The 101 on 2 dimensional barcodes

As you may know, part of snapizzi's platform is based on the use of 2 dimensional barcodes. 2D barcodes are hugely popular in Asia and Europe but are pretty new in North America. 2D barcodes are incredibly beneficial as they can store a few hundred times more information than ordinary barcodes and offer an extraordinary variety of B2C and B2B applications that are just beginning to be explored.

Today, 2D barcodes are primarily used through your mobile device (phone, PDA, etc) - bridging the gap between the online and offline world. 2D barcode readers on your mobile phone ‘read” the barcode from a photograph taken by your camera phone (download a free reader application if you don't have one, check out Beetag or do a google search for alternative). You just take a picture of the 2D barcode and your mobile phone acquires and actions on the content of the 2D barcode. The content is usually a URL - take of photo of a 2D code and your mobile phone immediately displays the web site - but they can also return email addresses, business cards, etc. 2D barcodes can be placed on just about anything but you typically see them on products and in media such as billboards, newspapers, advertising, etc. Many companies are linking 2D barcodes to unique discounts, coupons and other incentives - just another great reason to give them a try.

snapizzi's 2D barcode, used in capturing photos from ANY camera, not just your camera phone.

The most common versions of 2D codes are QR Codes and Datamatrix - the latter is what snapizzi uses as it increases the accuracy in grouping and organizing photos. While you can use our datamatrix codes with your camera phone, snapizzi integrated and leveraged the 2D barcode technology to be used with ANY digital camera. We use the information stored in the 2D barcode to reference the images on our web platform. snapizzi’s use of 2D barcodes is truly innovative for high volume of portrait photography, especially school, sport and event photographers as our 2D barcodes automatically generate online private galleries ready for sale for each individual being photographed. This means no more sorting and organizing through thousands of school photos or assigning metadata to countless marathon pictures or capturing a myriad of contact information onsite at an event or party – no manual intervention needed.

If you want to learn more about the 2D barcodes, check out wikipedia (sited in above QR/Datamatrix links) or just give us a shout - we love to talk about what we do.

Countdown to PhotoShopWorld Las Vegas

Only six weeks until PhotoShopWorld Las Vegas! Why snapizzi at PhotoshopWorld, you might ask? Well, besides the incredible teams at PSW and NAPP who put together these events, over half of attendees are photographers and some seriously talented ones at that!

We attended PSW Boston earlier this year to share how snapizzi enables portrait photographers of all sizes - whether shooting school, sport or event photos. snapizzi had such a positive response, we are heading to their "main event" in Las Vegas, October 1-3, 2009. We are looking into some really cool onsite event activities - so stay tuned!

snapizzi CEO, Jesper Sondergaard at PhotoShopWorld Boston, 2009

Scheduled snapizzi website outage

On Tuesday, August 11th, snapizzi will be integrating our back-end technology in preparation for the launch of our new school photography solution - a must-have platform for anyone who takes school pictures. As a result, on August 11, 2009 between 12:01 am to 11:59 pm, you will not be able to access our website (login, upload photos, etc.) The website will be fully accessible again on August 12, 2009. If you have any questions or need any assistance during this period of time, please don't hesitate to contact our customer support via email at support@snapizzi.com or by phone at (805) 284.9333. And, feel free to ask for details on our upcoming school photography release - we would love to share a sneak preview.

We appreciate your patience and look forward to seeing you again on August 12th!

New IZ tag applications are awesome

We have seriously upgraded our IZ tag technology so that IZ tags can now be applied to just about anything – runner’s bibs, athlete’s jerseys,  event nametags and buttons –– as long as IZ tags are 100 x 100 pixels of the photo, we can read it. 

This is great news for sports and event photographers who can now automatically group an infinite number of photos of one person by multiple photographers through an event – from marathons to VIP affairs and receptions.  Even with group or team shots, each individual will automatically get a copy of the photo into their private gallery.

Read more on snapizzi’s technology in action at 2009 Vision 5K race where we automatically captured over one thousand participants in six locations along the route by a team of photographers - delivering private photo galleries for all attendees automatically.  We love that our technology can now replace manual searching and sorting by bib number and make photos available in hour – it’s awesome! 

Welcome to snapizzi's blog

Well, we just launched our blog and are excited about a new forum to chat with you.  While we love our Twitter and Facebook, it is nice to have a place to call our own.  On our blog, you find the latest on our website improvements, articles about our technology and cool things our customers are doing.  You can also ask questions, find answers and share great ideas with us and others.  Or, just stop by and say hello - we are very social.