News

Prepare to be stripped!

as in naked?...

http://www.scotsman.com/business/media-tech-leisure/edinburgh-photo-blogging-website-blipfoto-goes-bust-1-3720220

As in assets…

And what are the only assets about the site?

The IP. And the personal data which - even if anonymised - is very valuable.

The IP is pretty much worthless - not a cutting edge area of development - and they already have the licenses to a similar competitor (Socialmatic).

The personal data has some value, but not that much given the relatively small population.

No, they'll move the business to the US and issue new T&Cs, placing any court proceedings in Minnesota. And tweaking the license to allow them to exploit the pictures - Bored Panda was an attempt at this that went badly wrong. And finally, anyone who doesn't object to the new terms and leave - with their photos - will be deemed to have accepted the new terms.

They're not in it for anyone's benefit but their own…

Sounds fishy

Minnesota?

http://petapixel.com/2015/01/04/family-minnesota-buys-majority-stake-polaroid-70-million/

In a sense, though, "Minnesota" is just a figure of speech, because the company could be incorporated in any of the 50 states of the US

http://www.usa-corporate.com/starting-a-new-business-in-the-us/choice-of-state-incorporation/

Either way, trying to get at them is not like taking a small claims action in the UK

The holding company for Polaroid is incorporated out of Minnesota, hence all of Joe's blips of downtown Minneapolis over the last two years, and not "the last few months" the deal's supposed to have been arranged in…

Arclight is right - they could incorporate anywhere, but they do seem to like to keep things local.

I'm finding it a tiny bit ironic that people are using Facebook, owned by a US corporation, to complain about Blipfoto being sold to a US corporation ...

Not at all, Veronica. Mark Zuckerberg has never made any attempt to conceal the fact that he sees all humanity as a data source to be mined and monetised to make him rich!

He's certainly long since stopped pretending to care about "community"…

I love Blipfoto, but the problem seems to be that it is not a viable business. There are no ads (bar the Polaroid stuff), the personal data is not being "monetized" (AFAIK), and the shop "closed". Thus revenue seems to just be subscriptions at the moment. Given most consumers expect websites to be free, this is no long term business model to grow a community.

There are loads of other community sites on the web with strong communities, but they seem to have sensible methods of having revenue. For example a running site I belong to called "fetcheveryone" has a similar community, is owned by a big brand, but has ads and sponsorship to keep it going.

I really hope blipfoto keeps going, but it is kind of obvious that the site as it currently is would have no long term viable future. Hopefully some American business sense can save what is a really great site and community. But it is obvious something big needs to change, as "you don't get something for nothing".