Immersive Tours, 360cities.net and the World of Panoramic Photography
Posted in Press Release, Self Promotion, Software as a Service on November 19th, 2009 by Ezra – Be the first to commenthttp://phillycreativejobs.com/jobmarket/job_market_20091101.aspx
by Bruce Pales, 1 Nov 2009
Bruce Pales heads up commercial activities at Prague based 360 Cities. Bruce is pleased to play a key role in bringing virtual reality photography into the mainstream, specifically via the creation of commercial propositions for panorama photographers. Bruce can be contacted at bruce.pales@360cities.net
Like most people, I was struck by the beauty of the photography when I encountered 360cities.net for the first time back in late 2007. I’m a commercial guy with a finance background and extensive experience in Business Development and Sales, and I get as big a thrill hanging out in gallery cafes as I do viewing the exhibits and an even greater thrill when I see a particularly attractive income statement or balance sheet. I’d seen panoramic photography before, on real-estate and travel websites, but I’d never seen such beautiful, high quality photography (“fully-spherical, high-resolution immersive imagery” is the way its devotees refer to it) of such interesting places neatly located on a map as I encountered on 360 Cities, and I was hooked.
I got lured into 360 Cities by a couple of beer drinking friends – one who invested in the company as an angel and the other who had helped the young founder of 360 Cities create a business plan and raise seed capital. So here I was, January 2008, sitting in our office in Prague with the founding visionary team of two, looking at the various possibilities of making 360 Cities commercially viable. At the time, 360cities.net had published about 5,000 immersive panoramic images (“panos”) taken by a small but enthusiastic member base of about 40, with the goal of growing that to 100,000 images from 1,000 members someday, and we were keen to generate sufficient revenue to allow this to happen.
Creating and selling virtual tours was an obvious way for the company to earn money. You’ve seen virtual tours on tourism and other websites. Many of our photographer members with sufficient programming skills were already creating virtual tours for clients in which the panos and the tour itself rest on the clients’ sites, which is not a bad proposition. Nevertheless, there are three disadvantages in following this approach:
The performance of the tours depends on the robustness of the client’s server, which can result in tours where panos either load slowly or don’t load at all.
The photographers spend a lot of time and effort creating and integrating the virtual tours into the client’s website.
The tours are static and cannot be easily distributed to other websites in order to be seen by a wider audience.
The 360 Cities platform is a powerful and time-saving way for pano photographers to publish their work as individual images. So we decided to extend to our members those same benefits for the creation of virtual tours (which we call “Immersive Tours”). We wanted our members to be able to build tours for their customers easily on our platform using only a web interface, such that the resulting tour would appear on 360cities.net and be easily embeddable in the client’s site and elsewhere with one line of HTML.
360 Cities is also a Premium Content Partner of Google Earth, which means our content is automatically included in Google Earth’s Preview and Gallery layers. This is of big value to our members and their clients, who like the idea of the additional audience for their tour images.
We began creating our online Immersive Tour Builder in early 2009 and officially rolled it out to our members in the summer. Commercial success thus far has been encouraging:
A growing number of our photographer members are building “Immersive Tour Widgets” on the 360 Cities platform, citing the fact that the Immersive Tour Builder is easy to learn and use.
Members have experienced some early successes in selling the Immersive Tours to businesses, who appreciate the unique distribution of their tours on 360cities.net and images on Google Earth.
Immersive Tours embedded in clients’ websites are performing at the same level as they do on 360cities.net.
Today, almost two years later as I write this, we’re approaching 40,000 published panos on 360cities.net by over 700 photographers. That 100,000 panos from 1,000 photographers dream will become a reality next year in 2010. Our team has grown to five – although we still have the feeling that we’re understaffed. Best of all, we now have a solid revenue model in our online Tour Builder and Tour Widget product. More reasons for pano photographers to join and grow with 360 Cities. Cheers!
360Cities is a partner of and represented by lucidCircus in North America. For more information contact ezra@lucidcircus.com
