Earlier this week I talked about Bizspark Camp UK and GigJunkie in the start-up highlight interview. Today, I am happy to introduce you to Koodibook’s Richard Godfrey. Richard was kind enough to not only talk about the company but also offer an in-depth demo of his photo album publishing service.
For those of you too young to know what a REAL photo album is, I’m talking about the physical, “holding in your hand,” wedding style albums. Koodibook allows anyone to create hardcover photo books from pictures. Now, this concept isn’t new in the computing world. People like Shutterfly, Kodak, iPhoto, and many street vendors have been offering services like this for years. However, unlike those days, most photos that people want to share end up on social networks today. This is where Koodibook really stands out. Essentially imagine being able to easily pull photos from any social network, photo site, or online storage system. Koodibook allows for unmatched flexibility when it comes to what complementary services you use. Their modular design allows for the inclusion of unlimited number of services.
If integrating with web services isn’t impressive to you, consider this. Most photos that people possess today don’t actually live on the internet. Whether you are a photographer, hobbyist, or a casual snapper, a lot of what gets shot stays on local storage. One of Richard’s “secret sauces,” is the availability of a Windows rich-client based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (sample demo application). Think of this as authoring software that allows you to customize exactly how the book will look and feel. Now, you may say, “Viral, it’s 2010, it’s all about the web, I don’t want to download software.” Normally, I would agree with you, but referring to my earlier point about photos being stored locally, which would you rather do, download and install a super fast piece of software that can manipulate photos locally, or upload hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution imagery over a slow broadband link to Flickr?
Of course, now being a WPF application, the authoring software is PC only, but the service does fallback on a great cross-platform Silverlight environment as well as a basic Flash environment, although the latter is pretty basic. All in all, once an individual is done designing a great photo album, he can share it and view in online as well as on an iPhone via their app.
To close, Koodibook is not only a great service, its shows exactly what businesses can create in terms of software experiences in in a relatively short amount of time when they use flexible frameworks like .NET and Silverlight!
