Whenever a new service or product launches – especially a consumer product, there is a span of time the creators have to spend explaining to people just exactly what they do, before they can start selling it to them.
We guys still get blank stares when we mention online photo printing, personalised calendars or custom mugs. I would love to get to a stage where there is instant recognition when one mentions these.
So how is this instant recognition achieved? One great contributor to that is competition. Your competition, to start with just ensures there are more people explaining the same thing often in different ways, and then someone with more marketing moolah will take such awareness mainstream.
Which is why I want to thank Canon. I recently came across this billboard for Canon’s latest home printer called the Wonder Box. And hear hear! They aren’t selling great page throughput, <super high number> print resolution or some other arcane jing bang. They are selling one important use – that you can use the wonder box to make personalised calendars, greeting cards, photobooks and t-shirts!
Of course, you can already make all these cool personalised products at itasveer (some in the works).
(Click to enlarge)
Which also brings us to another question: Home Printers. Do you think home printers have a got a chance in this niche personalisation market? Would you rather use a home printer instead of an online service? Let us know in the comments.
June 20th, 2008
Hi everyone.. we’re really sorry for being out for so long (close to 30 hrs). It was completely unexpected and happened because of a mistake.. don’t even ask how! But we always have backups so all data was intact. And we haven’t seen the orders coming in for so many hours because of that, so pour them in, and we’ll take a peaceful sleep for a while :)
June 18th, 2008
I’ve been wanting to post this for long but a lot has been going on and just couldn’t find the time to sit down and write. So here we go -
Turning two recently, this is the gift we had in store for ourselves. We just moved to a dedicated workspace, from an apartment cum office one. The new office is actually Ashish’s basement and it has more space than we’ll ever need in the near future. Its also surprisingly cool in the summers so it might cut down on the power bill :)
For those of you who’re wondering where’s all the printing equipment, here’s a look at the top secret printer that powers everything at itasveer. Its the all in one printer that we’ve developed with insane amounts of r&d.
No I’m kidding :P. This is actually one of the first failed attempts at making our own t-shirt printer. We’ve already ruined 4 printers and yet to see success, so the project is stalled till we have more funds to waste. Donations will be welcome, lifetime supply of t-shirts to anyone who finances further development.. no kidding this time :)
Now news on the development front.
We’re getting ready to start photobooks, they’ll take a couple of months to appear on itasveer, but if you’ve got any requests then drop in with an email and you can be the first beta customers to receive and give us some feedback on the product. We’ll offer some real discounted rates till it goes live online to all preview customers :). For those of you wondering what a photobook is, have a look here for photos tagged as photobooks on flickr.
Also, summers are here so we got a few internship requests, and we’re happy to have working with us Sanyam Goyal who’s a second year CS under-grad at IIT-Mumbai. He has a “in-need-of-a-desperate-update” half finished personal webpage here, but he fares much better in programming stuff, so he’s built our first demo integration with the print API we recently finished. And now he’ll be trying to solve the upload problem that many of you face with a better uploader (more on these projects later).
Thats some of the news for the past one and a half months.. and thanks all of you for the wishes! Lots of good stuff coming your way.. so stay tuned. Cheers.
June 2nd, 2008
