Juan Tapiola, co-founder of Pixoo, contacted me about his “beauty salon” for social networking sites. Pixoo features a global team of digital stylists and the automated management service that assists them to improve your online photos. Sounds strikingly like my ProfileDoctor pitch from four years ago.
Beta testing for Pixoo is occuring in Spain and the United States. When the service is live photo enhancement will cost $20.
Juan offered me free re-styling of a picture of my choice. I chose a typical photo of me, near the water, Boston skyline in background, and messy windswept hair. I wanted to see how the pixel pushers dealt with hundreds of wayward hairs.
As you can see in the photo, they changed the background and my hair and my outfit. Basically I don’t look like original photo at all. If this was a dating product, I would trash it from the outset, but Juan says it’s for social networks, which he for some reason thinks is a more applicable market to go after.
I disagree 100%. Few people will to pay money to have their Facebook photos tweaked. There are enough Flash-based websites that allow you to upload and edit your photos already, and Photoshop is coming out with a web-based version very soon.
This is a perfect example of why it pays to engage in some market research before you sink a whole bunch of time and effort into creating a workflow process, website, training editors, etc.
File under “too easily replicated and not enough interest”, at least in Pixoo’s current form.
