Scrapblog Archive

Scrapbook provider Scrapblog is announcing a new partnership today with Carnival Cruise Lines. The partnership will allow Carnival Cruise Lines to provide guests with a way to create unique multimedia scrapbooks of their "Fun Ship" cruise experiences.

This is another good example of non-traditional partnerships. I like to highlight stories like these because it should give you something to consider with your own startup. It’s a way to promote your product and gain distribution outside of the tech blogger community.

The Carnival Web site isn’t highly trafficked but if Scrapblog can gain access to the ships and market on-board, this partnership could do pretty well. Perhaps hand out free cameras on board for a day and then bring the camera back to our stand and we will create the Scrapblog for you and send it immediately to your friends and family.

Check out our interview with Scrapblog CEO Carlos García.

Today I had the opportunity to speak with Scrapblog CEO Carlos García. Scrapblog launched their app last year at DEMO. Scrapblog is one of those apps that has mainstream appeal but seems to miss the blogger circuit. I can tell you that it’s pretty freaking sweet and you should go and just play with it if only to check out their cool use of technology.

Carlos defines the site as a way to "create multimedia scrapbooks". I think they would have been better off leaving out the term blog in their name — it’s too limiting. Their tool is more of a scrapbooking/sharing/editing tool rather than a blog tool. I almost wonder if they should be marketing it as something more than just a scrapbooking tool. Frankly, they should market this as a trip reports sharing tool – the ability to edit/merge photos and share them could be a huge winner for trip reports.

The app is very easy to use and can make you look like a superstar with your friends and family as you show off your great graphics expertise (which is really just the app!). Photos can be imported from most of the major photo sharing sites including Flickr and Yahoo Photos. Videos can currently only be imported from YouTube. I did notice that if you have multiple pages, the publishing process takes a couple of minutes. I was also unable to grab any embed code – it just had an empty box. I was able to grab the embed code (below) once I viewed the pages after logging out.

Carlos took me on a tour of their newest features: crop and edit photos. Slick and fast came to mind. In fact, Yahoo Photos/AOL Photos/Photobucket should take a look at Scrapblog’s editing tools.

The app is built on Adobe Flex and Carlos noted that they have been working with Flex for three years. They launched with the initial alpha version of the Flex service. Scrapblog is based in Miami and has a team of about 15 working on the site.

We spoke about revenue model as I didn’t see any ads on the site. Carlos explained that they are doing mostly sponsorships with major companies like Disney and ABC and are working with the TV show Ugly Betty now which users produced over 20,000 scrapbooks and shared them as well. This is the online advertising area that we will see explosion in this year. Brands want consumers to spread the advertising rather than the brand purchasing the ads. Let the consumer pick up the ad and place it in their Facebook profile, MySpace page or blog. The brand gets viral distribution for no incremental cost. Scrapblog does this very well.

So Scrapblog markets to large companies, gets sponsorship deals, keeps the tools free for individuals and gains interest for the tool via the sponsor deals which increases their userbase. Carlos should write an (e)book on this model.

Here is an example I played with today:

Over the past week I have been speaking with Gonzalo Arzuaga. Gonzalo runs a new site located at KillerStartups where he reviews lots of new startups. I asked Gonzalo if he would be willing to pick five startups every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to profile on CenterNetworks. He agreed and below is the first post – let's call it a beta! Let me know if you like this idea!

Scrapblog.com – Create a World for your Pictures

Scrapblog is an awesome site that goes above and beyond all of your scrapbooking dreams. The different backgrounds, stickers, and templates available are endless. You can even add videos, links, music, and audio narration to give your scrapblog some flavor. More info »

Helium.com – Democratization of Knowledge at its Finest

Helium operates in a manner similar to Wikipedia, but it differs in its organization, content, and style of writing. The premise is that any given topic should have at least a couple of different articles written about it. Then, users read them and rate them, and the highest-rated articles make it to the top. More info »

Swoot.com – A New Face for the Internet

Swoot, you could say, is a browser portal; download one plug-in and you'll be able to access any browser on a range of subjects. Swoot is like window dressing for your virtual view; don't get tied down to the standards, tailor your browser, make it your own. More info »

Virb.com – A Social Networking Revolution

Forget the clutter and applications that never work of MySpace and check out the new social network, Virb, that will blow all others away. It's like they saw how much people hated the chaos of other social networks and decided to bring us the clarity and crispness we desired with a whole bunch of other fun features that work really well. More info »

GoPlan.info – Online Project Management and Collaboration Tool

Goplan provides you with all of the tools you need to productively and efficiently perform group projects. Their features include: managing multiple projects, managing task lists, controlling issues with issue tracking, publishing public facing project news, synchronizing everyone with a calendar, chatting in real-time with project members, and more. More info »