FocalPower…the blog

The Team has been quiet for a while and we thought it time to give a formal update as to what has been happening at FocalPower.

The past few months has seen an unprecedented number of economic, market, and political changes. Dave and I have been absorbing the implications of all these changes just like the rest of you have. These changes have definitely increase the challenges faced by FocalPower as a boot-strapping startup. Regardless, we continue forward with even more enthusiasm behind what we are doing because we believe that:

• the FocalPower vision speaks even louder today to the challenges facing photographers
• recent changes in the photography market only validates FocalPower’s vision and plan

Dave and I have both been busy with our day jobs (which is what currently funds FocalPower toward our initial service launch).  Yet we still burn the midnight oil working on the FocalPower Photo Asset Management service.  And we are both excited at the continual interest and increasing usage of the Photo Quote Widget, now serving up thousands of quotes daily!

On a personal note, Dave and his fiancé took a long weekend break a few months back to sneak off to elope with a handful of friends in attendance. Congratulations Dave!

Life changes and changing times aside, we have been hard at work executing against our launch plan. As we push toward a public beta of the service, we have expanded our development team by bringing on additional contractors. We are also looking for even more contractors, specifically Flash developers.  Any talented flash developers out there who have a passion for photography or digital media and want to strut their stuff to the world as part of the FocalPower Photo Asset Management service, get in touch with us!

As we march forward to a public beta, we do have early access passes available to those who enjoy getting their hands on the latest technology and understand the rigors of early product release (i.e., working with an evolving service, running a service through it’s paces, providing feedback to help shape the future of a service).

Interested? Send us an email to the contact us address on the main website.  And make sure you convince us of why you should earn the priveldge of an early access pass.  We’ll get in touch with your early access pass.

Recently, FocalPower was mentioned in a couple of different photography related blogs that we wanted to share.  Richard Wong’s Field Report: Photographers today posted an interview that he conducted with myself about FocalPower and the Photo Asset Management solution we are building.   Richard has created a wonderful behind the scenes blog about phtographers and photography and we discussed how FocalPower will fit into the online photography landscape.

1001 Noisy Cameras recently posted a blurb about the FocalPower Photo Quote Widget.  The Photo Quote Widget is still enjoying continued popularity and support from the online photography community.  1001 Noisy Cameras is a great source for digital camera news, rumors and more.  (note: they recenlty underwent a blog transition).  With Photokina 2008 coming up soon, the Photokina Situation Room is useful to keep track of all the noise and news coming from this industry event.

Today Dave and I spent hob-nobbing with the WordPress jet set.  At WordCamp San Francisco there were WordPress users and developers from across the country–we meet people from Seattle all the way to Florida. With a track for WordPress users as well as developers, there was something for everyone.  It was great talking with all the photographers I meet that use WordPress to power their sites.

For those photographers that use WordPress for their photography blogs or websites, I wanted to share some of what was learned from Stephan Spencer’s SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make (download presentation).  To get the most out of the work you do on your blog, you want to ensure you’re doing what you can to make it search engine friendly.  Besides the great tips and tricks in Stephan’s presentation, he recommends the following great SEO plugins:

• UTW Theme Compatibility Thing
• Yet Another Related Posts
• Popularity Contest
• WP-PageNavi
• SEO Title Tag
• WP-Sticky

If you’re a WordPress user, make sure you check out these plugins and let us know which ones help your blog’s SEO the most.

(Personally, I have been using the all-in-one-seo-pack plugin, which is the one of the top five plugins for the WordPress platform.  I would love see a gap analysis for the list above and all-in-one-seo-pack.  Any SEO experts out there willing to take up the challenge?)

More Early Access Codes Available

We had set aside a group of early access codes to the FocalPower service just for WordCampers.  But we didn’t give them all out!  So anyone out there who is interested in getting one, let us know by commenting on this post (please include your website/blog address in your post).  We’ll give out the access codes on a first come basis until they are gone.  Please Note: FocalPower is still in an Alpha state, some features are not complete and still under development.  We are looking for those who can handle the rough edges, use the system and provide us feedback help us get the features right.

Just a quick announcement that the FocalPower team will be attending WordCamp tomorrow (August 16th) in San Francisco.  If you’re planning on being their, let us know and we can coordinate some time together.  We are looking forward to hearing what challenges people are facing regarding photography and their blogs as well as to hear what exciting WordPress related developments people are working on.  We’ll also have some additional early access passes to the FocalPower system available for those interested in seeing what we have been working on.

We just added a new feature to the FocalPower Blog:  Photographer Polls.

For the next two weeks, we’ll be asking “How has the current economic situation affected your photography related buying?”. Regardless of what you call it, the United States is facing tough economic times.  And with the global state of markets and their interconnectedness, this economic downturn reaches far past the United States. So, what has this done to your spending habits on photography related items?

Every two weeks we will be running a new poll to help dig into key issues facing photographers today.  So please chime in and tell us what you think.  You can always find the latest poll in the sidebar.  We are also archiving all polls for future reference; we’ll try to leave them open for a month after the original posting.

Many thanks to Lester Chan for developing the great WP-Poll plugin!

We fought hard against the urge to post some sort of spoof this morning, we figured we would go in the other direction. It’s April’s Fools Day. But we’re not fooling…

…we’ve expanded our infrastructure and for a limited time we are taking new Alpha Users on board!

For the next 5 days, anyone who wants to get a sneak peak at what FocalPower has been building just has to fill out the Alpha Form (yeah, we know it says application…but don’t worry, everyone who applies will get accepted). Feedback from photo bloggers is that they love the flexibility of the FocalPower platform. Even non photo bloggers have been impressed. And that’s with a system that’s still in alpha…so, come check it out!

We haven’t expanded as much as this guy’s head…after all, we’re still in Alpha. But, if you’re interested you’ll have to hurry because the form will shut down on April 6th…

(Photo by Scott Ableman)