April 2012
3 posts
2 tags
Bringing Beautiful Back
Hi There,
With the release of the Olapic Instagram Collector we’ve seen an incredible amount of outstanding new photos! The take-away: Instagram photos from your community are simply fresher, higher quality, and look more beautiful on your site. At Olapic, we want to help you use photos to engage your community in a way that’s both authentic and deeply personal. Thanks for your...
1 tag
Newsletter #13: A Picture's Worth 1 Billion...
A Picture’s Worth 1 Billion Dollars
Hello again,
It’s official. Even the people that live under rocks (do these people actually exist?) have heard about Facebook acquiring Instagram for $1 Billion. With all of this added buzz from the deal, it seems that everyone and their grandma are now snapping and sharing pics in Lomo-fi. Last week we included Youtube, Flickr, and Instagram...
1 tag
Newsletter #12: It's Game Time!
Hello, Real fans live, breathe, and eat every breaking news story, stat, and announcement made by their favorite team - from the moment they wake up, to the moment they go to bed in their blue-and-gold-themed bedroom. At Olapic, we want every team to have an online space where fans, players, and team officials can interact on a minute-to-minute basis. Here are just a few of the ways fans and...
March 2012
9 posts
1 tag
Are You Hangry!?!?
Yes, you read that right. The supergenius cupcake-creating masterminds over at BakedByMelissa are throwing a finger-licking monthly photo-contest. Winner get’s 100 free cupcakes! That’s right, 100 mouthwateringly scrumptious miniature cakes that fit in the palm of your hand! I think you know where we’re going to get our cupcake fix this afternoon! We’ve been drooling over...
1 tag
Hashtagerrific!
Hi,
There are zillions of photos being shared on Twitter everyday. Wouldn’t it be super-mega-awesome if you could tap into that network and reach out to potential new fans? With the new Olapic Twitter Collector you can do just that! Here’s a refresher on how it works. Need help launching a photo campaign? We’ve gotcha covered! In other news, the MIT Media Lab guys have...
1 tag
Introducing The New Olapic!
Hello!
With the arrival of spring, we’re thrilled to announce the newly redesigned Olapic! Our dedicated team of developers have been working around the clock to build a faster, more efficient Olapic from the ground up. What this means for you:
A more powerful, stable Olapic platform
A more beautiful, seamless photo-browsing experience
A more rubust moderation queue for bulk...
1 tag
How To: Use Olapic at an Event
Austin is not only the capital of America’s proudest state, but home to the annual SXSW festival that brings in bands, brands, and quality craft brews from around the country. Mashable, the social media news site, hosted an event at a downtown venue and used Olapic to gather photos from party goers who snapped pics on their mobile phones. Read on to learn how to use Olapic at your next...
1 tag
Newsletter 7: Photoception!
Top O’ the Mornin’ to Ya, Have you ever wanted to revisit your past or become your favorite artist? If you answered yes to one or both of those questions then you should create your very own Metaphoto Gallery! And while we’re on the subject of self-reference, have you been keeping up with your users lately? (wag-of-the-finger) If you happen to be in Austin for SXSW over the...
2 tags
How to Feature Your Users!
It’s incredibly important to reach out, reward, and congratulate your fans and/or readers in order to foster meaningful long term relationships with them. You can highlight a specific user (or of group users) by displaying their high quality, featured content in… 1. In an article/post on your website
2. In a separate gallery on your website
3. In the print edition of your...
3 tags
Nom Nom. Our Favorite Eats on the Lower East!
Last Febuary the Olapic Team decided to play a little “lunch exploration game” on the Lower East Side (near our new office). We abided by one rule, and one rule alone: never go to the same restaurant twice for the entire month. After four memorable weeks of stuffing our faces with a variety of local chow, we’ve come up with a short-list of the best grubspots on the Lower East...
1 tag
3 tags
February 2012
7 posts
3 tags
2 tags
Olapic Newsletter: Kickstarting Your Campaigns
Howdy, The Olapic community is continuing to grow as we receive high quality user-submitted photos from followers all over the world! For this week’s newsletter we’re going to talk about promotion and trend tracking. For every Olapic gallery that you launch, promotion is key to getting the word out. Promoting a new gallery should take place across all of your organization’s social...
5 tags
Photo Gallery of the Week: NY Giants Edition
The weeks leading up to the New York Giant’s phenomenal Superbowl XLVI victory was full of excitement and anticipation. To show their support, Giants fans sent in photos wearing their favorite giants gear from all corners of the globe - from San Francisco, Thailand, Rome, and even Jamaica!
At Olapic HQ, we were amazed by the sheer quality and number of photos that Giants fans sent in...
1 tag
Instagram: Featured: Mobile Photo Group →
instagram:
Earlier this year, a group of mobile photographers got together to form the Mobile Photo Group, an international collective of 11 photographers dedicated to promoting their work and presenting mobile photography as an important and evolving form of photography. It just so happens that some…
3 tags
“Football isn’t just about the game. There are so many things that go on around...”
– Dave Lang, Baltimore Ravens’ digital media manager
3 Ways Social Media is Transforming the Superbowl...
If you’re lucky enough to be watching the game from within the stadium next Sunday, then count yourself as one of the lucky ones. Superbowl 2012 is expected to have one of the “five smallest” attendances ever recorded with a total seating capacity of 68,000 [indystar]. What will this mean? With an estimated 100 million plus television viewers tuning in, and game day commercials designed to engage...
January 2012
4 posts
How to embrace User Generated Content without...
iReport, CNN’s citizen-journalist-social-network, was officially launched in August of 2006. The service allows anyone to upload report-worthy content to CNN’s website. Recently, the CNN Press Room announced an important milestone for the platform: there are now more than one million registered iReporters worldwide. And if that doesn’t make any of you small, independent local news reporters shake...
Go Giants! It’s Big Blue Friday!
Today, the giants are encouraging New Yorkers to wear blue in support of the NY Giants in what it’s called “Big Blue Friday!” Even Mayor Mike Bloomberg has joined the initiative!
I’ll be wearing blue tomorrow for #BigBlueFriday. Join me! Go @Giants!
— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) January 13, 2012
He’s so confident that the Giants are going to pull a victory this Sunday that...
1 tag
Olapic Newsletter: Start the New Year off right by...
Howdy! Happy New Year from your friends at Olapic! Right now is the perfect time of the year to take stock of your budding company, or small business, and ask yourself: Are we adequately engaging our online community? This year, empower your followers by building a thriving community on your site! Need help finding the right tools to use? You’ve come to the right place! Here is a quick tip, as...
Just in time for the NFL Playoffs, the Ravens team...
First it was the current NBA Champion, the Dallas Mavericks, then the current Spain, Europe and World Soccer Champion FC Barcelona and now the Baltimore Ravens, just getting started with the NFL playoffs, have adopted Olapic as their way to connect with their fans with photos and videos. The team is asking their fans to upload their Purple Pride photos, and they have reacted lighting fast,...
December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Olapic Newsletter: 3 Interesting Reads for the New...
Howdy! Happy Holidays everyone!!! Here at Olapic we are getting our new year’s resolutions ready (hint: we are going to make our service even more awesome). If you haven’t thought of any yet, here you have an idea: How are you going to use Olapic in 2012? If you don’t know the answer, here you have some suggestions based on what we have seen so far. Get more eyes on the street: street journalism,...
FC Barcelona celebrates World Cup teaming up with...
We are excited to announce that following the Mavs, current NBA Champios, FC Barcelona, the current Soccer World Champion has also joined the Olapic family to enable their users engage with the club at a new level! Last weekend, FC Barcelona won the FIFA Club World Cup 2011 in Japan. The team wanted to celebrate such special ocassion with their fans, and they asked to submit their photos...
The Mavs, 2011 NBA Champions, Start the Season by...
We get excited when fans are able to experience the game on a whole new level with Olapic! That’s why we’re thrilled to be working with 2011 NBA Champions the Dallas Mavericks! The Mavs, as part of their social media strategy, are using Olapic to display beautiful photo galleries on their site and Facebook Fanpage. Our photo-sharing technology allows them to receive fan photos and videos from...
Why Instagram is Apple’s "App of the Year 2011"
Yesterday Apple announced Instagram as the “iPhone App of the Year” on its iTunes Rewind 2011 list. Instagram topped Angry Birds, Foursquare, Twitter and the likes. Apple calls Instagram, “The year’s definitive photo-sharing app.” The Instagram network is dominating the photo-sharing world with over 14 million users. If this isn’t a sign that photos are the wave of the future I don’t know what...
Olapic Newsletter - The kick-off edition
Greetings! Welcome to issue one of the Olapic Newsletter! Every other week we’ll be updating you with tips on how to use photos sharing and social media to increase engagement, boost traffic on your site, and grow your business. If you have any suggestions about what you would like to see here, just let us know! We’re kicking off the first issue with some must-read articles:
How to Spread Your...
November 2011
1 post
We support American Censorship Day
At Olapic, we help people communicate using pictures because we believe that everyone should be allowed to express themselves and photos is one of the best forms of expression. For that reason, today Olapic is participating in American Censorship Day and covering our logo with a “stop censorship” strip to protest over the SOPA and PIPA bills that are currently before the House and Senate. Today...
October 2011
3 posts
Halloween, A Perfect Opportunity for Increasing...
Halloween is just around the corner and a hair-raising electricity is in the air here at Olapic HQ. What’s all the buzz about? Apart from the excitement we all have for the upcoming weekend festivities (filled with ghosts, ghouls, hot cider, beer, girls dressed in the same costumes they wore when they were twelve, beer, pumpkin-carving, beer, apple-bobbing, beer, red food coloring, and did I say...
The “Occupy Movement” and the Power of...
Why major news outlets should embrace user-generated content or risk alienating their audiences
These days it’s easy to get lost in the media-frenzy surrounding the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests happening here in New York City. Nevertheless, it’s exciting to witness the pivotal role that social media continues to play in spreading the movement across the country. More importantly,...
Olapic is a contestant on "The Pitch," a Silicon...
Here at Olapic we are excited to announce that we have just been selected to be featured on a webseries called “The Pitch.” This series will profile tech start-ups chosen right here in Silicon Alley as they pitch to representatives of Lerer Ventures face-to-face. Lerer Ventures is a seed stage venture capital fund that invests in founders during the earliest stages of their...
September 2011
3 posts
How to design a successful photo contest
Just in case you haven’t noticed yet, photo-sharing is getting HUGE on the social web right now. Running a contest is a great way to tap into all of that content and boost community engagement in a fun and social way.
We wrote an article for Mashable outlining seven tips that will increase the effectiveness of your photo-related content. Keep these in mind!
Define What You’re Trying to...
How to import videos from Youtube
Every second, more than 2 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube. If you wanted to watch all the content uploaded during a single day, it will take you more than 8 years of your life!
Pictures tell the story and are easy to take, but videos can also help you to create more engaging experiences for your users. These are the reasons why we have just released a new feature that enables users to...
5 things we learned from Disqus
Commenting system Disqus , that is used on almost 75% of the sites that use a 3rd party comment provider has been an inspiration for Olapic since our early days (and it’s of course our commenting system on this blog), and we have been defined in several occations as “Disqus for pictures” (We’re not worthy!). And these are the most important things that we’ve learned from observing how Disqus works...
August 2011
4 posts
The photo-sharing war is heating up
This is being a very interesting week at the Olapic HQ. First an earthquake, then Steve Job’s resignation (an inspiration for all of us), and now a hurricane is coming!
But these weren’t the only interesting things that happened this week: we also learned that Facebook is now going after Instagram adding photo filters to his new mobile photo-sharing app. It seems that Facebook tried...
Social Photo Stock: Our hack for NYC Photo Hack...
The biggest photo hackaton ever took place at General Assembly during the weekend of August 20th. After having playing around with photos for a while, the Olapic team couldn’t miss this event. So, we did the unthinkable and woke up at 8am on a Saturday to get ready for a long day of hacking. We all know that incredible things can happen in just 24 hours, and in that period of time, we did...
Twitter rolls out its photo-sharing service... and...
Twitter just confirmed that its photo-sharing and uploading service is now available to all users
This new feature allows users to add images to their tweets using the new camera icon under their status update box. The size limit for the images you can upload is 3MB. These pictures will be hosted using Photobucket and will appear as a pic.twitter link.
And of course, here at Olapic we...
Making a movie around user generated photos: Ron...
“Project Imagin8ion” a contest created by Canon and Ron Howard launched on May 22 and closed yesterday with 96,362 submissions. This is another demonstration of how brands are realizing that the quality of user submission photos has increased dramatically over the last few years and how professionals can now use this content to create more engaging material, something that we have been doing at...
July 2011
7 posts
Is your office space creative enough? Mashable...
When you spend eight hours a day in your office, a stimulating work environment is key to creative success. What does your inspiring office space look like? How does it help you to brainstorm creative digital marketing campaigns? Those are the questions that Mashable, the most renowned social media publication asked to their readers in this article. And they did it using Olapic, where their users...
Are you a good photographer? Find out with...
Now that everyone is taking pictures, it’s time to find out who are the best ones at it. Like parents, everyone thinks that their pictures are the cutest ones, but it may happen that what not everyone shares that opinion about your sepia-filtered photos of lattes and your pet. We keep working to organize all the photos generated by users, and now with Photorank.me, we want to give you the...
Your readers can now tweet photos to your site
Olapic helps power beautiful galleries on your site. And we work very hard at providing easy-to-use tools for your readers to contribute with their pictures.
We recently launched our Smart Uploader (that helps readers submit by importing from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Picplz, and many others). And we also provide Email Photo upload, where users can submit their pictures attached on an email....
How to import pictures from Instagram, PicPlz and...
At Olapic, we continue developing tools to make photo submission really easy. To our existing importing tools from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others and the submission via email, we have just realeased a new set of importers from the most popular photo-sharing apps: Instagram, PicPlz and Picasa. Now you will see these options as part of all thew widgets:
Instagram is one of the most popular...
How to collect pictures via email
Olapic is a service that aggregates pictures from many sources. Your community can already import pictures from Facebook, Flickr and many others. But they generally do that via a web browser. That’s fine, but it makes it hard to submit pictures on the go. At Olapic, we are always thinking of better ways for your community to share their pictures, and today we are launching a new email...
Pictures and tagging between Facebook and Google+
Google has announced a new collection of services named Google+ that aim to compete with Facebook in the Social Media space.
These services include Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and Mobile. You can read a full description of them on the official Google Blog. As part of the mobile service, they have included a featured called “Instant upload”, in their own words:
“Getting photos...
Where to post your photos online
With so many smartphones and digital cameras around, the number of photo-sharing apps has recently exploded. A few years ago, if you wanted to share them, you would use sites such as Flickr, Photobucket or Picasa, or like everyone is doing those days, just upload your pics to Facebook. But if you want a really good mobile experience, apps such as Instagram, Picplz or Path are great alternatives....
June 2011
1 post
Making newspapers and online magazines more...
The arrival of Web 2.0 has changed the way media companies (such as newspapers and magazines) interact with their readers. The web is no longer a place where publishers are pushing content to a passive audience - the rapport has changed. Readers have begun to engage in conversations, sharing their own points of view with blogging platforms (that in many occasions were powered by these own...
May 2011
3 posts
How to link editorial content to a photo gallery
One of the most interesting features that Olapic offers is the ability to link your editorial content to your galleries. With a few clicks, you can create an embeddable uploader that will let your users to contribute with pictures to your galleries right from your articles. This is a great way to increase the interactivity of your pages and increase the engagement of your users. No matter what you...
Moderation tools for photos, videos and comments
Curation is a very important aspect for User Generated Content. At Olapic, we have all the tools that publishers need to make sure that all the content they publish is appropriate. In this short video, you can see how our online moderation tools work:
When you create a new gallery, you can decide whether the pictures have to be moderated or can be directly published. If you activate the...
Import pictures from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and...
These days, many of us have pictures distributed all over the internet. Here is a snapshot of the typical lives of heavy photo users.
…While one Internet user is uploading his photos to Flickr, his friends are tagging him on Facebook at the same time. Then he uses Twitpic or YFrog to tweet some pictures out. The next day he is uploading pictures to a new photo-sharing site…
When a...