Peter Martinez, cofounder of Pikchur, talks about his service for updating your social networks / micro-blogging platforms with pictures & videos. We go on to talk about his strategy with promoting Pikchur and whether or not it’s really necessary to go “all in” with your start up idea.
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Transcription
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Peter Martinez 00:00:23 Hi, I’m Peter from Pikchur, the easiest way to share life events from anywhere to everywhere. We specialize in mobile media. We take videos and photos from people’s cell phones and propagate to all their social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter. We go ahead and we’ll take the photos and videos from your cell phone; any cell phone really, we don’t have limitations as far as which type of cell phone. It doesn’t have to be a smart phone, it doesn’t have to be any particular model or service for that matter and we’ll take an MMS or an e-mail from that particular mobile device. We’ll optimize the videos and photos and we’ll propagate it to all of your networks.
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Ryan Parsley 00:00:57 That is super cool. I like the approach that, yeah, just an MMS message, everybody can do that. That was one of the things, I think, that helpedTwitter get adoption early on; was maybe not everyone had a smart phone. And even if you did have a smart phone, it was too decentralized. So to have an app on every kind of smart phone at that point. You know, like when the iPhone was just gaining traction; Nokia was still really strong into it, a lot of Windows mobile phones out there, it would have been really hard to make an app for each of these platforms. So the idea of having sort of a deprecated experience, and not in a bad way, I just mean that everybody can play. But if all you can send is an MMS, I’m sure that there’s file size limitations. Whereas if there’s an app to make the experience a little bit richer, then there’s that too, because I know you’ve also got SquarePik right?
- Peter Martinez 00:01:50
Yeah, we have a few apps out there. Some of them are from us, and some are just developers building off our API. SquarePik in particular is a joint venture between 39 LLC which is Davide.
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Friend of the show.
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Yup. We basically work together. We integrated the foursquare API and developed a system to capture basically what Pikchur does but also tag photos and videos to particular venues in the foursquare network. So if you’re at you know the theater or wherever you might be, you would use SquarePik and check in with a photo or video and we’ll go ahead and drop that photo or video at that location; which can be retrieve through the application or through Pikchur at Pikchur.com and we’ll also do a check-in for you at foursquare. So basically we built a “I was here” type of thing, but with photos, videos and leveraging the foursquare API.
- Ryan Parsley 00:02:47
That’s really cool. I like the approach that you start off, if someone’s kind of just new to Pikchur, you’ve solved the problem of "upload once, post everywhere". Or the more engaged someone would like to be with their content that their pushing up there, you kinda cater to that too, and I guess that’s part of the API strategy as well: “You can’t build everything, but if someone wants to have the good photo compression… ”, you’ve talked about that. I think that people maybe underestimate all of the wizardry you do with processing images and videos, but people can kinda just use that and build on top of that for all kinds of other uses.
- Peter Martinez 00:03:26
Yeah, basically we let people what we’ve already developed in the sense of video or photo optimization, we pull the geodata from photos, and we packaged it all into an API. I mean Pikchur doesn’t have to do everything, the website doesn’t have to do everything, but if we provide a way for people to, exactly like you said, you don’t have to be the super user to use Pikchur but you can. There are features we enable such as the geoware, the social check-ins to the networks such as foursquare, we’re gonna add more for the future but that’s mostly though our API. We’re looking to integrate Twitter Places, and ideally someday go on and we’ll open up a Right Axis and integrate them into our geo-social API. But like you said, you don’t have to be a super user to use Pikchur. You can just use it as a means to take a photo with your phone, send it through MMS or e-mail whichever your phone supports, and we’ll propagate it out to all your networks.
- Ryan Parsley 00:04:22
Yeah, you guys, I really like your approach because it seems very accessible in a way that a lot of other other cross-post type services just didn’t hit me. Like, I feel like a lot of times the first thing I do is I reate an account and then I just get hit with this big screen of, like this big cockpit of other accounts to kind of cross-relate, and “Do I want to send this kind of post to that?” I mean it seems like too much work for me, at which point I think to a more passive user it just seems incredibly overwhelming even to the point where it’s hard to understand why someone would want to do that. But I come to your site and the first thing I do is I can just log in with a Twitter account, at which point the accounts are bound.
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Right.
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And I send a message from my phone now my phone and my Twitter account and now I’m cross-posting.
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Pretty much.
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The barrier to entry seems as negligible as it could possibly be.
- Peter Martinez 00:05:20
Yeah we really don’t have a registration form. I mean almost, actually every network we support you can just log in with the credentials that are provided for that network. So you log in with your Flickr, you log in with your Facebook, Plurk, whatever network you use, and the second you log in we’ll the generate the account, create the post and email, and sync that account for you. But, I mean, the user doesn’t see that. What he sees, or she sees, is “Hey!, Welcome to Pikchur. Send your photos here.” and pretty much that’s it.
- Ryan Parsley 00:05:46
I think it’s also interesting that that way Pikchur works with the APIs,it seems really interesting to me. I think it’s pretty common knowledge that if someone’s going to build an app or a service these days if you can work around building an API such that other developers can kinda leverage you a little bit more like a platform; I think that it’s pretty common knowledge that that’s a good approach. Now for a company, or for a product like Pikchur where it is ultimately using other companies’ APIs and that’s where the magic comes from. I think it’d be one step removed where people might not, it might not be intuitive to everyone that you would also want to release your API, right?
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Right.
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Because it gets kinda meta at that point. But people definitely dig it because you’ve got a nice little archive of third-party apps that use you in different ways.
- Peter Martinez 00:06:42
Right. You know a lot of people don’t realize but we do have our own API that developers can leverage and by using one of the APIs we have available you can go ahead and leverage what we’ve already built as far as the propagation, the image and photo rendering, video rendering and such. So yeah, it’s a way to get out there. I would say that a large portion of our traffic, disproportionally probably, comes from the API. MMS is a big player as well, but I would say because of the quantity of applications and just the diverse types of applications whether it be the foursquare Web OS which does support Pikchur, or our Twitter application like Twitterlator, the different types of networks pumping into our service provide just a nice way to grow our company. It’s just a way to expand where we’re at, so yeah.
- Ryan Parsley 00:07:31
It’s also nice like with the… I tend to upload to Pikchur via e-mail because instead of… I don’t really want to have an app that is how I upload photos, that doesn’t make sense to me. What happens is: I’m on my phone, I take a picture, and with the Android OS there’s all these little share options right in there and if you wrote an app for android you could kinda hook in to that list, that menu, but the problem is I see what that is. All of a sudden, the longer that list gets the least valuable it is to me because it’s like “Oh my god, all these services can let me upload a picture.” But what’s great is you just, or how bout just e-mail?, because that seems easy enough. I think that’s sort of the thing with Posterous as well, I think that’s really cool. They seem to just be hooking into how people can interact with things most seamlessly, and then they worry about just making that more effective than it would otherwise be.
- Peter Martinez 00:08:31
Right, exactly. You take an e-mail that would just normally be an e-mail but it then becomes a way for you to share, like the birth of your son or daughter across ten networks. I mean it just, it becomes that much more but we do give people the option. You don’t have to send an MMS or and e- mail. I mean we do have iPhone apps that are just for uploading, and for those type people we support them.
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Yeah.
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So but we focus a lot on the MMS and e-mail as far as our processes goes and what we have, that’s something that’s there. We do have a lot of like custom triggers and things like that that people can use on the fly. So you don’t want to send it to particular networks? Don’t. You just go ahead and add… let’s say you don’t want to send it to Twitter, you just don’t… you put minus TW and pretty much when we receive it we’ll filter that out but it’ll go ahead and not send it to Twitter. So we do take it… we do provide a lot of functionality within something as simple as an e-mail or an MMS, but again we do have for those app… people have to have apps. We have means for them to communicate as well.
- Ryan Parsley 00:09:32
That’s cool. I think it’s interesting to also draw similarities between the kind of product that Pikchur is, where it’s a very social focused thing, and also I feel like I can’t go to a tech event and not run into you. So this seems like something that’s very much part of your personality too.
- Peter Martinez 00:09:56
Yeah, I mean it’s something that we… to be honest we first launched it was just me and Manny… and it wasn’t… it was just for us and kinda grew and then it became something that just suddenly took over everything. We worked really hard on it and we still do and we go to these tech events and we try to be active, not because we have to but because we want to. I mean we meet a lot of awesome people, opportunities and friends. So we mostly… to be honest we mostly go because it’s a good… it’s a good place to hang out. It’s with people that are just like you. You get to, I don’t know, I guess geek out when normally in normal situations talking about what happened on Techcrunch or Mashable with somebody else that’s not in the sphere it’s just… they just don’t get it I suppose. They’re not… I don’t know how else to explain it but it’s just a great place to hang out and not necessarily just for fun but a lot of the people you meet, I mean are also good people to know but that’s not the reason we go, but yeah.
- Ryan Parsley 00:10:59
Yeah, I think it tends to be… sure there’s all kinds of benefits both kinda personal and business. I think people that do it just for some sort of upwardly mobile play… it shows, and it doesn’t really work out for them. But… it’s like mixing the social norms and the market norms, that kind of thing.
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Yeah.
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But yeah, I mean it’s… I run into you from events that are either… some are about tech, some are about design, some are about what social networking. It seems like whatever it is, if it’s local, you guys wanna be part of it and it’s pretty cool that I think I can see the benefits from that because whenever someone talks about “Hey, I need to make a list of cool local tech start-ups” or something, you guys always come up too. It’s definitely… you’ve got people excited about your product and you’re on people’s minds because you’re everywhere. It’s like “Oh yeah, those guys are great. I wanna help support their thing” Because if at the very minimal you use Pikchur like a yfrog type of thing where it’s just “I need to attach an image to my Twitter account”, I think people could very easily be indifferent as to which service they use. But people aren’t. I’ve asked a few apps “Hey, where’s my Pikchur integration?”
- Peter Martinez 00:12:23
Yeah, and we’ve always appreciated the support of the community. They’ve always been really strong as far as adopting our services or basically adopting Pikchur. And like you said there are a lot of people, specifically South Florida, texting and things like that that do go out of their way and they ask for “Where’s Pikchur integration?” and that has actually worked out quite a few times. Some applications pretty much contact us because of people contacting them from the local community. We, it’s a small community down here in South Florida but we do have a lot of great people who are really active and aren’t in it for, I guess like you said, for the money they’re there for… to actually build a community out of… I don’t know, out of nothing. We basically, over the years with people like Brian and Alex and all these people organizing all these events, the South Florida Community has grown, and it’s becoming that… becoming something great.
- Ryan Parsley 00:13:23
That brings me to… I’ve talked to people who just have a day job. Right “just” like that’s not enough. And they tend to say they don’t have time to do the… call it social networking or just go out and meeting their peers in spaces and talking about what it is that they do. And I think that it’s hard for me to kinda not meet that with contempt especially knowing people like you that, while you were working on your graduate degree, you were running Pikchur, you also had another job; you got your hand in a bunch of other projects at varying degrees. And yet still, last Wednesday of the month there you are, first Tuesday of the month, whatever day different events are happening you really manage to balance all of this. I don’t know if “balance” is the right word because it seems like you’re always running.
- Peter Martinez 00:14:19
Heh, yeah. I mean it hasn’t been easy but there’s always time for these types of events. I mean I make my schedule… I guess I’m really schedule oriented. I have a lot of things that need to get done, tasks and things like that as far as like for work, and I think that’s what’s kept me with the availability to do things that most people would say they don’t have time for. I’m pretty anal about what needs to be done, when what needs to be done and so I work really hard towards that. Attending these events isn’t something that I take lightly, I really like going to these events so I make sure to go, to fit the time to make it available, to make myself available for these type of things. And you’re right I was going to… I actually just finished grad school so things got a little bit easier for me, but I do have a full time job and I do still develop for Pikchur and other applications whenever and in different degrees like you said. So yeah, I think something to take away form that is just be organized. It’s pretty much what’s kept me going I suppose.
- Ryan Parsley 00:15:19
That’s cool. I think that that’s a nice thing to talk about too, the fact that you’ve got a full time job and you’re starting your business. You didn’t decide to take a plunge, you know “Forget this” and jump in there which I think… I hear often people that were successful with start-ups, turning them into something else, they said they personally felt like had they not taken a plunge they could not have made it in this. What factors were involved with you deciding to keep your day job while you work on this other thing and just really spread yourself… for you to put that much effort into it.
- Peter Martinez 00:15:58
Well, I guess it’s really mostly a personal thing. I’m really the type of person that likes to have a plan and likes to be… personally it’s not that I don’t like to take jumps but I like to have calculated jumps, I like to see where I’m jumping to and make sure that there’s somewhere to land. So what I’ll do is I’ll extend myself by working harder later and doing whatever I have to do to make what I want to happen, happen. For example Pikchur, I come from work I get out of work, I went to class and then I went home and I would work. It’s not because I like to work 20 hours a day but because I like to… I would rather put the extra effort in than to jump into the unknown. I guess that’s just a personal thing, I don’t really recommend that for everybody but it’s worked for me.
- Ryan Parsley 00:16:50
I think that that’s great for people here. I think that’d be really encouraging because I’m sure that there’s plenty of people who, you know, they’ve got a family, they’ve got a mortgage, or they just simply do not feel like the thing to do for them is to just drop everything that they have and trying to run towards this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But when you listen on the echo chamber that is the Internet, it seems like people keep saying “Oh, you gotta take the plunge, you gotta take the plunge” and then to hear you say “No, it’s working just fine. Its fine, it’s safe, I feel good about the way it’s going”. As an outsider I don’t know anything about your numbers, but it seems like Pikchur has great adoption; at least just by running into people who happen to know about it.
- Peter Martinez 00:17:38
We have a pretty decent user base as far and our growth has been pretty decent as well. Last month was really good for us and I didn’t have to quit my job, I just have to work harder. I mean I would assume that the people who are saying “Go ahead and take the jump”, they probably feel that they can put more effort into it. I feel that there’s 24 hours in a day. If you have the time take it, just don’t watch as much TV I suppose. I mean do watch TV but not as often as I’d like to, I don’t hang out… I do a lot of work is what I’m trying to say and I think for me that’s the better route. I feel that the people who think that they should take the jump feel that they can get more work done if they didn’t have anything else. I disagree. I think that if you just apply yourself and organize your life, you’ll find the time.
- Ryan Parsley 00:18:29
So that’s sort of like the witticism, “If you really want something done, the best strategy is to ask the most busy person you know to do it for you”, because you’ve got people who are pretty good at not doing things and you have people that are good at doing things and if they’re always doing something they probably are, as a rule, getting more accomplished.
- Peter Martinez 00:18:48
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re going pretty well. I think we’re going good places. We’re working, I’m working on a lot of different things and I feel that it’s worked out for me so I definitely recommend it to people. I think it’s also a lot safer because you’ve still got your nine to five, you’re still collecting your paycheck, but you’re still making what you want to happen, happen.
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I think it’s great whenever any new blog post, podcast, whatever, can have an opinion… well not even an opinion, have someone who’s speaking from experience that’s contrary to what seems to be conventionally understood as a truth.
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Yeah, I mean, It’s worked for me. I’m assuming it’ll work for other people if they just apply themselves. I’m not saying… I don’t wanna sound like a douche because I don’t want people to think “Oh, this guy’s telling me how to live” or whatever or “What’s worked for him” or whatever, I’m just saying it’s worked for me.
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Well I hope that… and I’m pretty sure that the way that you are very careful to phrase it is not you’re telling people that’s how it should work for them but you’re just good enough to share how it has worked for you.
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Right.
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And there’s a world of difference there. No, it’s great. So one thing we talked about a little bit before, I think I’d like to dig into a little bit deeper is the fact that Pikchur has, for a long time, had geoware stuff into it and I think a lot of people are looking into that as the next big thing but, what you’ve been doing that for three years now?
- Peter Martinez 00:20:17
Um, two. Yeah we’ve been doing geoware for quite a while now. We basically have always taken the meta data from these phones and taken the… with photos, what most people are not aware with is that when you take a photo with your cell phone, nine times out of ten there’s going to be an embedded geo-location in it. We go ahead and we’ll parse that so we’ve been doing geoware for quite a while. We’ve been focusing more on it lately because of our geo-social API which we just launched a few months ago, like a month or two ago, I’m not really sure. Whenever we launched SquarePik, I’d have to look back, but I think it’s been about a month. We integrated the foursquare API and allowed people to drop media within venue locations and then also retrieve the media, so we’ve been focusing a lot of our attention within enhancing our existing geoware capabilities and we’re working towards integrating Twitter Places and, like I said before, ideally someday go out and open up a Right Axis. You know, just enhancing what is already an existing geoware system.
- Ryan Parsley 00:21:23
That’s pretty cool. I remember going to Pikchur.com and seeing a bunch of photos kinda mapped out on Google Maps and at that point, I mean it’s not exactly that you pioneered that. If you knew where to dig you could find something like that on Flickr.
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Right.
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But people didn’t… I don’t feel people at large were very aware that this kind of thing can happen. And it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t trivial to kinda get all that set up on Flickr either as I remember it.
- Peter Martinez 00:21:56
Yeah, I mean we’ve always, from the launch, thought it would be really neat to share with people, obviously at the user’s request and privacy settings, but where things were taken. When we first launched the product it was very hyper-local. It was only South Florida community, and then South by Southwest we were finalists for a lot of awards, and then we kinda took off from there. And then suddenly we’ve got people in Japan and in Asia and Europe taking photos and I think that’s where, for me, the real value kicks in because you suddenly see photos on the map from all over the world like people going to work and you get to experience… I guess different parts of what’s going on in the world in… I don’t wanna say the buzz word "real-time" but what’s going on in the world with regular people. They’re going to work, they’re camping or whatever and it’s… for me I think it’s the coolest thing when people post with the geoware stuff. I know people are excited about the possibility of generating revenue through local Mom & Pop shops or the closer you get to the target and things like that and I think that there’s a lot of value in that. I think from the beginning we’ve always thought the geoware was mostly for… was really cool as far as being able to see what’s going on around you and around the world.
- Ryan Parsley 00:23:13
Yeah, I feel personally the extra meta data that you can wrap around content just exponentially makes that more valuable. If you’ve got… I guess one example would be, you could take a bunch of photos. You know, go back a couple years it was a shoebox full of photos and you come back to it a couple years later and you’re like "What is?… Where was this?… Who is this person? I remember this person, I met them… I don’t remember. What was their name? I went to high school with them" and it seemed like the value of a photo far far lower, right? And then all of a… I guess you could start doing like timestamp, datestamp and really the thing was that you’d have to put effort into kinda scrapbooking or something like that to kinda wrap this richer experience around a photo. Now you kinda flash forward to now and, like you say, I take a photo with my camera or with my cell phone and date, time, location… that’s crazy. I upload it to a service, I just e-mail it to you guys, and I say easily "Picture of Jen" whenever you know? And then now I can search for that. There’s so many more ways you can consume this information.
- Peter Martinez 00:24:31
Yeah, and then like you said as far as where it was, who is that?, that’s something we’re taking serious. We’re integrating with the faces.com API which does facial recognition. We want to enable that fairly soon as far as being able to tag people’s faces or auto-tag people’s faces and train the network so that later on once you take a photo it’ll be like "Oh that’s Ryan" or "Oh that’s Brian" or whoever. And so that’s something we’re working on really hard right now to launch, it’s something we’ve talked about for quite a while. You know facial recognition on its own is really difficult but services like faces.com were kind enough to open up an API, and so we’re gonna leverage that to provide that much more value to your media. So not only do you know where you took it, but you know who’s in it and when it was taken and you know whatever information is pertinent to you.
- Ryan Parsley 00:25:22
That is some crazy futuristic stuff. It almost makes me not want to complain about not having a flying car. Peter, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time talking about this definitely very knowledgeable about both the tech and how to get the business adopted by users which I think is something a lot of people really need to focus on. I think that that really shows true as something that more and more of the successful start-ups do and you’re really doing that.
- Peter Martinez 00:25:49
Well thinks for having me. I hope I didn’t bore too many people with my Pikchur talk but it’s great being here and I appreciate the opportunity.
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Oh, sure, not boring at all. I think it’s very… with this target audience I’m sure that’s exactly what they would like to hear right now. Thanks a lot.
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Alright man. Thanks, bye.
The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.