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2012-05.md

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Everpix May 2012 Report

High Level

  • New back end has been sent to testers for the last couple weeks and early results are promising
  • Many new features on the web front end
  • iPhone app 1.1 submitted to App Store
  • On track for our summer out-of-beta release: we have recently switched to a weekly release schedule where we push new builds of all products to testers every Friday

Introducing Photo Mail

Now that all the pieces are getting together, we have put in place what we call (for now) “Photo Mail”. It’s a very elegant solution to a long standing and very concrete problem: sending copies of your digital photos to your family and close friends.

Think of how many steps are needed today if all you want to do is send some photos from your collection to someone else so they can simply have them, print them, re-share them, etc... Email, Dropbox, Flickr, Facebook... there’s nothing that just works: it’s always a major hassle requiring either many steps either from the sender or from the receiver.

From Everpix’s website, iPhone app and soon-to-be iPad app, you can now do that in an instant: select photos, click Photo Mail, enter email address, done.

  • If the recipient already has an Everpix account, photos are copied directly in full-resolution and with full metadata to the account and land in the “Inbox”, while a notification email is sent.
  • If the recipient doesn’t have an Everpix account, a virtual one for this email address is created and photos copied to it, while a regular email with medium-resolution photos attached to it is sent as well. This email also invites the recipient to create an account to get access to full resolution versions, as well as all previously shared photos.

And of course, Photo Mail works equally fast whether you send 1, 5 or 200 photos.

We never intended Everpix to replace mass photo sharing: Facebook and Twitter already do it very well - we make sure Everpix interfaces nicely with these services. However, we believe the combination of having all your photos seamlessly in the cloud, accessible anywhere, organized, and backed up, combined with Photo Mail, will be an attractive offer to our users.

New Back End

We set up development and production servers running the new back end, and have started to invite family and close friends to the production system.

We already have a couple hundred thousands photos in it, and results are promising regarding our new JPEG 2000 pipeline with full-resolution photo support (while preserving full perceptual quality and all metadata of course): the average photo size is less than 500 KB, compared to several MB of the original JPEG.

This is really interesting for a few reasons:

  • Our Mac Uploader is still pretty much as fast as uploading full-resolution photos than 2K version like before (although it does use more CPU).
  • It makes an even bigger difference in the iPhone app: we only need to upload around 500 KB per photo instead of round 2-3 MB - this means much less 3G data usage!
  • Our infrastructure cost per average user (assuming 5,000 photos initially) should be less than $0.50 per month, plus a one-time $1.00 import cost of the entire user’s photo collection.
  • We should be able to control our infrastructure costs much better than competitors who have to be dealing with original JPEG files: 5X to 10X more bandwidth and storage costs.

We still have one major feature to build in the back end (a new type of view on your photo collection), but apart from that, it’s mostly bug fixing and optimization work now.

New Front End

To go with the new back end and all the new possibilities it offers, we also have set up a new web server at https://new.everpix.com, which we will swap with https://www.everpix.com at launch. There’s plenty of new features and you can really see the product coming together:

  • Home view
  • Photo Mail support with Inbox view
  • Album view
  • Higher-quality thumbnails
  • Full-resolution downloads
  • Photo rotation
  • Date edition

iPhone Client

We submitted the 1.1 update to the App Store, which features many improvements over our current app:

  • Refreshed and more polished overall user interface
  • Connect to Facebook, Twitter, etc. straight from the app
  • Better, cleaner full screen photo viewing
  • Improved sharing to Facebook and Twitter
  • New ways to share: Photo Mail and Photo Pages

We have also an updated version of the iPhone app that runs against and takes advantage of our new back end, which we are just sending to testers now.

iPad Client

Now that our iPhone app version 1.1 is completed, work just resumed on our iPad app. The goal is to release it at the same time our new infrastructure is rolled out as it will be a great companion. To achieve this, we are only adding the minimal required feature set, mostly copied from the iPhone app, but of course, while being wrapped in a simple and elegant UI.

Windows Uploader

Work just started on June 1st - it’s too early to share progress yet.

Android Client

On hold for now, as we currently don’t have the bandwidth.