Pixable

Have you ever wondered who you’re tagged with the most on Facebook? Have you wanted to download all of those tagged pictures of you and your best friends in one click?  Well, we have and so that is what we focused on when creating our first application for the Pixable Apps family: MyPhotoStats.

We just launched MyPhotoStats yesterday and have already seen plenty of people having fun finding out who their “Top 3″ and “Top 10″ are. We’ve also had some interesting (read: awkward) results when girlfriends aren’t always their boyfriends’ #1 too. Hey, we’re just doing the calculations for you guys – don’t shoot the messenger.

With the MyPhotoStats application you’re also able to view all of the photos in which you and one of your friends is tagged, as well as download all of those photos with one click – a great way to back up your most precious photos.

Check it out at and let us know what you think! MyPhotoStats

Remember that we’re on Twitter too, so feel free to send a tweet out to @Pixable.

The Pixable Team loves to get feedback from users. Your comments and suggestions help us constantly improve both our website and our products. If you have a minute, please take our quick survey and help us serve you better.

If you’ve ordered an album, we want to hear your thoughts:

http://bit.ly/jlRU9.

If you haven’t ordered an album yet, please tell us why not:

http://bit.ly/3PH6DC.

You guys asked for it, and we listened.

Pixable’s new storyboard feature lets you rearrange the order of your photos before touching them up in the album creator.  This is especially useful when you are combining your pictures with your friends’ and the order becomes a little chaotic. After selecting the photos you want, you can choose the storyboard option when using auto fill. Simply check the box before continuing and you’ll be taken to a window that allows you to group the photos however you want – just drag and drop them onto the pages like you do in the album creator. (See the pics below.)

To prepare for our launch to the public last week, we gave our homepage a bit of a facelift. We tried to optimize the use of our space – adding more photos of our products, while also making the page less crowded. It sounds impossible, but we tried.

As always, we love to hear our customers’ opinions and we take constructive criticism well (we like to think), so let us know your thoughts!

Is the homepage better? Worse? Any suggestions of your own?

Before:

Click for a larger image.

After:

Click for a larger image.

It’s been an exciting time here at Pixable, much has happened in the last two months of operations.

At the end of July we quietly opened Pixable and started testing the site and operations. We’re amazed on how quick the word started spreading; we already have over 150 orders and more than 8,000 unique visitors. We’ve been covered by blogs in the US, Russia, Italy, Belgium, France, Mexico and Spain.

During these 2 months, we’ve corrected a lot of important bugs, tested the functionality of the site, optimized operations with the printing company, gathered a lot of feedback from users and conducted usability tests. After much hard work we’re doing a full release of the site.

The new release includes:

- An improved user experience with various interface enhancements and refinements to help users create smarter, faster, and more personalized albums.

- New enhancements for the album creation process.

- New features that include: adding contributors, a storyboard to organize the order of the photos, new backgrounds, photo effects and much more.

- Improved the speed of the site by more than 300%

Every day we feel more proud and convinced about Pixable, not only because of the great product we built and the great feedback we’ve received but also because of the increasing use of Facebook making it by far the biggest repository of photos on the web.

Here are some comments left by some of our users:

“Your service and your web site are both amazing to me!  I’m waiting to see if the end results are just as good but I’m betting it will be.

Easy, Fast, Flexible and Reasonably Priced

I think you have it all!”

Fred, from Chicago

“I was just surprised with a gift from the postman!  The book looks great and I love how easy it looks when you can just drop one of these in the mail to a person like myself

I honestly didn’t think the Facebook photos were capable of printing this well — very slick stuff.

Thank you very much — you just got yourself you new biggest fan!”

Alex, from California

You’re all invited to test our product at: www.pixable.com and get your first book for free just use the coupon: PIXABLOG.

With our new tool you the photos to be placed in the book

Our new backgrounds and effects make every memory stand out!

So we launched just a little over a month ago and the orders are coming in – exciting times!  It’s been fun to see how Pixable is being used in very cool and creative ways.  Below are some examples of what we’ve seen so far.

Trips:

The whole Pixable idea got started from finding an easy way to document trips, and it’s still a popular use among our users.

Instead of just creating albums of their own pictures, though, more users are taking advantage of the ability to use the photos from their different travel companions’ Facebook albums – saving them the time and hassle of doing a large mass exchange of photos.

Parties/Celebrations:

Lots of users are beginning to use Pixable to capture parties and celebrations, and many of them are using the fun backgrounds and stickers to liven up their albums. New college students are using it to remember their first semester of freshmen year and coworkers to remember the office party.

Anniversaries:

A photo album is always a nice and personalized gift for a special occasion. So, it’s no surprise that Pixable has been a good tool for the lazy boyfriends who want to quickly throw together a personalized album with pictures of them and their girlfriends. The feature that allows you to search for any two or three of your friends tagged together has become a real hit.

Random memories:

We’ve had roommates using Pixable to remember their times together and moms using Pixable to print out pictures of their kids in a snap. Many users are also enjoying the ability to upload their own backgrounds to make the album more personalized.

Jokes:

The Pixable users with a sense of humor are finding funny (and sometimes embarrassing) photos of their friends and making hilarious albums with them.

Photo Portfolios:

Amateur photographers have been using Pixable to create stunning portfolios of their work. Being able to upload high quality photos from their computers and cheaply print them at professional quality has been a major draw for them.

Gifts:

It’s even more fun when you send a Pixable album as a gift. Many users are sending their albums directly to their friends and family, and sometimes even as a surprise.  Travel companions, best friends, children, parents, and coworkers are all in for good times.

Well, this is just what we’ve seen so far and we’re excited to see what our users will come up with next.  In the mean time we’ll be continuing to create new themes, backgrounds, stickers, layouts, and other fun features to make the books even more personalized.

Come check us out and let us know if you’ve found Pixable useful in another way!

At Pixable we are still working from various locations (India, Caracas, New York) although Andres and I (and our interns over the summer) have been working from our apartment in NYC. We thought that it was time to move to an office in an incubator (i.e., shared space) as we are recruiting in NYC too. You may think that I am obssesed with offices (you remember my post about startup offices?)

We visited some office incubators in Manhattan and the truth is that there are very interesting options in cool places (Chelsea, Meatpacking District, Tribeca, West Village or East Village) for Internet and tech companies. The good thing is that they have the startup atmosphere (in terms of common areas to rest, decoration, etc.) and the prices are not that different to other incubators we know in Boston (Cambridge Innovation Center) or Silicon Valley (Plug and Play). Most places offer offices at around $500/person/month, including coffee, utilities, cleaning at night, furniture, internet, front desk, usage of meeting rooms, 24 hour access, etc. This means that for 2 people you should expect to pay at least ~$1000/month.

All of them have shared front desk and lobby, meeting rooms, kitchen, common areas for lunch/coffee, or bathrooms, Internet, printers, mail handling, are in hype location in NY, have the “loft” touch with cool furniture, are ready to move in (i.e., fully furnished), open 24 hours a day, and allow you to move to larger of bigger spaces within the incubator as your company requires it (usually they only require 1 or maximum 2 month commitment, so you can change later if you think you need it). They also organize networking events within the incubator.

Here is a list of the ones we visited:

• Eemerge: Awesome building, with great views in Chelsea. You can have private offices for 2, 3, or more people, and is very flexible to move across offices as you grow. If you get an office for 3 people, you can easily fit 2 additional temps in summer. There are a lot of common spaces like tables for lunch, coffee areas, sofas to watch TV, etc. Easy to commute if you are on the West side. We saw Freshdirect.com there too. Here you can see some photos.
• Techspace Chelsea: Great location in Chelsea. You feel that you have privacy (offices for at least 2 people) but at the same time it is very easy to feel you are part of the rest of the incubator (kitchen, common desks along the corridors, etc.). The incubator looks really new. Easy to commute. Here you have a slideshow with photos.
• Techspace Union Square: Probably the coolest in terms of decoration, and fantastic location (both, neighborhood and building). We saw that companies like Linkedin, Slide, Trulia, Adknowledge, or Pandora have offices there (all for more than 5 people). Here you have a slideshow with photos.
• Techspace West Village: same architecture/design as the Techspace at Union Square. Some media/tv companies had presence there. Great location (although I think you pay for it). Here you have a slideshow with photos.
• Sunshine: In Tribeca. We think it is ideal location for 1 or 2 people companies (cubicle’s). Very affordable too, compared to the rest. They also allow you to have a virtual office or coworking space.
• Spark Space: Same location as Rose Tech Ventures, from David Rose, an entrepreneurial figure in the NY internet/tech space. The building is a little bit old (compared to Techspace or Eemerge) but it has great entrepreneurs.
• NY 160 Varick: Sponsored by Bloomberg in NYC to promote entrepreneurship in other industries in the city (besides professional services, fashion, etc). It is a new incubator that requires a more formal process to be accepted, although it is subsized. Here you have more info.

• New Work City: Great for individuals, or for people that want to pay as you go (drop in and pay per day).

Here you have some pics I took with the iPhone:

During the last year, our team at Pixable has been scattered and working from various locations around the world: Boston (Harvard and MIT), New York, Caracas, India (Chandigarh and Delhi), Spain (Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid), Philadelphia (Wharton), North Carolina (Duke), and Buenos Aires. We are a truly global company, which in our case is not that fun because some of us need to be awake many days at night. This is not the ideal situation for a startup that wants to move fast, but we had to find ways to make it work as frictionless as possible, without spending much money. In this situation, coordination and communication require an extra effort. We have been using very basic software tools to keep us aligned without spending much money in hotels and business traveling.

From Pixable, we want to help other entrepreneurs with some basic tips about FREE tools we use and when and how we use them. It may sound too basic but encouraging for the entrepreneurial teams in the same situation:

• Google docs as a white board: Ideally, one team should have a white board in which to structure and write the list to to-do’s, assign taks to people, assign priorities, delete or aggregate comments, deadlines, new info. However, we could not use a white board and Google docs was a good solution. The real time document editing is really useful during calls.  Additionally, we use Google docs for almost any type of info and list we want to keep shared and updated frequently in real time (e.g., list of bugs, list of addresses, list of coupons, etc.). For SW development (Software Project Management, Issue Tracker, Bug Tracker) we use Gemini from Countersoft and we have heard of many other people using Basecamp or Pivotal tracker(thanks Seph). For overall project management we starting using Zoho Project, but given the amount of changes and the small size of our team, we decided that we do not need so much structure and project planning tracking/documentation until we have a larger team. So we keep using Google docs.

• Demoing new features, usability, bugs, etc: We frequently do demos, where one person uses the application, and the rest of the team sees remotely what he is doing (i.e., live screen sharing). There are many sophisticated tools out there, like webex. The best we have found is Mikogo. It is very simple, with not may functionalities but you can start a meeting right away. Other users can point with the mouse and also take control of the mouse. The standard in the industry I guess is WebEx. And the standard among bootstrappers is Go2meeting (we actually started using Go2meeting). However, Go2meeting takes much longer to start. I highly recommend Mikogo: You just click on start meeting on mikogo, you get a number that you can share with IM with your team, and that’s it! less than 3 seconds! We use Mikogo to share the screen and skype to do the conference call.

• Skype IM, voice, and video: Our skype desktop clients are always on. We countinously ping each other, even when we sit next to each other (e.g., to share links). We also have many conference calls with the developers, international collaborators, investors, etc. In our particular case, skype video works pretty well to share designs. Two typical examples:
  • you draw a mock up on a paper, and instead of scanning it and send it to another person, you just show it in the video
  • we also work with physical products. During the testing phase of our printed photobooks, skype video was very useful to share visual results and things we wanted to change or were incorrect. 

• Screen capture tools to show bugs on the site: you might be laughing at this but when we find a bug on the site, we just do “printscreen” and paste it on Paint, and then share it with the development team via email. As simple (and old fashion) as that. Now we have migrated to Snipping tool, which is already installed on Windows Vista (we didn’t even know). It allows you to capture the screen (or a selected area in the screen), highlight text and add text. If you use MAC, there is even a better tool called Skitch (thanks Seph from Propercloth for the recommendation).

• Free conference call numbers: very useful for meetings with partners, suppliers, and third parties. There are plenty of free supplier and you can keep a permanent number with your private passcode.

• Store and share files: Mesh.com. We have not used it very frequently but it has been useful when needed as a repository of data or to share large files. Here you have an evaluation and comparison of various tools to store and share files, including box.net, filedroper, yousendit, or drop.io.

• Software to create design mock ups: most developers and designers still work with photoshop, powerpoint or just drawing with pencil/paper+scanning. Balsamiq (a YCombinator company) is an amazing software that can accelerate a lot your design phase. It costs only $80. In future posts I will talk about it because it is really impressive how much we have accelerated our development.

We know that these tools may sound neither sophisticated nor professional (compared to project management tools, sharing repositories, versioning safes, etc that I have used in large corporations in the past). But they work for us. We even tried with easy to use tools like Zoho project but given the size of our team and the speed at which we iterate, simple things like google docs seems more suitable. I have also seen super cool video conference products used at McKinsey or Microsoft, but we cannot afford those either. 

I hope this info helps to other entrepreneurs bootstrapping and working in remote locations. If you have other tips, please share with us and the rest of the entrepreneurial community leaving a comment in this blog!
 

We just came across Photojojo, a great photography site with an awesome newsletter, plus a store with neat little photo related gadgets and toys, such as tripods, fun photo frames, a white balance lens cap and more.

The newsletter is really awesome. It has very interesting ideas for the casual photographer.

Disclaimer: we do not know anyone at Photojojo (although they seem to be cool guys)