The Digital Insider

At ScanDigital we have been very pleased with the great response we have had to our new film and video digitization services. We are proud to match our unrivaled quality in photo, slide and negative scanning with great video and film transfer. All video and film is transferred onto DVD which is easy to play in any standard player. The quality is excellent and it brings to life old memories that have been sitting in the back of your closet for years.

But what if you are looking for something more than just a DVD copy of your film or video? ScanDigital is happy to place your film and video avi files onto a hard drive. Once you have the full avi files you have the ability to do so much with your old film. There are a number of programs available to edit your home movies ranging from very basic programs like iMovie to professional level programs such as Final Cut Pro. From transitions and effects to adding music and chapter points, you are given the ability to personally customize your precious memories.

Special Events can be a great way to use your newly digitized film. Seamlessly integrate stills and video together for that big slide show, everyone will love what you have created for the big anniversary, rehearsal dinner, birthday etc. Also, you can now post your videos on the web. This will allow you to share your video with friends and family members all over the country, even all over the world. We have already heard stories of our customers sharing great moments with family members as they watch their old films and videos. And that is really what our process is all about, restoring precious memories so that it can bring family and friends together, no matter how far apart they are.

Getty Images, the leading provider of stock photography and video, agreed to a buyout offer today from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman.  At ScanDigital, we continue to work closely with professional photographers wishing to digitize their life work and monetize the image through the sale of stock photography.  The move today by Hellman & Friedman supports our belief that this segment of the market will continue to grow.  Getty Images owns iStockphoto.com, a site that provides royalty free images.  This cost structure has proven itself to be particularly attractive for many web developers and companies seeking images for their website.

iStockphoto as well as other web based companies that sell stock photography continue to be a great source of ongoing income for professional photographers and are an invaluable resource for web designers and graphic artists.  Images that once could have cost hundreds of dollars now cost only a few dollars which has increased overall volume.  The stock photography industry has also grown as meta-tagging and search capabilities have been improved allowing users to more readily find and access images matching the user’s specifications.

It will be quite interesting to watch how Getty grows and changes as a company under Hellman & Friedman’s management.  It will also be interesting to see if other private equity firms make a run at Getty’s competitors, such as Corbis.  At ScanDigital we continue to be excited about our ability to assist photographers to bridge the gap from analog to digital.  It is an all around winning situation: professional photographers are able to increase their income through the sale of the images, the stock photography sites enjoy a larger library, we have additional digital conversion work and, perhaps most importantly, the end user has access to better images in a larger library at a lower cost.

I was very excited when I recently learned that the DigiPac shipping option was added to ScanDigital’s artillery of high performance parts. DigiPac, the only way to ship your precious memories, eliminates the hassle of printing out a mailing label and locating appropriate packing materials for your treasured photos.

All ScanDigital customers have the convenience of registering online for the service. The process is really so easy from start to finish: gather your photos, create an account, request a DigiPac and for only ten dollars you will receive a box, pre-paid shipping label, bubble wrap and small plastic bags by mail within two to five days. All packing materials are recyclable and reusable. Then you just drop your photos in the box and about 10 days later the same box returns with your materials, a disc and instructions on how to access your photos online.

I was personally excited when I heard we were about to launch the DigiPac. It was one of those things that I knew immediately would help our customers because let me tell you, there have been so many times where I want to ship something that I end up in a mad scramble to put together a makeshift box only to realize that I do not have all the proper shipping materials. DigiPac eliminates the hassle of going to the UPS store or if you’re like me, creating a box practically from scratch.

Some of the most respected companies in the world use the pre-paid packaging method, the vision at ScanDigital was to model this while maintaining the highest customer service rating among our clients. I’m sure many of you for one reason or another have had to send a laptop or computer back for repair. When the packaging from, lets say Apple in this case arrives, you are instantly put at ease with the contents of the shipping package. A sturdy box, extra cushioning, and a label. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

The ScanDigital DigiPac…helping everyone sleep better.

About Brian Samuelson: ScanDigital welcomes Brian Samuelson, the newest member of the ScanDigital PR team. Brian comes from a variety of backgrounds within the of public relations, marketing, and event planning fields. Outside of the office, Brian enjoys photography, surf, and travel.

When we set out to create ScanDigital, one of the primary goals of the business was to eliminate the fine print. Meaning we never want our customers to have to dig through pages and pages of our website to understand the service we provide. Growing up my mother always emphasized with us the golden rule and this has carried into to my business life. I constantly try to put myself in our customers’ shoes and imagine how I would want a company to interact with me.

I am very proud of our customer service team and the superb service they provide to our customers. I have been encouraged by the enthusiast positive reaction and feedback our customers provide on this front. It seems in this day and age people are pre-conditioned to expect to spend much of their time on hold when dialing a toll free customer service line. I am not sure how this happened, but I can tell you it goes against almost every business principle I have ever learned.

I came across an article about a month ago called “7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers” (the full article can be found here: http://foundread.com/2007/10/18/7-habits-of-highly-effective-managers/). As I was reading the article, I realized that many of the principles correlated with the same principles I have tried to instill in our customer service team. The principles mentioned in the article are as follows:

1. Know Your Limits
2. Listen First Before Speaking
3. Ask “Why?” not “What?”
4. Be Decisive
5. Be Responsive
6. Communicate Frequently
7. Manage Passion

From a customer service perspective many of these are the same. To correlate these, my keys for our superb customer service:

1. Know Your Limits - If you do not know the answer to every one of a customer’s questions they will be much happier if you turn them over to someone that can answer their questions.
2. Listen First Before Speaking - Our customers’ questions span a broad range of topics and often the best thing we can do is listen first and speak second.
3. Ask “Why?” not “What?” - This is a particularly important one and not necessarily the most intuitive, but in order to provide the highest level of customer service we need to understand why our customers are using our service and how they intend to use the digital images. For example, a customer who wishes to use the files digitally we will want to recommend our “Normal” resolution levels; however, if the customer wants to create enlarged reprints or plans to use the images in a professional capacity then they should use our higher resolution settings.
4. Be Decisive - The process of digitizing is foreign to many of our customers and they are looking for us to provide clear, straight forward answers in a decisive manner.
5. Be Responsive - Our customers trust us with their precious photos and memories which makes it critical to our business that we be available and responsive. Doing otherwise would be unfair to our customers and would be terrible for our business. On top of that, its just the right thing to do.
6. Communicate Frequently - This idea is similar to #5, but again the idea is to keep the customer informed at all times. This puts their mind at ease.
7. Manage Passion - Our service is great and I love the passion our employees feel for it, but that does not mean we should stop improving our service. My goal is to constantly tweak and improve our service and system to provide the most user-friendly, hassle free service possible. Sometimes this means we need to recognize that our customers have great insights into where we can improve the service and in turn we need to be open to their suggestions. It is for this very reason that I still personally make time to take customer calls from time to time. It is important that we understand our customer their needs and motivation for using our service.

Right off the bat here, I must admit that I have never been involved in any kind of evacuation. A few earthquakes and some school drills are about all I’ve attended. When it comes to fires, tornadoes, hurricanes or even an alien invasion I couldn’t even imagine the thoughts that run through a homeowners head. Having just a few minutes to get yourself, your family, and anything else you may find important out and on the move has got to be tough. What items do you take? What do you leave behind? What types of questions do you ask yourself? Do you really get the time to ask these questions?

Recently we here at ScanDigital have been receiving materials from those who have gone through just that. As I’m sure you know by now, Southern California has been fighting wildfires from Santa Barbara all the way down to the Mexican border. Thousands of homes have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the devastation. The story we are hearing first hand here every day is that of families gathering up whatever they can, clothes, heirlooms, and pictures and seeking shelter. The luckier ones have been able return to their homes and are working to return everything with minimal effort.

Having started as part of the ScanDigital team only weeks before this tragedy, I’ve realized in these dangerous evacuation situations it simply makes sense eliminate the burden of trying to rescue your photos by having them preserved and digitized in advanced. One of my favorite parts of our service is that the images are backed up to our offsite, secure servers, meaning our customers do not even need to worry about grabbing their CD/DVD in an unforeseen tragedy. If leaving pictures behind allows for more time to gather other items that can’t be replaced, I say save those. Printing out photos later just makes sense. It’s a problem one could worry about after all the other hassles are squared away. I like to think that the work I am doing provides a bit of the safety and piece of mind to our customers who know their photographs are safe offsite and online, hopefully this helps people during times like these.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Muhammed El-Hasen from the Daily Breeze. We had a great discussion and covered topics from how we founded the Company to our plans for the future. The article was great and I have been meaning to post it for everyone to see. Have a read when you have a chance. The article can be found online at the following address:

http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/articles/10663116.html

Alternatively, the print version (including photos) can be found here:

http://www.scandigital.com/newspress.php

Last week, Greg Soblete from TWICE magazine spent some time discussing ScanDigital and our new affiliate program with Anderson Schoenrock. When you have a chance check out the article posted over at . The interview and article was also featured in TWICE’s print publication. The full article can be founde here: http://www.twice.com/article/CA6487977.html?q=scandigital

From time to time I’ll wander the internet for something new and absolutely intriguing. Usually when this happens it hides behind account sign ups, which I’d probably forget the usernames and passwords anyway. If I like my latest discovery, I tend to research it and learn more about it only to bump into a few people over the weekend who shoot down the one I’ve picked in favor of something better, faster and easier than what I’ve stumbled upon. The way it seems to go more often than not as the speed of development and innovation continues so quickly it is hard to keep pace.

Recently I learned that Adobe was gearing up to move its full software line to the web. I was intrigued and began to investigate. There are a handful of companies trying to take Adobe like applications online and meet that challenge (Snipshot.com, Picnik.com, Fauxto.com just to name a few). Soon these startups will be beat or acquired by Adobe in its quest to move these applications to the web. Photoshop, the software on the lips of anyone doing image editing, is about to be integrated into a webpage. Well, to be fair “about” is a stretch I suppose. Rumor is that it will take up to a decade to make the full-blown version online, but within the year there should be a free version available.

This simply makes sense… the whole idea of having software sit online somewhere. This way the company knows exactly who’s using the software and when. No more pirated software, no need for updates/upgrades, and it pays for itself with advertisements! Yeah, I’m not too thrilled about that last part either, but I’d hope that if you subscribe to their program, you’d get those removed. Plus, it seems everyone has their pictures online somewhere to share with other people, why not fix them up a bit online first.

Now, Picnik and Snipshot are free so I’ve played around with their sites. They’re basic, but considering these applications sit within your browser, it’s amazing. Plus the average user does not need the wide spectrum of photo editing tools offered by a program with as much complexity as Photoshop. Fauxto’s site requires a sign in and going against my personal guidelines, I created an account. Now that I’ve tested a handful of these, I would say Fauxto comes the closest to Photoshop by providing layers and effects along with other goodies. I’d say check it out, but be careful before you go bragging to your buddies at the bar about your latest discovery… the next best thing is probably waiting just around the corner.

A few months ago I received an email from Richard Derks, the co-founder of a new company called Respectance, seeking a partnership with ScanDigital. At that time I had not heard of Respectance, but as I came to understand the company and the service it was providing I was thoroughly impressed.

Respectance is a company that allows its users to generate online tributes to deceased relatives, friends, idols and mentors, basically anyone you might want to pay a tribute to. Respectance has been called “the myspace for the deceased”, while this is a somewhat grim way of describing it, the point is that respectance provides an online social space for individuals to pay tribute to their loved ones. I think it is a fantastic service and a touching way to remember those you love in this digital age. The digital age in which we live is really about using digital technologies to enhance our lives. The ability to be able to access those old photos and fond comments about a loved one instantly from anywhere on your computer is such a step forward from having to dig out an old photo album in a box somewhere to relive these memories.

The company is the first to use the combination of rich media combined with relevant content, to provide an outlet for emotional expression. With emo-social media, Respectance has created a dedicated venue for sharing emotions and memories online, unlike all-purpose social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, that are inappropriate for personalized tributes. As Derks describes the company:

“Respectance is establishing a new tradition for sharing memories of loved ones. Finally, there is an appropriate outlet for sharing emotions and memories of loved ones for all to appreciate, enjoy and contribute to.”

Respectance contacted us about a potential affiliate partnership because they were finding that many of their users were in need of a quality photo scanning service that could provide the fastest turnaround in the industry and they were particularly intrigued by our online gallery and ability to provide a web-based version of photos to their users. I am very proud to associate the ScanDigital name and brand with companies like Respectance.

In addition to adding Respectance as an affiliate partner, we have recently launched an official program to pursue these type of affiliate relationships. We have built a system from the ground up which allows our affiliates to track users coming to our site through their site and share in the success generated by these customers.

From time to time, I plan to highlight some of our Affiliates that I believe would be of interest to our customers.

For more information on Respectance visit: www.respectance.com

For more information check out the details using this link ScanDigital’s Affiliate Program.

It has been about 2 months now that I have been working on posts for The Digital Insider. I am constantly scouring the internet for new and interesting topics and asking the team here at ScanDigital what they think our customers and readers would be interested in reading about. More often than not it is someone here on the team that has an interesting idea that lead to my posts, so I thought it was time to bring in other contributors and authors.

Our staff here is a group of highly trained individuals, with a diverse background within a variety of niches in the photography and digital photography field. For most of these people working with digital photos and technology is not just a job, its something they love. Outside of the office they are generally keeping up with the latest and greatest innovations which makes them ideal contributors to our blog. I’m excited for them to share their thoughts with you.