Colin Charles Agenda

Online photo printing comes to Malaysia – why not harness the Flickr API?

Found a cool Malaysian company, eoe. They apparently have physical stores, but what’s cool about them is online printing of photos — something which I believe is totally new in Malaysia.

They’re cheap – RM0.30/4R print. They’re even trying the viral marketing thing – get bloggers to write about them (no, I am not participating) in exchange for free photos.

I might try there services at some stage, but not today. Why? Because I have to upload photos through my browser. Their “Easy Upload” app displays a silly message saying they don’t support Firefox (so I don’t get the fancy pants editing of images, et al.).

<free advice>If they want to be a smarter Malaysian company, they would partner with Flickr, and harness the Flickr API, so that people can make easy prints from Flickr. After all, advertising for Flickr is already done for free, thanks to Maxis (they love advertising Flickr and how easy it is to use on their phone network). Printing images that are already there, rather than re-uploading (with slow, unreliable Streamyx) will make a whole lot more sense. Besides, each photo coming out of my camera, is probably 5MB in size — so I’ll pass.</free advice>

Here’s wishing Eoe much success, and hope they partner with the likes of Flickr, or just harness their darned API, for easy printing.