Making Family Photos Simple Again
Introducing the world’s first interactive photo album
A new consumer hardware company called Joy launched today with a pre-order for their first product: The Joy Album. Obvious Ventures led Joy’s seed financing and I have the pleasure of serving on the company’s board.
The Joy Album is focused on one thing, and it does it really well: put all your family photo and video memories at your fingertips. There are no ports, no wires, and no applications. All your photos are organized into albums and displayed in beautiful full screen layouts and slide shows. Keep it on your coffee table or kitchen counter and it wirelessly charges on its stand. It’s developed by a team that has worked at Apple, Sonos, and Yahoo and helped create the iMac, Apple TV, and Sonos Play connected speakers.
When I first met Joy CEO Alan Chan and heard his contrarian plan to build a hardware device paired with a cloud service for photo sharing, I was instantly intrigued. I’ve personally experienced a growing frustration that family photo sharing has gotten harder and harder over the last ten years, since the rise of the smartphone. Families now suffer from photo fragmentation —pictures and videos scattered across myriad smartphones, tablets, laptops, and digital cameras.
Many have tried to solve this. The road is lined with skeletons of photo apps and photo sharing services that failed due to the lack of a viable business model. The services that do exist today are focused on one of two things:
- Offering you free online photo sharing in exchange for advertising. Either ads in and around your photos or the extraction of ad-targeting meta data from the contents and patterns found in your family photos.
- Relentlessly selling you photo prints, books, mugs, and other photo merchandise.
I know a little bit about #2. Back in 1999 I helped build the online photo service Ofoto and served as CEO through the acquisition of Ofoto by Kodak.
In the early days of the switch from film to digital cameras, Ofoto was the category leader helping consumers get their photos into online albums, share them with family, and turn them into Kodak prints and albums.
Today consumers are printing a lot less, and sharing a lot more. But that sharing is often reduced to one photo, thrown into a social stream on Facebook or Instagram. The process of organizing family photos and videos into albums, and storytelling and reliving those family memories has gotten a lot more complex. Joy is purpose built to make it simple again in a beautifully designed, ad-free way.
Like the Joy hardware team, I’m an Apple alum. My time at Apple taught me the power of design and the importance of simplicity. Anyone who has shipped a consumer product knows how hard it is to make a product simple. Alan and his team at Joy are building a tightly integrated mix of hardware, cloud software, and smartphone apps to deliver easy private family photo sharing. I believe it’s the first full stack photo sharing solution ever created and I can’t wait to help bring it to market.
Please visit the Joy site to learn more and consider pre-ordering the Joy Album (you’ll get a huge price discount if you do ;-).
