ISPCON hosted a showcase for innovative, new companies. One of them showed up with a free offer to ISPs: an e-mail based photo gallery.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 5, 2008]

Ra'anana, Israel-based 2Pad has a photo service for ISPs. The company's own cost structure scales with its own business because 2Pad is using Amazon's S3 storage and EC2 computing services. The company pays only for the resources it uses.

The service that 2Pad offers is an e-mail based photo gallery. It tags the photos according to the content of the e-mail and users can then browse the images on the web. Users can obtain photos not just as prints but also on mugs, tee shirts, and other objects.

I spoke to two of the co-founders over Skype, calling them in the morning in New York, evening in Israel. Aaron Boublil and Philippe Lumbroso emigrated from France to Israel a few years ago at a time when many others were doing so. They brought with them their tech knowledge. Boublil had founded Mediaquest, an online advertising firm that he then sold to Ogilvy. The other two co-founders, Lumbroso and Ary Tebeka (with whom I did not speak) co-founded a French modem company, Kortex, in 1985 and have been working in hardware and VoIP since.

Now, they are focused on e-mail. "We wanted to make the most viral solution possible," says Boublil. "We believe e-mail is the most viral tool on the internet."

The service, Boublil says, has more features than the competition. It enables sharing of photos and also video. It has automatic tagging. It has permissions (limit who can view the image).

The company works with two photo services: Mill Valley, Calif.-based QOOP for U.S. customers and Tachbrook Park, Warwick, UK-based CeWe for European customers.

Revenue
The company earns revenue from three sources, Boublil says. It offers 1 GB of storage for free, but charge $2 per month for up to 5 GB and $5 per month for up to 20 GB. It inserts Google ads into the e-mails that carry the photographs, earning a small amount of revenue there.

The company gets most of its revenue from the printing services, Boublil says. The margins there are significant.

ISPs get a share of the revenue, depending mostly on volume.

Boublil says that ISPCON attendees were particularly impressed with the fact that they don't have to install anything at the ISP. It's free to join, and no hardware or software to install. The only objection ISPs might have is that in most cases, 2Pad owns the billing relationship.

Because of these benefits and the one drawback, 2Pad's e-mail photo service may be best suited to the smallest of ISPs, those ISPs that are looking for revenue share and referral relationships because they don't want to manage new hardware and software.

Boublil points out that customers will use these services whether the ISP charges for them or not. 2Pad's competition is free services like Flickr and Facebook. It competes by offering more features.

According to the site's extensive FAQ, more features are planned. The company wants to add cropping and editing tools, as well as other features.

In summary, unless you're already offering a photo solution to your customers, take a close look at this one.

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