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Phlook Turns Photos Into Portable Social Objects

LIM YUNG HUI — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:54:03 +0000

Snipd is building a social network around clipped web contents; Last.fm with music; Scribd with documents. For Phlook, it’s photos. Since its public beta launch on July 31 2008, Singapore-based Phlook (pronounced as flook) has released a series of improvements to its interface usability and socialability. The most recent ones are “favorite it” and annotation features.

Movable Social Objects

Phlook converted a ‘static’ photo into a Flash interactive one, which can be embedded on any website or blog. Now, this portable photo comes with rating, annotation and email features.

YouTube users can add commentary on videos with Video Annotations; Phlook allows its users to annotate on photo and the annotations are accessible by anyone. Users can also “Favorite” the photo. To try out these features, hover mouse over the burger photo below and slide-out menu will appear on the left. To view the annotations, click on the bottom-left of the photo.

Interactive Phlook’ed Photo

Users can customize a few parameters of the embeddable photo, namely:

Size: photo display dimension
View counts: track based “onRollOver” and “onClick”; view tracker can be turn off
Add clip: appear on top-right corner whenever a mouse hovers over the photo
Default menu: user access which menu whenever the photo is clicked

In addition to the photo’s social features, its embeddable Slideshow also get a facelift. The new layout and design seem to be more intuitive and responsive. In addition to Phlook website, users can also create Slideshows on Facebook with PicBox application.

Spanking New Slideshow Now Showing at Phlook

Phlook is founded by Wee-Kiat Ng and Justine Ho; funded by Thymos Capital LLP, a Singapore-based private start-up incubator.

Phlook Turns Photos Into Portable Social Objects originally appeared on GreyReview.com on February 21, 2009.

Phlook Goes Public

LIM YUNG HUI — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:11:22 +0000

After four months in private beta, Phlook is going public beta today (GreyReview’d here). However, the Phlook team is still working on its transaction feature, which is quite an interesting feature. It allows amateur and professional photographers to use Phlook to monetize their works. Nevertheless, the public beta version of Phlook is still fun to use.

Its photo embedding (another cool feature) is already working. Each photo is converted to Flash file, which can be embedded into any website/blog. You can zoom in, zoom out the photo. Below is an example of a Phlook’d photo. Mouse over the photo to see more details and share it with others.

Phlook Goes Public originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 30, 2008.

Phlook It, Share It, Sell It

LIM YUNG HUI — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:55:50 +0000

Singapore-based Phlook Pte Ltd, founded by Ng Wee Kiat and Justine Ho, is planning to announce the public launch its online photo sharing and management site, Phlook next week. Besides sharing and showcasing photos, the website also enables users to sell them. According to Ng, Phlook aims to become the best web-based platforms, not only for everyone to share, organize and manage their photos / images but also, for amateur and professional photographers to showcase and sell their works. Development started in October 2007 and was in private beta since November 2007.

At Phlook, anyone can upload photos and there is no limit on storage (but upload for each user is capped at 100Mb per month). Its Storyboard allows users to compile different sets (or ‘chapters’) of photos into a single collection, which can be shared with other Phlook’ers. Users can set who can view and download their photos. Other Phlook’ers can rate and Favorite-It the photos. Also, on Phlook, users can find and ‘make’ friends.

Each photo is converted into shockwave file, which enables owners of for-sales images to prevent unauthorized downloads and ‘image rip.’ This shockwave’d photo can be embedded on other websites and blogs for display and comes with zoom-in / zoom-out feature.

Users can also share, post and bookmark the photo in various popular social network, blogging and bookmarking sites (such as, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Diigo, StumbleUpon, etc.)

The Phlook Market

Rather than competing head-on with heavyweights like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug and Zooomr, Phlook goes beyond photo sharing and organizing, by providing a marketplace function for photo buyers and sellers to transact. Each photo social network offers various add-on services as means to monetize its user-base; Phlook offers photo transaction service. The following table outlines some of the services at Flickr, SmugMug, Zooomr and Phlook.

Websites	Services
Flickr	Pro account subscription, variety of photo-related services such as photo print-outs, photo-books, photo on credit card, etc.
SmugMug	Pro account subscription, photo prints, photo books, photo-on-mug, canvass, greeting cards, etc.
Zooomr	Pro account subscription
Phlook	Photos buying and selling

Phlook shares revenue from photo transactions with photo owners. The owners can earn between 66% and 90% from each transaction, depending on the photo price. The minimum price is fixed at US$0.99, whereas the maximum price is dependent on the seller’s selling track records.

To become a seller, you need to activate the Phlook Earnings Account. Earnings made from photo sales are transferred to this Account and once it reached US$100, the amount will be automatically transfer to your PayPal. Early withdrawal can be made, if the Account balance is more than US$3. To buy photos, buyers can use credit card or PayPal.

Best of Both Worlds

Phlook is a hybrid of a photo social networking site (eg. Flickr) and an image bank (eg. Crestock). Social networking to build a vibrant community of photo sharers, sellers and buyers; transaction capability to develop inventory of commercial-grade images.

The ‘portability’ of for-sales images on any website / blog expand distribution reach and its an attractive value proposition for sellers. It is also important to innovate new ways to ease upload of photos (eg. desktop/mobile uploader application), in order to attract and sustain usage. In brief, the synergistic combination of share and sell functionality is powerful and it certainly makes Phlook looks good in the photo social network marketspace.

Phlook It, Share It, Sell It originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 26, 2008.