I have been following the stealth startup PicturePal for sometime. Unfortunately under NDA, I was unable to post anything about it - until now. This weekend, some of the most popular resort destinations on the island of Kauai will feature PicturePal kiosks for guests to upload their pictures from their digital camera memory cards.
Founder Sommer Jayson has been developing this offering for the last 10 months, "On my last trip to the islands, I was struck by the fact that every tourist struggled with the same problem as I did." Jayson, on an extended family vacation with a party of 12, found she had used up all of her camera memory in the first 2 days. On a quest to buy more memory, she found not only that prices for memory were very inflated on the resort island, but most memory types including hers were out of stock.
Founder Sommer Jayson has been developing this offering for the last 10 months, "On my last trip to the islands, I was struck by the fact that every tourist struggled with the same problem as I did." Jayson, on an extended family vacation with a party of 12, found she had used up all of her camera memory in the first 2 days. On a quest to buy more memory, she found not only that prices for memory were very inflated on the resort island, but most memory types including hers were out of stock.
Jayson's ONLY CHOICE was to stand in a hellishly long line for the Kodak Picture Maker and go through the painful process of selecting which of the hundreds of photos she wanted to print out.
"I was really annoyed that I was spending my precious vacation time sorting through photos and printing them out. Unfortunately this was my only choice," Jayson recalls.
PicturePal aims to solve this problem by offering resort and hotel lobby kiosks that allow guests to simply upload their pictures to a secure web folder, allowing them to clear their memory for another day of picture taking. When their vacation is over and they are back at home, they can simply access their photos to download, print, share, or buy prints online.
Even better is the cost of the service: FREE.
Jayson believes that by offering the upload service for free, that other revenue opportunities will surface with online photo companies. In fact, Kodak and Yahoo have already been calling the small Seattle-based firm, wanting to initiate partnering discussions.
From our perspective, we see PicturePal taking advantage of two key trends that show no indication of slowing: (1) Digital cameras continue to offer more megapixels despite the diminishing returns to the casual photosnapper. This will in turn drive the demand and cost for digital memory. (2) No matter how many Gigs a memory card is, it never seems to be enough for digital photographers. While digital allows photographers to take and review multiples of the same picture and then delete the bad ones, our theory is that few have the discipline to delete the bad photos.
As long as digital memory is in constant shortage for vacationers, PicturePal should see strong growth.
I will be watching the PicturePal team, seems like they are onto something...
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