I first met Molly Steenson at South by Southwest in 2000
when she was promoting her award-winning
webzine Maxi and worked at Scient and then Razorfish. Today she's
researching
historical precedents for mobile, social interactions in architecture at Yale
and spoke at the NYCWireless group's meeting held at NYU's ITP on September 27th
on her ethnographic research in Bangalore, India, on mobile phone
sharing between the classes. While at Microsoft Research India and discovered
that, regardless of class, mobile phones
are shared in a variety of ways. With the diverse background and interests,
it's no wonder she's a girlwonder.com!
* Happy Birthday Fotki!
Wednesday, September 27 was Fotki's Birthday!!!!!!!! They're 8-years old! Perhaps you're wondering
just what is this "fotki" all about?
Fotki is a familiar little term for "photos" in Russian. The first version was released as a personal
site by current president, Dmitri Don, together with Katrin Lilleoks in their
New York City apartment. It was a hobby
and a place for them, their friends and relatives living in different countries
to share their photos. It was also the
initial and current home for all Cyber Scene photos!
From 1999 when friends got the Fotki community snowballing
to 5,000 members in 2000. Just a year
later there were 10,000 members and premium membership and online photo
printing were introduced. In 2002 when other companies were closing, Fotki was
hiring more full-time employees and offered phone customer service. Yes indeed, someone actually answered the
phone to help with any questions! With
over 100,000 members and 15,000,000 photos in 2003, Fotki we moved their
servers to a new data center with 24/7 monitoring. Premium members also got the ability to keep
online journals and an option to sell photo prints. New uploading tools and slideshows made photo
sharing more pleasant and Fotki ran its first photo contest! Continuing its exponential growth, in 2004
they had 400,000 members and 30,000,000 photos hosted and in 2005with 650,000
members and 50,000,000 photos online, users enjoy convenient social
bookmarking, RSS feeds, photo tagging, upload by email features, and
geotagging. Now, between offices in Europe and the heart of NYC (Times Square),
they're poised to take over the space, literally! Today they have over 1,000,000 members from
more than 200 countries and over 100,000,000 photos shared in 12
languages. Fotki truly is a tremendous
international family whose members love their digital photo-home. They are connecting users the world over and
I predict another amazing 8 years (and more)!
More at: http://journals.fotki.com/fotkicom/fotkiblog/
