October 10th, 2007 11:11am
Damien
Pixenate is an online photo editor, developed by Cork based Sxoop Technologies, which is run by Walter Higgins. Sxoop is backed by Enterprise Ireland and is participating in the “Genesis” business incubation programme. Walter is currently working on Pixenate Hosted edition, a low-cost subscription-based version of the software which will enable Pixenate to reach a wider customer base.
Mini-blurb for what company does::
We develop Imaging Software for the web. The first product is Pixenate: an online photo editor which is used by Social networking sites, photo printers and ISPs. We’ve just released Pixenate Premium Edition - a version of the software focused on Photo Printing services and are beta-testing a hosted version of the software aimed at smaller websites.
I asked Walter a few questions about Pixenate and Sxoop:
Is Pixenate just a showcase for the technology you have developed? Do you see the site taking a life of its own?
Right now - yes it is just a showcase. There’s a lot more to Pixenate the product than what you see at pixenate.com.
You’ve just made a Facebook version of Pixenate, do you see you moving where the audience is?
No. I’m trying to move to where the money is. Right now I think it’s in high-margin custom photo products so I’m focused on turning pixenate into a product that enables creativity and makes it easy for users to turn their photos into cards, calendars, t-shirts etc.
The facebook app was a few spare hours last night after the kids had gone to bed. Honest-to-god I only did it so ye’d shut up about how I should have a facebook app.
Would this not create version fatigue as you always have to be looking out for the next area of expansion?
Well I’m only a one-man startup so fatigue is something I’ve become comfortable with (that and the heart attacks that lull me to sleep each night) . No I’m not always looking out for the new area of expansion simply because I don’t have the resources. I’m focusing on a niche market of online photo printing services that need to generate more revenue from high-margin photo merchandise.
Do you forsee a time when digital photography is going to be stored and edited almost exclusively online?
I hope so. It’s a generational thing. I’m comfortable sharing my photos online but a lot of my age-group (late 30’s and older) aren’t. Facebook and others are establishing norms for how much content people are willing to share. Much as I hate facebook I have to acknowledge that long-term it’s probably good for companies like sxoop.
Adobe is releasing a web version of photoshop, do you see this as competition, how do you counter the current competition and who are they?
If adobe are going to offer integration services/software so that online photo printers can use it seamlessly then yes it is competition. We have a better product and a priced better than any of our competitors (Pixami for example).
September 27th, 2007 10:06am
Damien
PutPlace is a neat service which allows the average punter to hand over the collating of your digital data to someone else who’ll catalog it all and sort it out. As we create more and more data and scatter it all over the place on so many devices, a service like PutPlace is going to be mandatory for many of us. Joe Drumgoole is the main man in PutPlace and is well known in the growing tech community in Ireland. always lending his support to tech events and willing to give a hand. As well as Joe there’s a part time marketing person, 2 fulltime developers and a part time tester. The company is privately funded and has gotten coverage in the Sunday Tribune and the Irish Times and Joe features a bit on the tech slot on the George Hook show on Newstalk.
Mini-blurb for what company does:
Find Organise Secure and share your Digital Lifetime. Web 2.0 sites will manage content for you if you get it to them (a bit like mailing your house to your cleaner to get it hoovered). We think find and organising your content where it lives (in the home) is a much more sensible proposition. To that end we offer a set of tools for finding and organising your content, publishing it on the web and linking content on the web back to its original source in the home. Once this is done we add online backup and the ability to manage long running transactions (e.g. copying your itunes collection to mp3.com) so that they complete regardless of reboots and network disconnects. All for a low, low monthly few.
Is PutPlace going to be like some kind of middleman for datawarehousing? Will you be the guardian of data for people and help them to get it out there on the web or on Facebook etc as well as getting it back?
We provide a collection of services,
- We help organise your content in the home so all your music ends up in one place, all your photos in another and your videos in another, no matter where they appear on the home network.
- We backup those files to a secure server that we provide (or that you supply e.g. skydrive, GDrive, ibackup, XDrive, OmniDrive etc.)
- Help you share your content by provider publisher interfaces to media sharing and social networking sites (with both publishing and unpublishing interfaces so you can remove content)
- Provide a linked view of all your content so that the content in your backup, the content you have shared and the content in your home are linked into a single global view of all the content you own
- Provide a seamless, secure conduit between all these locations so you can move the content between them easily and safely
- Remember what you moved where so you get a life history of each piece of data
Is the trend for search technology breakthroughs going to be away from the textual web and more to places where data resides that is not necessarily on the web?
Search will continue to extend its reach into all our content. Our belief is that personal search over all your content wherever it lives will be a big winner, but as a paid service rather than an advertising play, because the privacy issues will make people shy away from allow google to aggregate their search data.
Since there are billions of gigs of data not on the web but scattered on every type of device, won’t sucking all this into a central resource take an obscene amount of storage and even new storage technology?
We don’t suck the data, we suck the meta data. Remember all this data once originated on somebody’s PC. No one vendor is going to backup the world the same way that no one vendor is going to supply all the worlds disk storage. We provide the conduit and the memory for the meta data.
September 25th, 2007 10:03am
Damien
LouderVoice is the brainchild of Conor O’Neill of Argolon Solutions. Born and degreed as an engineer, he’s always been the traditional hacker and tweaker and after many a year working for big and small companies including S3, Integral Design, Xilinx, Advanticus, EMC, McAfee and Argolon. He is now working on his own creation. LouderVoice is funded by personal investment, Enterprise Ireland and Angel investment.LinkedIn profile for Conor. Blog for LouderVoice. LouderVoice has been mentioned by the Tribune, Silicon Republic, the Sunday Business Post and Mashable.com
The blurb for LouderVoice:
LouderVoice is a community-driven web-site for finding, writing and sharing user reviews. It is the hub that connects people, knowledge, interests and places. Users can publish, find, rate, bookmark, share and subscribe to reviews. They can finally harness the distributed expertise in blogs and social networks to assist in their purchases. We have recently enabled early support for mini-reviews which are posted by reviewers using SMS and IM via Twitter and similar sites.
I asked Conor some questions about LouderVoice:
Why reviews? Is that market not saturated? What sets LouderVoice apart from the competition?
Actually the opposite is true, the market is crying out for non-technology dedicated review sites, particularly in Europe. Despite being barely out the door, many of the reviews in our system are returned first on Google search since they address the thousands of long-tail niches that the more established sites ignore.
In addition to our multi-lingual focus, we are convinced that our approach of “your reviews where you hang out” is fundamentally more scalable and provides higher quality reviews than the multitude of silos containing semi-anonymous content. You aren’t going to mess with your online reputation on your blog, MySpace page or Jaiku account. You also write about those things that have affected you most.
What have been the most fun profiles so far on the site?
The diversity of reviews is the thing that I enjoy the most. I love the ones by the TeamGearedUp crew simply because I have never encountered products like them before. I ‘m also fond of the TheSwissJob’s pub reviews from Switzerland. Not something I expected to see on our site at this early stage.
You seem to be doing a lot of work on reviews via mobiles, do you have expansion plans for this?
Lots and lots of ideas in mobile! We started with some simple proof-of-concept Twitter and Jaiku integration but we are just about to turn on direct SMSing of reviews to the site using an Irish number. Once that is up and running, we’ll start adding a bunch of useful features there.
You’ve won a ticket to Techcrunch 40, how was that?
Just back and had a blast. I love the openness of everyone there. My competitors were telling me exactly what they were building without any of the usual “don’t tell anyone I told you this”!
The web is all a flutter and going through rapid changes of late with social networking being the big thing, is there a way of dovetailing LouderVoice into this or is it already social enough?
We don’t want LouderVoice to be YASN but we will add social features to make the site more useful for the users. Ideally we would like to leverage the current social network portability efforts when they come to fruition so that users can carry their networks in and out of LouderVoice with zero effort.
September 23rd, 2007 11:17pm
Damien
Welcome to Profile Ireland, this site/blog/space is dedicated to giving coverage to Irish Tech companies, mostly concentrating on startups but also looking at established though young tech companies. Hopefully over time this blog will be a space where people can find out about new Irish tech companies as well as new companies getting themselves some attention. Go here to fill in a form if you want to do a profile.