is not geotagged, like photos taken with DSLRs, but it is clearly the best attempt so far. I liked it so much, I decided to pay Google to store fullsize images for me. I also run Google Photos uploader on my desktop and it watches that Dropbox directory, uploading anything I place there from my DSLR.
To help Google Photos do a better job, I have started to geotag my DSLR photos, which you can do with a tracking app that keeps a time-keyed log of where you have been.
I still get a quarterly DVD archive from Phanfare, although I now add only major events to Phanfare. So at this point, I use Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Phanfare for my photos and videos. I pay the latter three. I have these services arranged in a way that they don’t interfere with each other.
I still love my Phanfare website, with its carefully curated album, custom music and descriptions of each event. But if that site goes away because Carbonite accidentally or deliberately ends the Phanfare service, I will never go to that trouble again. I have the meta data downloaded from Phanfare, so the information won’t be lost, but it will probably never be seen by another person outside myself.
My current prediction is that Google Photos wins for the long tail of our personal media. They are cross platform, free for most users (images below 16 megapixels and video of 1080p or smaller), and seem to be making enormous investments in photo analysis and automatic organization.
Revisiting Freemium
In July of 2009, I wrote that Freemium did not work for Phanfare. I just re-read the pos and I want to revisit the topic of whether Freemium could have worked for Phanfare. Ultimately, that post concluded that for a premium product with few network effects, it was difficult for the economics to work. I stand by that conclusion, but I believe there were other options at the time and other considerations that I did not include.
First, since Freemium means giving something away to entice user sampling in the hopes of having them buy the product, by definition, Freemium is always possible if you give little enough away. That is, if we had given away downsampled photo sharing limited to 100 photos for example, the cost of the free service would have been low enough that it would not have represented much of a burden on the paying customers. Yes, it may have undercut our premium positioning.
Whether a very limited freemium offer is enough to create any user interest is a separate topic. But these types of freemium offers do succeed in the brick and mortar world. At a retail store, you can come in and browse for free. This is a form of freemium. You are consuming their HVAC and taking up physical space.
We did not explore severely limited forms of freemium Phanfare service and so can’t generally conclude that no freemium offer would have worked.
Second, I undervalued the ecosystem benefits of having a large user base, even if that base is not paying. Ultimately, your ability to strike deals with other companies depends on you having a lot of users. Want to be featured in a camera or promoted at retail? Your large user base is something you can trade on.
In addition, all the ancillary parts of the ecosystem only show up for systems that have large user bases. Apple TV, Roku and Nikon, Canon, Adobe; they only care about systems with large number of users. Hence, you don’t get to provide a full solution unless you have a larger number of users. A paid-only offering pretty much guarantees these ecosystem partners won’t to do business with you if you are in a space where only 5% of users will pay.
So looking back, I believe that we should likely have pursued freemium more vigorously by figuring out a way to offer something that could work economically. For Phanfare, that also might have meant ditching fullsize originals in general. And it might have made sense. It might have meant ditching the premium positioning entirely.
That said, if you are happy with a niche, small service, then avoiding freemium probably does make sense. And niches can make a lot of money. Apple takes home most of the profits in the smart phone industry while serving a small minority of the customers. Of course, that’s a huge market. But Apple has pretty much no freemium offer except maybe being able to listen to the first 90 seconds of ITunes songs for free on an ongoing basis.
Timing Matters
Mark Heinrich and I started Phanfare sometime in 2003. We incorporated in 2004 and eventually sold the company in 2011. Along the way, I learned a few things, but one of the most memorable to me is that timing matters. Not only can you be too late, but you can also be too early.
When we started Phanfare, storage was too expensive to consider storing fullsize originals for free, ad-supported. Collections averaged more than 30GB and our fully burdened cost of storage was at least $1/GB/year. Even Google today has only about $20 of revenue per user per year ($60B/3B people), and they have one of the most lucrative advertising businesses in the world.
Ask most married people what they would take with them if their house was on fire and they would say their wedding album. Ask them the last time they looked at that wedding album, and they often can’t remember.
Excepting the immediate gratification one gets by sharing a photo or video, the amount of time that folks spend looking at the older media in their own collection, on average, is very small, probably under one hour per month.
Netflix costs maybe $9/month and many families use it over 100 hours. It’s rational that a consumer simply won’t pay more than a few cents, at most a dollar/month, to have convenient and permanent access to their photo and video collection. Obviously, some will, but that makes for a niche market.
So consumers won’t pay much, if anything for a permanent online archive. If you want to make the service mainstream, you will need to make it free. But since total page views and audience attention is low, advertising is not going to cover the bills easily. And if you are storing fullsize originals, then we are not, even today, at the point where delivering a phanfare-like service is economical based on advertising.
Today, the two leading mainstream services for taking your whole collection for free are Apple Photos and Google Photos. Google down-samples by default, unless you are willing to pay. Apple offers only a paltry 5GB for free (if you consider buying a $700 phone free).
So if you want to store fullsize originals for consumers and encourage them to store their entire collection, you need to charge them. And since we established that they will only rationally pay maybe a few dollars per year at most, back in 2008, you were not delivering the service. Phanfare was $99/year. At that price, the service had contribution margin at scale, but getting enough subscribers proved difficult.
So what should we have done? Well, to start, we should not have worried about fullsize originals. We clung to that because we were not sure we had not enough differentiation in the down-sampled photo world. But the reality is, if you show a friend a 25 megapixel image of your children versus a 2 megapixel compressed JPEG of the same kids, the friend leaves with the same impression. The emotional impact is the same.
This lesson on the importance of timing, and secondarily on the importance of doing some price-based-costing (deliver a product at the price point the customer will pay) is one that I won’t soon forget. Technology marches on, becoming cheaper and more capable. When Apple decided in 2001 that your computer would be your digital hub and you would sync by-wire your songs from your desktop to your devices, it was not the best solution imaginable, it was the best solution possible at the time.
The Road to Phanfare
Carbonite acquired Phanfare in 2011 and at the time, I could not talk too much about the acquisition. But some time has passed now and the details are not nearly as sensitive. In this post, I don’t want to focus so much on what has happened since the acquisition (not much) but instead, what led me to start the company with my friend Mark Heinrich.
My love for photography started at Stuyvesant High School in the early 1980s. Back then, a friend who had a Canon AE1 taught me the basics of SLR photography. I bought a Pentax K1000 and eventually a Nikon FG. I still remember trading my K1000 for the FG, taking the modest credit that Willoughby’s offered me. I wish I had kept that first camera.
I became photo editor of the Stuyvesant Spectator newspaper during my senior year, 1985. By that point I had a darkroom in our laundry room at my childhood home on Staten Island. I developed all the Tri-X pan for the staff photographers, creating proof sheets. I had modest equipment and a lot of patience.
I never considered photography to be art. Maybe some photos are art, but most simply document life, communicate a moment. For me, photography satisfied my desire to leave something behind, to be more than dust in the wind. I also loved the technical aspects of photography and the gear. The Japanese cameras are beautifully made, finely engineered instruments. They are almost like jewelry.
I took a lot of photos – as many as I could afford to develop. I always had basic equipment. In college at Dartmouth I had only a 50mm lens and one terrible Vivitar zoom that was so poor I could never get myself to mount it. I joined a company at college, Picture This, that took photos at sorority and fraternity formals. I learned how to shoot portraits and groups, use a flash properly and avoid red eye. I learned that at sorority formals, photos without men sell better than those with the men. The men were transitory.
When digital photography started to first take off in grad school at Stanford, I played with a Apple QuickTake 100 we had in our research group. In the late 90s I watched the founding of Ofoto and Shutterfly with great interest. These were ultimately transitional digital photo services – they focused on creating physical prints and objects from digital images, something with little long term appeal.
Many of us in grad school had simple web sites that we maintained on our workstations with our personal digital photos. These websites were the equivalent of the personal photo album of our childhood, the album that was in the living room cabinet. Most of the images that we published to these sites we got from CDs that Kodak gave us when they developed our film. digital cameras were poor quality in the mid 90s and expensive, way outside the budget of a graduate student. Our websites were often static HTML pages generated by Perl scripts. They were protected from prying eyes via an .htaccess file that popped up a password prompt.
After Stanford, in 1999, I founded my first company with my friend Mark Heinrich: Flashbase. I will talk about Flashbase another time, but it had little to do with photography. DoubleClick acquired Flashbase in 2000 and Mark and I finally had some financial security for the first time in our lives. We started buying a lot more digital cameras. I owned one of the first Nikon CoolPix cameras and the Canon D30, D60, and so on. Our digital images were piling up and we were not sure what to do with them.
Keep in mind, this was before facebook, before YouTube. By 2004, Mark and I were interested in doing something in digital photography. We both loved it, and we both had no idea where we should be keeping the long tail of our digital photos. We were certain that keeping them on our local hard drive was the wrong answer, that your hard drive was where photos go to die. Unseen by anybody, the disk would eventually fail. We hypothesized that folks would pay for a high quality archive of their digital photos. And we thought that the internet should be your master copy of your digital photos, not your computer.
The idea of the cloud being the master copy of your digital photos was not popular yet in 2004. Networks were not fast enough and disk was way too expensive. Steve Jobs was pushing the idea of your Mac being your digital hub, centered around iTunes. To make the whole thing workable, we designed a fat network client that would run on your PC and sync your photos to internet, moving small versions fast and fullsize versions in the background. The idea was that you could work with your photos on the local app while the app moved the photos to and from the net in the background.
We were fixated, perhaps wrongly, on preserving fullsize originals. And at that time, there was simply no way to store fullsize originals and have the service be ad-supported and free. Plus, we did not want ads on our personal photo albums. And so we decided that Phanfare needed to be a subscription service.
I will tell the Phanfare story in another post, but in retrospect, we were not wrong about where photography was going but we were way too early. It would take another ten years before Apple would release their Photos app that synchronizes your iPhone roll with the cloud and shows it across your devices. Google Photos is the same idea (but better). These ideas are right in my opinion. You should be able to shoot and the photos should magically get mirrored to all your devices and stored reliably in the cloud. There should be no upload step.
What we were wrong about is that websites of photos at unique URLs would be the way people share photos. People share photos through social media when they want to share with more than a few people and by direct message (email, SMS, google hangouts, etc) when they want to share with a single person.
I learned a lot from the Phanfare experience and I will share some of those things in coming posts.
Competing Without a Timing Chip
I competed in the NJ State Olympic Triathlon this past weekend. I am an amateur, of course. Nevertheless, as anyone who competes in these weekend warrior events can tell you, results matter. You want to know not only how you did overall relative to your age group but also how you did in event (run,bike,swim) and how fast your transitioned between events (known as T1 an T2). And you want to see those results published.
Your results in triathlons are typically recorded by an RFID chip that you wear around your ankle. That’s the way it worked at the NJ State Tri. First you swim (1500m), then you transition to your bike (T1), then you bike (approx 30k at this one), then you transition to your running gear (T2) and then you run (10k).
It’s not unusual for me to get kicked a lot during my swim because I can’t swim in a straight line. This event was no exception. After finishing the swim (poorly), as I was passing over the timing mats at the end of the T1 transition, getting ready to mount my bike, I noticed my ankle chip was gone – knocked off in the water no doubt.
I told the kid manning the timing machine that my chip was lost and he asked my number, but it is was also clear that he had no way of manually entering my time at the machine in the field. Perhaps he just wanted to know my number so he could radio that I had not drowned.
So now I am biking my heart out, and then running in 95 degree heat with absolutely no certainty that any of it will actually “count.” And then I thought, this is really a lot like life. You work hard, you go to school, you try to make your endeavors a success, but while you are doing it, you just never know whether you will meet with success, or whether history will record your efforts.
And so this blog is like competing without a chip.
As it turns out, the nice timing people at Timberline Timing Systems were happy to accept my Garmin watch times as my unofficial results, along with my observation that I finished right before a particular chipped runner. They said I would not be eligible for awards, which did not change the outcome for me. Bib 1851. My own analysis here.
Hello, World, again
This blog contains a copy of all the material I wrote as CEO of Phanfare. But now, I am restarting the blog, three years after Phanfare. I will probably still write about photography, although much less than before. And I might write some about what has become of Phanfare, but probably not too much. We will see what this becomes, together.
An Engineer 