On Monday I had breakfast with Doug Rowan at a Kirkland Starbucks. You can see a picture I shot, on my new cell phone, of Doug here.
Who is Doug?
He's the former CEO of Corbis. As such, he's one of the world's most powerful people in the digital photography business. Well-connected, too (he was the manager of the team that built Bill Gates' house, so he knows a few people). In an hour of talking with him I learned more about the digitial photography business than most people would learn in a year of trying to figure it out on their own.
Why?
Because Doug's invested in several businesses in the digital photography space, and he has one of the world's best networks.
Here's some anectdotes. One of his companies, Preclick, was in the running to be acquired by Google. Google decided on a competitor, Picasa, instead. Why? Doug says that Google wanted Picasa's Hello, which lets you share pictures via an instant-messaging-style service.
Preclick, in my view, is a better app than Picasa, but that was only 1/15th of what we talked about. Here's the rest of the list -- would love to know what your favorite app is on this list, or if you know of any others that are cool:
Picaboo -- create and share digital photo albums.
Our Pictures -- easy photo organizer.
Beon Media -- Turn your plazma or TV screen into a digital canvas for the world's finest art and photography.
PhoTags -- innovative photo suite that lets you embed all sorts of metadata into photos.
Piczo -- fun photo sharing. Doug says that Canadian teenagers are going nuts over this. Why only Canadian teenagers and not, say, teenagers in Europe? He has no idea, but the company is trying to find out (their thesis is that it's because a large percentage of the first 100 people it was seeded to were Canadian -- there's the effects of a few influential evangelists on a company again).
Funtigo -- photo scrapbooking and sharing.
Buzznet -- Photo blogging and sharing.
Flickr -- Photo sharing and blogging. My favorite so far, although I'm still using Text America cause I started with that.
Text America -- Photosharing and blogging.
Photo Story 3 -- Make cool photo stories.
Grouper -- Share photos with your friends in a secure way.
Any other cool ways to share photos?
