This Google Trends graph comparing photo printing sites is interesting. The seasonal Christmas surge is very evident. It also looks as if by this measure that Snapfish has caught up with and pulled ahead of both Kodak and Shutterfly.
Probably however the Snapfish versus Shutterly comparison is the only really valid one here because there is an obvious search term that people might use for both of those. For the other services there are likely to be other search terms that people used over the years.
(Disclaimer, I work for HP of which Snapfish is a part.)
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Update 2019-09-14: The above links no longer work.This is what it looks like now. Back then Snapshot was a market leader — now it has declined precipitously.
date: '2008-03-30 20:48:29'
layout: post
slug: me-talking-about-snapfish-lab
status: publish
ref: http://www.eamonn.org/blog/?p=263
title: Me talking about Snapfish Lab
wordpress_id: '265'
categories: HP
If my Spanish is correct this article starts “LABORATORY OF IDEAS. This is the design of the Web of the future. Hewlett Packard re-arms its business strategy at the hands of an Argentine.” and it then goes on to talk about Bernardo Huberman, senior Fellow at HP Labs.
date: '2008-03-29 13:49:25'
layout: post
slug: hp-labs-new-products-in-the-works-at-hp-labs
status: publish
ref: http://www.siliconvalley.com/
title: HP LABS — New Products in the Works at HP LABS
wordpress_id: '263'
categories: Programming
tags:
– snapfish lab
This video was on the front page of siliconvalley.com, the web presence of the San Jose Mercury news. It features several HP Labs projects including Book Prep, Face Bubbles, Snapfish Lab, and Conversa.
(I appear at time 1:27 describing Snapfish Lab)
date: '2008-03-20 08:58:49'
layout: post
slug: finally-got-laptop-usable-again-with-ubuntu-linux-in-vmware-under-windows
status: publish
title: Finally got laptop usable again — with Ubuntu Linux in VMware under Windows
wordpress_id: '260'
categories: Futzing
tags:
– linux
– ubuntu
– vmware
– windows
After my disk failure, my re-born laptop is more-or-less fully functional again. Previously I used dual boot setup. This time I used the free VMware Server to run Linux under Windows. So far it works well: I can do almost all my work in Linux, escaping out to Windows just to use the Outlook calendar and set up the VPN — and view the occasional IE-only web page. The biggest improvement now is that Linux networking can piggy-back on the Windows VPN so I can access the corporate intranet from home under Linux.
(Thanks John for the pointer to VMware Server — though I did end up using it the opposite way around than you had suggested.)
date: '2008-03-13 10:09:00'
layout: post
slug: day-five-without-windows
status: publish
ref: http://twitter.com/eob/statuses/770649492
title: Day Five Without Windows
wordpress_id: '258'
categories: Futzing
Day 4 since Windows died on my dual-booted laptop. Can do almost everything on Linux. But no Outlook calendar or VPN, so need to reins ...
— Eamonn O'Brien-Strain 👨💻🔍🌁🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇲🇺🇳⚛️ (@eob) March 13, 2008
As I briefly mentioned in a recent twitter I got the dreaded Blue Screen of Death when booting up my laptop in Windows last weekend. Repeated attempts to reboot in various “safe” modes were to no avail and finally a CHKDSK revealed that there was disk corruption. I need to re-install Windows, and perhaps get a new hard drive.
Luckily my laptop is dual-boot, so I was able to boot up in Ubuntu Linux. There I could see all my Windows files, albeit in read-only mode, so that I could back them up easily onto a USB hard drive in preparation for the WIndows re-install.
Meanwhile I had a lot of other work to do, and it was interesting to see how much of my normal day-to-day work I could do on Linux. All of my software development work is done on Linux anyway, so that was not an issue, the question was how much of the other work could i do.
My company uses Outlook Exchange for e-mail, but it also allows access via IMAP, so I had no problem getting the Thunderbird e-mail client to connect both at work and at home. Microsoft Office documents are widely used in the company, but I could easily view and edit them using OpenOffice. I have not yet however tried sending an edited file back to someone using Microsoft Office to see if they could open it properly. Web browsing in Firefox on Linux was pretty much an identical experience to using Firefox on Windows. I did encounter a few videos I could not play, and our company has an internal IT support chat service that uses a Windows ActiveX component that I could not use to report my woes.
There were really only two shortcomings that are going to force me back to Windows. First is the support of Outlook Calendar, which is widely used in the company to schedule meetings — despite trying, I never found any solution on Linux that allowed me to access the Outlook calendar. The second is the VPNs that I use to connect to work from home and to the data center where our web application runs.
We had a big event in HP Labs today unveiling our new research strategy. My small part was helping to demo our Snapfish Lab web site. We also released a video about Snapfish Lab in which I make an appearance.
I'm not a U.S. citizen, but I live here and find the presidential race fascinating. So I took some of the online tests which claim to tell me which candidates are a closest match to my opinions.
What is interesting is that each of the three sites give three totally different orderings of the three viable Democratic candidates. I am surprised in particular at how poorly Obama does — perhaps I have been overly swayed by the glamour and symbolism of his candidacy and should instead pay closer attention to his positions.