Lifeblob's World

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Lifeblob has been shortlisted for NASSCOM Emerge 50, 2010. There were 200 companies in the fray and it feels good to know that the jury members and Zinnov found us worthy of being on this list.

I would like to thank each one of you for your support. And if you are going to be at the NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave in Delhi on August 25, I look forward to catching up with you.

For a complete list of companies that have been shortlisted, you can go here.

Our friends at Nature Wanderers have a series of wildlife photography workshops lined up between now and April 2011.

Do take a look at the schedule below and book well in advance if you are interested – the seats tend to fill up fast. For any queries or additional details, you can reach out to Shivang Mehta of Nature Wanderers.

Thank you all for the overwhelming response to the lifeblob store.

We are glad that you like the choice of products on offer and we are working hard to provide you options that give more more control over the design of products and also offer you a wider choice in the designs available. But thats stuff we are working on and something that I will detail in a future post.

In our continued efforts to make it a rewarding experience for you to purchase personalized photo gifts from our store, we are now offering free shipping on the entire range of our products. Yes, you read it right, you don’t need to pay a penny for shipping as long as your order exceeds Rs 150/-.

So what are you waiting for – visit the lifeblob photo gifting store now to turn your photos into magical gifts and bring a smile on the face of your loved ones.

Calling all photographers – The lifeblob photo contest for the month of July is now open and the theme is:

Rain Rain Rain – Share your photos of the beautiful and joyous rainy day

I love dancin in rain.. by Sneha Rathod

And this time, we are not giving away one or two prizes but a total of 16 prizes:

• 1 Gold prize winner will receive a cool Rs 1000/- gift voucher to the lifeblob store
• 5 Silze prize winners will receive 10% discount coupons to the lifeblob store
• 10 Bronze prize winners will receive 5% discount coupons to the lifeblob store

So what are you waiting for. Grab your cameras and get going, for the rain does not always come when you want it to. For more details about the contest, visit the photo contest page.

One of the things that we constantly think about is how we can make it easier for our users to use the service. And as a big step towards that, I am pleased to announce our integration with pixelpipe, the San Francisco based content distribution gateway service.

With this integration, you now have tools to upload your photos directly from a variety of mobile devices, including Apple iPhone, Nokia S60 Series, Nokia N900 Series, Google Android and Palm Pre devices. There are also extensions that you can use to directly upload your photos from Mozilla Firefox, Nokia Photos, Adobe Lightroom 2.0 and Windows Xp Web Publishing wizard.

You can find the complete list of supported devices and the configuration instructions on this page.

So how do I get started?

Getting started is really simple – simply follow the steps below to upload your first photo from your mobile device:

a) Sign up for a pixelpipe account at http://www.pixelpipe.com. You can also log in using your twitter account there.

b) Once you are signed in, go to “Add pipes” menu item on the left and type “lifeblob” in the search box. Alternatively, you can scroll down to find the lifeblob logo among the supported services.

c) Click on the lifeblob logo – this will take you to an authorization page where you need to grant pixelpipe access to update your lifeblob data. Don’t worry, you can always revoke this permission later in the lifeblob settings if you like.

d) Thats it! You are now ready to start uploading photos to your lifeblob account through pixelpipe. All you need now is a client for your mobile device – you can follow the instructions here to choose the one that will be appropriate for your mobile device and start uploading.

We need your feedback

Do let us know how you find this integration. Do you have other ideas to make it more productive for you to use lifeblob?

Do write in to us at feedback@lifeblob.com with your thoughts and suggestions – for all you know, you may win a cool gift voucher for the lifeblob photo gifting store if we like your idea.

I am pleased to announce a new addition to our team!

Gowthaman Basuvaraj, a graduate of Anna University and IIIT, who has previously worked for 2 years with Yos Technologies, joined us last week and has promised to take the level of geeky-ness in our office to a whole new level.

As Gowthaman says about himself – “My interests are reading fiction novels and writing code. I am a no-frills weekend biker and a food lover.”

You can connect with him at his lifeblob and twitter pages.

This past weekend was an exciting time for all of us at Lifeblob. We had a stall at the recently concluded siliconindia Startup City 2010 event and we were pleasantly surprised with the response we got at our stall. This was a ideal platform for us to talk about the recently launched Lifeblob Store (http://www.lifeblob.com/store) where we sell personalized photo gifts such as calendars, mugs, canvas, designer photo frames and so on.

Lifeblob Stall

Dart Game

We, also had a dart game in the stall where people visiting the stall could try their hand at darts and win Rs. 1500/- worth of photo products from the Lifeblob store (http://www.lifeblob.com/store). The goal was to get the maximum points by aiming at one of the 3 zones on the dart board (which had different points). If they predicted it right they would get another turn. Else the game ends. More than 500 people participated in this game with many people scoring over 400 points and they walked away with discount coupons on the photo gifts. The winner Mr. Venkatarayappa walked away with the grand prize by scoring 710! Incidently, he had never played darts before!

Hope you all liked our presentation and the products we offer!

Two weeks back, we silently turned on the lifeblob photo merchandise store, sprinked around a few tweets and waited in the hope that one of the hyperactive bloggers ( techcrunch, mashable, pluggd.in et al.. ) will discover it before our formal announcement and brag about breaking the big news before everyone else.

The stage was well set, and cards properly laid out for the sensational discovery, but alas, that did not happen so finally you get to hear about it from the horse’s mouth. The good part is that our customers did find out about the store and we got several orders and a lot of great feedback during these two weeks which we implemented before making this announcement.

So here is the grand announcement – the lifeblob store is finally open for business!

If you are already a lifeblob user, its very easy to place an order – simply click the “Buy Prints” button next to your photos and get started. If you are not already using lifeblob, this is a great time to get an account and turn your photos into beautiful personalized products.

We have partnered with Printo to bring you the highest quality photo merchandise at a price that you can afford. Here is a quick preview of what we are selling currently:

1) Photo Mugs, starting Rs 299 Rs 249 only ( you save 17% )

2) Photo Greeting Cards, starting Rs 50 Rs 40 only ( you save 20% )

3) Designer Photo Frames, starting Rs 299 Rs 199 only ( you save 33% )

4) Canvas Prints, starting Rs 1399 Rs 999 only ( you save 23% )

5) Simple Photo Prints, starting Rs 5 Rs 2.99 only ( you save 40% )

6) Photo Books, coming soon

7) Photo Calendars, coming soon

Do try it out and share your experiences / testimonials with us at feedback@lifeblob.com. Please note that the prices above represent a limited period inaugural offer, so place your orders now!

Today we announce the launch of a much needed and frequently asked for community feature: badges.

As a lifeblob user, badges are a way for you to show-off your accomplishments to the world and get more people to find you on lifeblob. Flaunt your badges on your blog page, your website, your photo-blog or anywhere else you like and declare to the world that you have arrived.

Some of the badges are available for everyone to use and you can pick up the one you like at  http://www.lifeblob.com/badges. If you have more ideas for these badges, let us know and we will get one created for you.

We also have a few special badges that are reserved for privileged / featured lifeblob users. If you have been interviewed on photography tips or if you are a lifeblob power user, you will hear from us really soon about your exclusive badge.