Lazy Sundays and Online Prints

My Sundays are lazy. Things move slowly and my perception is groggy. This is usually fueled by sleep-deprived Saturdays spent desperately cramming a week’s worth of chores, social obligations and general fun into one 24-hour period. And every alternate Saturday, I play a late-night, low-stakes poker game with some friends. This makes things worse, because I end up getting home on the wrong side of 4:00am. I usually lose at poker. So every alternate Sunday, I’m not just extra lazy, but extra grumpy as well.

What’s all this got to do with anything? Well, read on, because this is how it started. So I’m in bed again, on one such Sunday, having sorted breakfast out. Since my mind is not at its usual sharp best, I’m lazily sorting through my email, tossing out the junk – folks in Mongolia (so it seems) offering to enlarge certain parts of my body and/or sell me a Rolex for about $100. Innovative! There’s another bit of junk from someone called Zoom.In. And that’s the subject of the post today.

Apparently these folks will print and ship my digital photos. OK, big deal, this is hardly a new or path breaking business model. But I will admit that I haven’t really seen an Indian site do this before. And the “starting at Rs.4 per print” makes me raise an eyebrow. I cringe (thinking I’m going to regret this) and click the link (www.zoom.in) on the emailer….

Cheesy pun on the Zoomin’, and the zoom.in aside, I’m surprised by a very clean, very Flash and AJAX, very Web 2.0 site that actually looks very impressive. Hmmm. So what’s it do? Well, it’s got the usual – you can upload photos (unlimited storage) and share the link with friends. It’s got the interesting – you can import photos from your Picassa or Flickr account. And it’s got the store, where you can order prints – starting at four bucks a pop for the 4 x 6 on Kodak Royale photo paper. And it’s got some interesting touches – prints on metallic paper, on mugs, t-shirts and other such. Very nice. And the killer feature – just email photos directly from your phone to an @zoomin.com address and they get added to your online album. Neat, no?

Must test, I think to myself. Perfect little zero-energy project for my Sunday afternoon. So I sign-in and upload a few photos. An excellent experience given that you can select multiple photos together, and not have to go through the tedium of doing this one at a time!

I decide to order some 6 x 8 prints, and try the metallic paper, then I do a photo-mug. Cute. I also pick up my 15 free 4 x 6 offer (available to everyone when you first set up your account with them). And finally, clever boy that I am, I enter my coupon code for a free 2 GB pen drive with orders over Rs.250 (I found this on their blog). By the way, there’s also a flat shipping charge of Rs.25 anywhere in India.

The ordering process is fantastic, and a dream to use. You can preview each print separately, or all together, crop images, and select the optional touch up service (supposedly they will clean up your photos before printing).

Two not so good things happened – first, my order was delayed – it arrived 3 days after they said it would, and second, they printed my mug up-side-down!! Maybe they were playing poker the night before as well! In any case, this allowed me to test their customer service, and it was pretty good. Someone called my back within 24 hours of my grumpy email, and they shipped me a right-side-up mug right away (took another 3 days to get to me). Walk across to my desk to check out the mug!

Now, I did a bit of looking around, and they do have some competition in India. In fact, it seems that this space is pretty crowded already. There’s Snapfish (http://www4.snapfish.in) powered by HP, who offer 4 x 6 for Rs. 2.95, and 30 prints free when you set up an account. Then there’s iTasveer (http://www.itasveer.com), 10 free prints at sign-up and Rs. 2.90 for 4 x 6. They also have a ton of options for photo gifts, like mugs, tees, mousepads, mounted (framed) prints and so on. There’s also Picsquare (http://www.picsquare.com/), Rs. 2.99 for 4 x 6, and 10 free 6 x 8 prints on sign-up.

So, was it fun? You bet; though I’m still not convinced that a photo-mug is absolutely essential. What I really need is a photo mousepad, or a photo keychain (not!!). So next Sunday, I’ll try out iTasveer or Snapfish!!