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Cyber scrapbooking

 

Cyber scrapbooking
May 27, 2006 -Amy Martinez
Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI — Carlos Garcia had been struggling to come up with his next business venture when his dad gave him a glass-encased photo of his toddler son, Lorenzo, seated in a highchair, laughing with his head thrown back.

Underneath the photo, Garcia’s dad scribbled, “Mas vino, por favor,” Spanish for “More wine, please.”

Garcia liked it so much that he knew what his next venture would be: A Web site for people wanting to personalize their photos, just as Garcia’s dad did.

He and his wife, Margarita Irizarry, spent the next 18 months developing www.scrapblog.com, a Coral Gables, Fla.-based Web site that builds on Garcia’s fondness for the one-liner and attempts to re-create the scrapbooking experience.

Scrapblog allows its users to upload their digital photos from computers or camera phones and decorate them with a variety of stickers, background designs, shapes, frames and “bubble” comments. They can share their photos with others on the site or keep them private, for viewing by invitation only.

Garcia and Irizarry, both 32 years old, intend to make money by selling advertising space and personalized photo products, including books, calendars and coffee mugs. They also plan to charge diehard users an annual fee, likely less than $30, to tap into “premium” stickers and other perks.

“People are going online to share their content — their videos, their photos, their stories — and Scrapblog is just another way for them to have fun with their content,” Garcia said.

Scrapblog is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nobox Marketing Group, a Web site design and marketing agency that Garcia and Irizarry started six years ago with another married couple, Jayson Fittipaldi and Monica Heitlauf. Clients include Toyota, Lexus, Verizon Wireless and Procter & Gamble. Three of Nobox’s 25 employees in San Juan, Puerto Rico, now are devoted to Scrapblog.

Garcia and Irizarry have invested $200,000 in Scrapblog so far and are looking for venture capital to add new features, such as audio commentary and music. With only word-of-mouth advertising, the site has attracted 2,162 users since its March 21 launch and is growing about 7 percent a day, Garcia said.

To be sure, photo-sharing Web sites, led by Yahoo’s Flickr and Hewlett-Packard’s Snapfish, are hardly new. An estimated 60 million people already share their photos on up to 20 sites, according to InfoTrends/CAP Ventures.

But the Puerto Rico-born couple says their site distinguishes itself by going after scrapbookers and others who want to get more creative with their photos. Most of those 15 or 20 sites, they say, are the online equivalent of photo albums, not scrapbooks. Flickr and Snapfish declined comment for this article.

Data from the Photo Marketing Association International supports their belief that the demand is there for yet another photo-sharing site: Nearly 22 billion digital photos are predicted to be taken this year in the United States, a 10-fold increase from 2000, when digital cameras were still fairly new.

Only half of the digital photos are expected to be printed, meaning the other half will have to go somewhere, possibly to such sites as Scrapblog.

The popularity of scrapbooking also bodes well for Garcia and Irizarry — an estimated 25 million Americans spend money on scrapbooking, according to the Craft and Hobby Association.

Irizarry, a lawyer by training, dabbled in scrapbooking for about a year before giving birth to Lorenzo, now 2½. But she gave it up after deciding it was too expensive and time-consuming. She said Scrapblog — with its free decorations, all accessible with the click-and-drag of a mouse — will appeal to working mothers who find the Internet a lot less intimidating than their neighborhood arts and crafts store. That view is shared by Fran Saperstein, publisher of Scrapbooking.com Magazine, a monthly with more than 300,000 readers. She said a typical scrapbooker spends about $150 to get started and an additional $50 or more a month on products — not to mention at least a couple of hours picking out those products.

While scrapbooking has grown significantly from a decade ago, it’s leveled off the past few years among women between the ages of 24 and 59, its target market.

Saperstein said Scrapblog will help draw more of those women in. “Having a site likes this gives people the opportunity to get into scrapbooking without making a huge investment in the right paper, the right cutter and the right stickers,” she said.

“There are people who are going to go to this Web site to try out scrapbooking, and at some point, they’re going to want something that’s three-dimensional,” she said. “We see this as an entree into the paper part of scrapbooking.”

Credit to: http://www.adn.com/life/story/7772684p-7685379c.html