Mobile Flipbook Studio

My niece recently had one of these done with her boyfriend at a graduation party. Our family thought it was a great idea! Have you ever seen this done?

http://www.iloveflipbo​oks.com/

I've never seen it before, but it looks VERY cool. I dig it.

I do wonder what the licensee fee is. I don't like that it requires multiple licenses to do multiple set-ups, but I'm going to wait 'til I get the info to pass judgement.

Seems like a great niche as a stand alone thing, but also a great addition to doing event photography, if ya got the bodies.

I disagree. It's their software and licensed for single users. Perhaps they have a discount structure for multiple booth setups...

I think this is a neat idea. I bet that couple is making money hand over fist at all those events!

'bout $10Gs investment... and the 'software key' (dongle) is quite expensive even for the following years...

It's a great concept no doubt. But way outta my price range...

it seemed to say that a dongle only does a certain amount of prints too... is that right? If so, that would suck, you'd have to keep paying them.

I wonder if a clever photographer could figure out how to do his/her own, or if there is some kind of copyright or patent on the whole idea. The license fee does seem to be rather expensive. The only people who seem to be making any money are the people who sell the licenses. It would take a lot of flipbooks to cover $10G.

I hope I'm not doing anything uncool by posting this info... it's not really proprietary info, anyone can get it, and more details, by emailing them. They were quick to reply, which is a plus on the customer service side. I will leave out specific pricing.

5000 books per dongle after the first year(which is unlimited)... which is limiting, but would take alot of event hours to use, I'm sure 5000 is plenty for a year. But what sucks is your "each price" essentially goes up if you don't need/use all 5000 in the year...

As with any franchise/licensee situation, what you are paying for is the research and development they did to automate/document the process/business and put it together in a kit form... take vid, chop it, format it for print, lay it out so it will cut easily using a slitter, and then stack and staple. I'm sure that all took some serious programming. The photoflipbook concept isn't new at all, but the automation so you can do that "while you wait" at an event is great. Especially under 2 minutes!! I think it's impressive.

And they (and franchisees) seem to charge by the hour, not per book... I guess they could charge per book as well, but that wasn't obvious at the various licensee sites I checked. Which I guess is good, because you get paid whether or not anyone shows up and makes a book. Just some general ball park calculations, I came up with about (13) or so three-hour events to cover the initial investment... That's not unheard of for a year running an event business... but still... soo many factors involved... as with any business...

Thanks for blogging about PicFlips! We just did a 50th surprise birthday party tonight and the guests had a ton of fun.

As for the dongle discussion below, the 5000 print dongle only expires when it is used up so no worries about losing prints if you have a slow year. Based on what our licensees are charging, the licensing fee ends up being about 5 to 7% of revenue. We feel that this is a fair price and without it we wouldn't be able to pay all of the costs related to programming, patenting the system and all of the other costs associated with growing the licensing business.

Feel free to contact any of our licensees and get their take on things.

Have a great weekend!

Shawn

Shawn, thanks for joinin' and explaining about the dongle. I hope you don't mind sharing a few of the details in a public forum. (PM me if you'd like me to edit any of my posts.) Perhaps this thread will generate a few new licensees for you. Lots of lurkers and searchers.

Was I right about only charging by the hour? Or do you charge for the books too?

It really looks like a fun business. I myself just don't have the capital...

JohnE, the $10K includes ALL necessary equipment too. That's not just the license fee.

Yes, thanks for joining Shawn. I appreciate your business innovation. However, it seems to me a skilled photographer, with a little ingeniuity, sweat, and imagination, along with some computer knowledge, could develop his own system using software, printers, and cutters, readily available today.

I think I'd try shooting a burst of medium jpgs first & try to find a way to bind 4X6s together. The 20D just keeps clicking away & never seems to run out of buffer.

I was thinking along the lines of a movie camera or webcam, and slowing down the frame rate to about 10 / second giving you a booklet of about 80 pages for 6-8 seconds of video. There are paper cutters on the market that will cut business cards (or close to those dimensions) from a regular 8 x 11 1/2 sheet of paper, which might be a good size to work with. The pictures would be so small you wouldn't need very good quality.

I think there is a better solution here: http://www.videoflip.c​o.il/downloads/downloa​d.php more cost effective and feature rich.