Blog homeA couple of weeks back I again opened up again an opportunity for a “review” on this blog. This time four companies came forward to go under the “musings microscope”. (see original post).
I apologise for being a bit slow on coming back to it…. but everything is a bit hectic at the moment…. today I turned on Skype for a call and within 10 minutes I was having 5 concurrent conversations with different customers from around the world. Anyway, its hectic for all the right reasons - so I am not worried too much (note to self - when turning on Skype - turn it on as invisible)
Excuses over, the website / service I want to review today is Panedia - http://www.panedia.com/
Aaron Spence, CEO, from Panedia, described their service as follows:
“We’re a content development company doing new things for online travel with panoramic virtual tours….all extremely high quality content…all shot by professional photographers. We do put our content on maps (like Google with Streetview) but a quick look at our sites will show that we’re not a Streetview (or Everyscape, Mapjack, Earthmine, BlueDasher + the rest) copy. We’re not trying to shoot every street in the world….we professionally shoot things that travellers may want to see.”
One look at their website and I can see some beautiful images taking up 90% of my screen (the remainder mainly being a Google map). The high quality of the images and the execution on the web is top level.
One of their competitors will be Google street view. Indeed Panedia, in this blog post, have done a side by side comparison. It basically boils down to having a few, high quality, images vs a quantity of low quality “snaps”.
So what do travellers want?
I expect business travellers and those dealing with the practical aspects will tend towards finding Google street view very useful indeed - you can look ahead and work out where to park, the current traffic levels (in some cities) etc.
However Panedia are not going for that market - they are aiming to sell their quality content to 3rd parties (presumably travel companies and consumers directly) in order to help build a reason to go travelling in the first place (especially for leisure travellers with their desktop wallpaper service).
I could spend a great deal of time looking around the Panedia website as the quality of the images drags you in and makes you want to click to the next one (they are linked into adjacent images so you can travel around, much like Google street view)
What challenges do they have?
Challenges will come from two directions
- Keeping images “fresh”
- Competitors
Keeping images fresh
I remember managing website projects for large travel companies who have dedicated staff working on their image libraries. One of the challenges when working at large scale is keeping images fresh and accurate. For example, on a hotel reservation website, if a hotel undertakes renovation - then, according to trading standards rules, the old images may no longer be used…. etc etc…. its a real issue.
Panedia may have made a great upfront investment in creating a wonderful library of images - but in 3-4 years time - they are going to have to do many of them again. Therefore their opportunity is a current one.
Competitors
I am not going to list all competitors because Aaron has done a great job of that in his quote (!)…. however one that probably ought to get a bit of attention is Panoye. Basically this is a community website and has been developed by an individual rather than a company.
It is a community where individuals can upload geotagged panoramic tours with the ultimate aim of building a virtual tour all around the Earth. The guy behind Panoye says that he only did it as a website to put on his CV….
If I was Panedia I would recruit the guy from Panoye as soon as possible. According to his blog he wants to move somewhere sunny and is looking for a job - hence Australia would probably be fine (if the visa can be arranged!)
Why am I so interested in Panoye?
In my opinion a community effort is really one of the only ways to build a massive collection of quality images and take on Google streetview. OK Panoye isn’t the completed article yet…. but it shows that a community of global photographers can be created….. and therefore, given a bit of backing, it would exceed any effort made as an “expert lead” project.
Power to the people.
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G’day Alex,
Thanks for the review I always love to hear other perspectives on our work as it’s impossible to be objective about something I’ve spent years working on.
I think you are spot on about the opportunity crowd sourcing provides to increase coverage, and it’s something we’re working towards. We’ve developed Panedia using an end to end workflow…from shooting to mapped panoramas most of the process is automated. Being able to control the inputs & quality at every stage of the workflow has been key to the outstanding results we have. Opening up the system to allow others to add content & use our end to end workflow (assuming they have suitable equipment) will be no small task. But before we undertake it, we want to finish development on the best panorama mapping system there is (IMO
and demonstrate there is potential for contributors to actually make money from their contributions. (Panedia is a commercial site after all)
Concerning updating content, our goal is to have a professional panorama photographer in major cities… (in Australia that would be the 8 state capitals) producing content all year round in their city & region. With a fulltime pro photographer per city/region & our fast workflow, outdated content would not be an issue.
Thanks, Aaron Spence
http://panedia.com
Hi Alex,
Thank you very much for listing my hobby-CV project as a competitor to Panedia. And also - thanks to Alex for his great site. I created my site because I needed a place for my own panoramas (and because, at the moment, I had enough spare time:)… Other people liked it — and this is how Panoye is born.
Panoye and Panedia are different. If somebody want to make professional spherical panoramas — he must have a panoramic tripod, expensive lenses, profesional software. But, many people enjoy panoramic photography with normal cameras, free software, and they make only partial or cylindrical panoramas. Some of those panoramas are great, some aren’t. Some are made by professional photographers, some by absolute beginners… But hey, they want to share their work online. I’m proud they decided to do it on Panoye
Tomo Krajina
PS. Croatia (where I live) is also a sunny place, but I agree - working in Australia would be nice
)))
And here I am, the potential 3rd party travel company interested in buying fantastic inspirational content for my site. Seriously.
But here is the question (challenge) for the producers: how do I differentiate my site if you sell the same fantastic inspirational content to everyone else?
This is our current conundrum, and the reason why we have not licensed travel pictures from any of the existing great and professional content libraries, but rather collected our own tavel pictures + family + friends + user generated pictures, that we have processed in the most professional way.
We still have to finalise our decision on videos, virtual tours etc so any ideas are welcome - as far as we remain unique.
Daniele
G’day Daniele,
It’s a great question you ask, and one I’ve considered quite a bit in the past.
From a provider (our) point of view it’s a pretty simple equation. We either have very few clients who pay lots of money which results in a relative scarcity of our product, or a very large number of clients that pay a little money. Obviously fewer high playing clients means more exclusivity for the content…. while total exclusivity would require the licensee to to basically buy our entire business by covering all our costs + profit.
Of course differentiation and exclusivity while similar concepts are not the same thing. When we finish developing our product offering there will be numerous options within the product range. Including:
a) Showing small panoramas on maps.
b) Showing small, medium or fullscreen panoramas on their own.
c) Showing large panoramas with hotspot links.
d) plus more.
This will allow a content licensee the freedom to customise their implementation of our content to suit their site and provide plenty of differentiation. Additionally the licensee will choose which content they want to use. On Fraser Island for example we have over 250 mapped panoramas. While each licensee will use what they consider to be the best panoramas, everyone is different so there will be plenty of differentiation just in panorama selection given the large range we provide.
Now that I’ve made some differentiation arguments, I’ll put my position on the table. I regard the products we’re developing as tools. Sure they feature amazing content, but they’re produced to support the licensees existing content…. not ‘be’ the licensees total content. In the same way virtually every travel website now has some flavour of google ’style’ maps implemented, I hope in the future travel sites will start to use high quality, high resolution virtual tour content ubiquitously. (Lets face it, there is no better way to show a place online, and as a frequent traveler…I wish travel sites would provide content like ours of places I *haven’t* been
One caveat, Google maps are free, high quality/high resolution panoramic virtual tour content is not….so far. I think early adopters will lead in this area of quality paid content while the rest of the crowd will eventually follow by using free streetview content or similar. (The quality is poor, but it’s better than nothing)
I’m imagine you’ve considered these points before, but hopefully I’ve provided something to ponder.
Thanks, Aaron Spence.
http://panedia.com