Red Herring reports on Tabblo's picture sharing strategy

Red Herring looks at a new photo sharing service, Tabblo, that officially launched today, although it has been in beta for more than a month and I’ve played around with it weeks ago.

Tabblo emphasizes “storytelling” — “tabblos” (see below) — with a large number of templates that make it easy to create more interesting layouts than many other photo sharing sites.

Walt Mossberg gave Tabblo an excellent review in his Wall Street Journal article and other reporters/analysts have had good things to say about the service.

Lots of competitors

Red Herring emphasizes the huge number of competitors in this area, and Tabblo’s founder, Antonio Rodriquez, certainly is aware of that.  Rodriquez writes often in the company’s weblog, and the postings are interesting — not filled with company puff pieces.

The article says Tabblo aims to offer the functionality of Adobe Creative Suite and Apple iPhoto.  Rodriquez says, “It’s like a mush between a good photo manager and a blogging tool in terms of letting you write live Web pages with text and pictures and templates as opposed to a photo site.”

However, even if Tabblo has some unique combination of features, there are many well established photo sharing sites with the resources to copy what Tabblo has done, Red Herring notes.

Revenues and partnerships

Tabblo’s revenues will come, in part, from selling photo-related products, such as prints and photos.  The company also would like to provide co-branding opportunities for camera vendors that don’t have their own Web sites for photo sharing.

Rodriquez is talking to cellular operators and photo retailers, but these companies have their own sites and he acknowledges that it’s not an easy task to develop partnerships in this environment.

Indeed, U.S. cellular operators have established relationships with major photo companies, such as Kodak and Fuji and they aren’t likely to switch — or even add — a small wanna-be.  Cellular operators generally are interested in adding features to their own sites (or their partner’s sites).

Camera phone photos

Currently, you can upload photos (with several easy ways) to Tabblo only from your computer.  However, in about a month Tabblo will enable photos transmitted via e-mail or MMS from a camera phone, Red Herring reports.

Users will be able to attach up to 100 photos in an e-mail message (cellular operator limitations notwithstanding) or one image via MMS (based on the constraints of MMS, not because of Tabblo’s limitation, I assume).  Tabblo will automatically create a “tabblo” layout from the transmitted images.

So far, Tabblo does not accept videos, but users have been asking for that.  No word in the article about when or whether video storage will be offered.

Give it a try

I think Tabblo is definitely worth a look.  Personally, I like the “storytelling” aspect that offers a wide variety of templates and simply drag-and-drop arrangements.

For my own personal service, I want photo + video storage as well as, preferably, some simple Web-based video editing….although I really need to check out Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 for editing mp4 camera phone videos.

My view is with the increasing incorporation of video recording capabilities in camera phones, people will want to create albums that combine both photos and videos of specific activities, such as vacations, weddings, sporting events, etc.  Why should people have to view a second site for videos?

Comments

[Kare Anderson]

Have you seen any of these companies partner with associations to co-brand a package to offer members? Maybe launch a related contest at their annual meeting, show off success stories throughout the year, have an association-wide "story" created as well as a "special price"product for members?
- Kare