Wednesday, April 05, 2006

PicSquare - Upload, Share, Print.

Now that digital photography is attracting many more yuppies than the old film photography, storing & sharing of digital images has turned into an important aspect of it. Not that there is any dearth of online webspaces to store the pictures - Sony's ImageStation, Yahoo's Flickr and many more. Most of them provide the facility to get the printed copies on your doorstep by mail. But, sadly, that's limited to just US & Europe. While the demand of such a service in India has raisen considerably in recent times, we are yet to see any such service take off.

PicSquare is one such service introduced very recently in India. The brainchild of two young entreprenuers, it is still taking baby steps, but promises a lot more. The two masterminds behind this venture - Manish & Kartik - are undergraduates from IIT Bombay. Manish graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2002 and went on to pursue his MS from Purdue University. After completion, he worked for a while and later on gave it up to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. Kartik completed his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering in the year 2004. He was working for about 1.5 years before joining Manish in this venture.

I have used PicSquare to get some of my photos printed. I guess it doesn't make much sense for me as a person living in India, ordering prints to be delivered locally, but if you think about Indians living abroad & wishing to share their memories with people back home, this service does make a lot of sense. E-Mail the pictures, you'd say, but then the internet penetration in India is still as low as a meagre 5%. Even for someone like me, living in a different city from my parents, it makes sense to get the printed photos delivered directly to my parents in Jaipur (They don't access the net, of course). Its also quite hassle-free for both the parties. One point I'd like to make it here is, the service as such is expansive if we compare to the local GK Vale printing (It costed me ~ Rs.90 for 11 4x6 prints, including delivery).

The print quality is very satisfactory. I guess they process the images a bit before printing them. Hence the richer colors & sharp images. No complaints here.

Their website is rather simplistic. I personally like to-the-point websites, without all flashy mumbo-jumbo & the cluster of buttons & links. The navigation is also quite intutive. They have implemented the functionality to upload multiple images in one go, which is utmost important for such a site. You can edit attributes for multiple images together, which is again an important desirable. They have borrowed the idea of tags from Flickr, which is another nice-to-have feature. They claim to provide unlimited image storing space, but my experience with them doesn't give me any chance to support or deny that. I can't say how gracefully their system will handle it once the bulk uploads start to happen.

You can select photos from the uploaded ones and put them in the shopping cart and order prints; quite standard process as far as online shopping websites go. Presently, they are charging Rs 4.50 ($0.10) per 4x6 photo, Rs 13.50 ($0.30) per 5x7 & Rs 67.50 ($1.50) per 8x10 photos (On a local printing shop, they charge about Rs 3.50-Rs 4.00 for one 4x6 print). One problem I found in their payment module is that it refused to work with my Visa card. Manish & Kartik later acknowledged the problem and hopefully they'll iron out such issues soon.

For the future, they have quite a lot planned. Personalized greeting cards, photo-printed T-shirts, customized coffee mugs, photo frames, calendars, etc. If we go by the testimonials on their site, they have already made many patrons. Hopefully, they'd make many more in coming times.

Keep up the good work, fellas!

12 comments:

Jeet said...

Try karte hain ji ise bhi.. kisi ne mail to bheja tha but I didn't pay much attention last time :)

I was discussing the same thing with a friend a couple of weeks ago. I think its a good business idea.

The elderly camel said...

seems really worth trying out. I have wanted to print out a few snaps, but was not keen on taking my card out and putting it into Gk Vale's reader. This seems ideal, esp as you pointed out when you wish to send them to someone. What is the delivery charge like?

Varun Singh said...

@Jeet: Now I came to know this kind of service already exists. Check out www.kodakexpress.co.in & www.photojagat.com

@Sid: They chared me Rs 10/- for delivery in Bangalore. They are based in Bangalore. Can't say how much would it cost for Jaipur.

Anonymous said...

Check out www.printcamp.com , They do delivery across India and the quality of prints is also good.

Anonymous said...

Picsquare is certainly keeping up its promises of quality and punctuality as ever

Anonymous said...

I can stand testimony to the quality and comittment of Picsquare

Anonymous said...

very dissatisfied with quality of pix. when inquired, heard total bluff from customer care. I wish i was in Banagalore to show my local lab's prints of same photos.

no more.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Varun Singh, I sincerely request you to verify before praising. This affects quality of this blogpost.

Anonymous said...

Never try PHOTOJAGAT.com for delivery to India. They are fraud.

Unknown said...

I do not know where you got the price from but on the website of PicSquare the prices mentioned are Rs. 3 per print which means for 11 photos it would cost Rs. 33 plus postage which in case of India is a maximum of Rs. 36.

Maybe earlier the prices were what you stated.

I do agree that making the website more neater would help though it should be not be graphically intensive website as the users are most likely going to be common people and you do not want to intimidate them

rk181401 said...

On Picsquare

Quality seems to be ok but the delivery time line is too bad. the worst part of Picsquare is they crop the prints too much on all sides of the photos.

At the end it makes the photo a complete senseless..!

They give fantastic ideas on cropping " While taking photos we should make sure that we leave 3mm gaph on all the sides of snap"..! Absolute ridiculous idea instead of working on the solution..! They better stop giving such a stupid idea to the customers.

RK - Hyderabad

Anonymous said...

Poeple, You are talking about this business model and trying PICSQUARE.. but I as a user would recommend you to try the GURU in this field of "Printing and Serving its customers" from over 9 decades.

I recommend fellow users to try www.gkvale.com and then comment about others in this industry.

Good Luck.