Lifeblob's World

Lifeblob is one of the fastest growing photo sharing services in India and we have over 5 Million photos on our service as we speak. A few months back, we turned on the lifeblob personalized gifting store so that you could customize and order high quality photo gifts directly from our site.

Today, I would like to announce an opportunity for all of you to be a part of our growth story. For the past few days, we have been secretly testing out our affiliate program and today we would like to open it up for everyone.

What is an affiliate program?

An affiliate program allows you to partner with us and sell our personalized products on your website or blog. All you have to do is put up a lifeblob personalized gifting store banner on your site or blog and you will receive a commission for every sale that happens when a user clicks that banner and places an order.

How much will I earn?

We look at you as our partner and we have created a win-win situation where you can grow as we grow. Our affiliate program is a performance based program, based on the volume of sales you do each month. If you drive a higher sales volume, your commission percentage goes up. For more details on the commission slabs, visit our affiliate program page here.

This sounds too good. Is there a catch?

There is no catch here. Just try it out for a month and see what kind of results you can achieve. Remember, if you aren’t satisfied with what you are earning, you can simply remove the links to our site. It’s that simple!

How do I join?

To join our affiliate program please send an email to affiliate@lifeblob.com with your website details and how you plan to sell Lifeblob personalized photo products. We do not tolerate people becoming an affiliate just to receive a discount on the Lifeblob products.

Rakhi is around the corner and we are excited to announce new template designs for all our products. Here are some of the designs that you can use to create excellent personalized photo gifts for your sister or brother on this Rakhi.

Rakhi Greeting Cards

Rakhi Photo Mugs

Rakhi Designer Photo Frames

If you are not sure about what to gift and need suggestions, do write to us at buy@lifeblob.com and we will be happy to help out.

Click here to see a larger version

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.

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.

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.

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!

Last week was an exciting and challenging time for us. The NASSCOM Emerge conference in Chennai was coming close and we were working on putting together a showcase of all NASSCOM photos from previous editions on their lifeblob page.

Thats when, Avinash Raghava ( Regional Director of NASSCOM North ) asked us if in addition to the live coverage of the event through photos, we could also provide a live gifting solution where photos of the speakers are used to create photo gifts that are given to them as souvenirs. The idea sounded very exciting so after some initial research we decided to take up this challenge.

So how did we do it?

1) As per the schedule of the event, there were two parallel sessions with multiple participants in the panel through the day. This would mean creating between 5 – 10 photo gifts in 1 hour and this instantly ruled out the possibility of getting the photos printed from an external printer. We decided to carry a HP Photo printer with us.

2) The gifts had to be branded with NASSCOM Emerge graphics. Initially, we created a template that we would merge with the photo to print a branded photo at the event, but we felt that it would increase the turnaround time and is also more prone to errors. We decided to get a tent photo frame printed in Bangalore with a slot where the photo can be inserted. We also got 130 gsm glossy photo paper, a cutter, a scale and glue for the job.

3) On the venue, we setup our equipment at the back of the conference room and did a test run before the event started. Here is Rahul operating our setup at the venue.

4) I took the role of the camera person and Rahul took the role of the gift creator. As soon as a session began, I would run to grab photos of all the speakers and then go to the other room to get photos of the speakers in the other room. It took me 10 minutes to take these photos and thereafter another 30 – 40 minutes to post-process, crop and print them.

5) In the end, the photos were cut out and slotted on the photo frame to create the gift. Here is what it looks like.

It was a great experience for us and I must thank Avinash Raghava for giving us this idea and for Kiruba Shankar for coming up with it. And I hope all the speakers liked it .

PS: We are open for any such ideas for corporate and social events. Drop in a mail at contact@lifeblob.com. We would love to hear from you!

We’ve been thinking how we can help our users do more with their photos and one of the things that we hear very often is:

“Hey, I’m happy to see my photos online and see my friends comment on it, but it would be kinda nice if I could print them!”

So a few weeks back, we decided to figure this out and I’m happy to announce that we will be announcing the launch of a lifeblob photo store really soon.

The lifeblob photo store will allow you to turn your photos into beautiful frames, personalized greeting cards, canvas prints and gorgeous photo books. You will also be able to get your favorite photos printed on T-Shirts, Mugs and several other artifacts.

To take advantage of our location, the store will initially be opened up for delivery within India and will thereafter be scaled up to enable deliveries in other countries as well. If you would like to see your country supported, do send us a note at feedback [at] lifeblob.com and it may just help us prioritize our next steps!

So get your printing wishlist ready and watch out for our launch announcement soon!