Photo and video sharing service Phanfare has relaunched with enhanced sharing capabilities and a free 1GB version meant to entice users who are not ready to pay $55 per year for unlimited storage.
The company found that the first version of its service didn’t make it easy enough for its 11,000 paying members to share their hosted media with each other. Sharing usually had to be done by manually emailing password-protected links to family and friends. These emails would get lost, and with them, the URLs and passwords contained within. Users would also grow tired of composing bulk emails, leading to a siloed data effect where content sat unviewed.
The new version of Phanfare addresses this issue by integrating social networking functionality that enables users to create connections with one another and specify which content they want to make available to their Phanfare contacts. The photo sharing model is very much like it is on Facebook, although with more granular control on who sees which particular content. You can designate other Phanfare members as part of your family or friends, or you can link up to them through groups (say, for your neighborhood or office). Then, you can decide which of your uploaded content you want to share with friends, family, and/or group members.
Once shared with the appropriate people, new content is broadcasted to them through an activity feed on the site’s “dashboard” (shown to the left). This “my messages” area will not only show you thumbnails of your contacts’ most recent contributions; it will also display notifications of when people leave comments on your photos, as well as when they confirm you as part of their networks. This activity will also be gathered by Phanfare for a digest email that goes out daily.
Phanfare aims to build a large user base, so it has made it easy for you to introduce your friends to the service. Its invitation mechanism allows you to send out email invites that help new users set up a free account, join your network, and view your content. New users are now given a free 1GB, as opposed to the old model where all users had to pay $55 per year for unlimited storage. While users can still choose the paid option to get more space, this free base membership option should facilitate the collaboration aspect of Phanfare 2.0 by boosting the network effect.
The company says that with time it plans on heading even further in the free membership direction by increasing the storage cap significantly while maintaining revenues mostly through the sale of print merchandise. This tactic contrasts with the one taken by SmugMug, which remains fully as a premium service without any free membership option (although you can participate in a free trial with that service). Phanfare says that it’s heading towards free because it has ambitions for widespread adoption, and having a large user base will help it strike deals with wireless hardware manufacturers in the future.
Along with its browser-based service, Phanfare also provides a desktop client that allows you to manage and edit your content locally while automatically synchronizing all changes with the same content hosted in the cloud by Amazon S3. Currently, this desktop client is only available for the PC but the company has been working on a version for the Mac as well. There is also no Phanfare Facebook application or iPhoto plugin, but these too may be available in the future.
Phanfare raised $2.5M in a Series C round led by Azure Capital Partners this past October. The company has raised $5M total since beginning operations in 2004. Its first round amounted to about $0.5M from angels, and its second round amounted to $2M from Acadia Woods Partners and angels in August 2006.
really – re. printed material as a profitable enough business? This market seems saturated already. I did some research into it and the print (pictures) market is on a slow decline as it’s mostly older people who print photos from online. There may be some market in kitsch printing like calendars, mugs and stuff but there are already a lot of sites who do this too including the big printing companies with their large budgets for marketing…
I prefer my photos in the cloud. No clutter!
I’ve been recommending fPhanfare to schools for a while now as it’s advert free and can be made private. The big issue for me was the clunky way you had to go about embedding photos and video into blogs etc. Hopefully they’ve improved this too.
“Phanfare aims to build a large user base, so it has made it easy for you to introduce your friends to the service.”
“The new version of Phanfare addresses this issue by integrating social networking functionality that enables users to create connections with one another and specify which content they want to make available to their Phanfare contacts.”
Are either of these points not applicable to ~any of the manifold social services out there? Is this somehow extra noteworthy?
Separately: are there really no possible product names left in the universe that don’t require fatuous alternate spellings of words?
@4 Separately: are there really no possible product names left in the universe that don’t require fatuous alternate spellings of words?
Product names, yes. Domain names, no.
There is a Mac desktop client available, just not the version 2.0 which should be available in February as a Beta.
Andrew:
Congrats on the relaunch.
Luckily there is http://picturepush.com ; free and unlimited
“The new version of Phanfare addresses this issue by integrating social networking functionality that enables users to create connections with one another and specify which content they want to make available to their Phanfare contacts.”
Zoto.com users can also do this. We also relaunched our site back in March. We added TONS of great features. Lots of Ajaxy goodness and an amazing bulk organizer. We also have new customizable flash albums that will rock your world. However, the good folks at TechCrunch have never bothered to take a look at our new service.
i’ve been a customer for almost a year and am welcoming the new upgrades, until i read about you must register in order to view pictures. right now i can share links to albums without having my family/friends be a member to view them.
so i started to look for alternatives but for the price phanfare is charging, no one else does:
- full quality back ups
- video support
- desktop software for uploads compatible with mac
- mail you a dvd backup of your files (not sure if they still do this, but this feature was available last year)
- no ads or “phanfare” logos on my albums
i hope it doesn’t turn away my family/friends if they have to register just to view my albums. unless someone can refer me to another company that offered what phanfare 1.0 did