Shutterfly, the $500+ million valued online photo sharing and printing company announced earlier that they have acquired Nexo.   The amount is for roughly under $15 million in the form of cash and stock.  Nexo Systems Inc. is a company that makes it easy to create web sites and e-mail lists.  Here’s the synergy in the acquisition:
1.) Shutterfly’s core demographic are families that enjoy sending pictures to each other to share memories.
2.) Nexo’s demographics are those who want to create quick web sites that revolve around pictures, blogs, and videos.

Craig Jorasch and Tom McGannon, Nexo’s founders, will join the Shutterfly’s technology team.  Shutterfly is based in Redwood City, Calif. and Nexo was based in Palo Alto Calif.  Shutterfly has over 1.5 billion images uploaded in its digital archive. 

“Photos play an important role in social expression and personal publishing, and Shutterfly is proud to be an early pioneer of online sharing. The acquisition of Nexo accelerates our next-generation sharing platform and enhances Shutterfly’s market leading position and consumer value proposition,” stated Jeffrey Housenbold, Shutterfly’s President and CEO. “Nexo’s talented development team has deep experience with Web 2.0 technologies and services. Nexo’s services will complement Shutterfly’s products and services, giving our customers more ways to connect with friends and family and to share pictures taken with multiple cameras at special events – from weddings and family reunions to the kids’ weekly soccer game.”

[Information Source: StreetInsider]

Shutterfly, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFLY) ^[1] recently acquired Make it About Me!^[2]  The synergy behind the acquisition is that Make It About Me! produces books with custom pictures for about $40  and Shutterfly is one of the biggest picture sharing companies.

Shutterfly had an IPO around September 2006 and is currently valuated at $535.36 million.  Shutterfly’s opening price was at $15 per share and today, SFLY is trading at about $22.30 per share.

“This acquisition increases Shutterfly’s market leadership in the rapidly-expanding category of personalized storybooks and photo books,” stated Jeffrey Housenbold, President and CEO of Shutterfly. “We’re very pleased to offer parents compelling, personalized stories that feature their child together with beloved characters, such as their friends on Sesame Street, and others.”

Some of the custom books that Make It About Me! sells is My Adventure on Sesame Street and My Amazing Alphabet Adventures.  Below is a screen shot of My Adventure on Sesame Street:

“We created Make it About Me! to inspire children to explore their world in an educational and fun way,” stated Michael Anthony and Jim McCreery, co-founders of Make it About Me! “As Shutterfly incorporates our technology and products into its award-winning Photo Book line, we are excited to see these books entertain, motivate and help educate young readers.”

The financial details were not disclosed.  This was Shutterfly’s first 2007 acquisition and through this acquisition, Shutterfly gains Sesame Street licensed content and themed characters. 

[1] Shutterfly.com
[2] makeitaboutme.com (now redirects to Shutterfly) 

References:
[3] thealarmclock

Shutterfly, the online picture sharing website created by James Clark (who also founded Netscape) in 1999 has announced today that its free picture organization software, Shutterfly Studio now has some newly expanded features.

“Because our customers are taking and storing more pictures each year, they require a more sophisticated solution for managing and editing their vast collection of memories,“ stated the President and CEO of Shutterfly, Jeffrey Housenbold. “We are introducing these enhanced features to Shutterfly Studio to provide consumers with an easy way to organize their images while adding a host of editing features that will allow them to further express their creativity.“

The new features include the ability to create a collage with over 140 templates.  There is also whiten teeth, thinning, oil paint, graphic poster, auto color, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, color temperature, and straighten features.

Shutterfly Studio is a competitor of Paint.NET, Adobe Photoshop, and Google’s Picasa.

I’ve been using Facebook for the last 3 years and have seen it constantly evolve.  For this post, I will discuss 2 ways that I could see the popular social networking company improve its services: Slideshows and Videos. 

Slideshow:
The first way I could see Facebook improve is by taking a similar approach to photo browsing as Shutterfly.  I came up with this when my uncle sent me pictures on Shutterfly of a Diwali celebration that my family had back in Michigan.  I just sat back, relaxed, and did not have to do much work to go through all of the pictures.

As you may be able to see.  Using Shutterfly, you can adjust slideshow speed, picture size, and control fading as the pictures appear.  Whereas the Facebook approach is more manual-intensive:

On Facebook, to go to the next picture in a photo album, you have to either click on the picture or click on ‘Next.’  The maximum number of photos that any given album contained on Facebook is 60, which means that it takes 60 clicks to get through the album.  This is inefficient and strenuous.  If Facebook implements a slideshow option, I am sure that millions of users would be grateful.

Video:
From my point-of-view, the difference between MySpace and YouTube versus Facebook is that MySpace and YouTube encourages users to express their creativity through means of video creation and profile customization whereas Facebook regulates user capabilities for profiles which may not necessarily be a bad thing for Facebook.  However, if this barrier is broken in an organized fashion, I strongly believe that Facebook could take away a large amount of market-share away from MySpace if somehow they integrate video features.

MySpace claims that a lot of YouTube’s growth is accounted by the fact that many YouTube videos are embedded in MySpace user profiles.  If this is true, this could be problematic for YouTube if MySpace disallows the embedding of YouTube videos into MySpace user profiles.  Facebook could learn from this mistake and create a video upload system called Facebook Videos rather than allowing users to embed videos from YouTube.  This could potentially take marketshare away from YouTube as well.

One of the cool features that Facebook has right now is the ability to tag people in photo stills, but just imagine if you could tag friends in videos as well.  That would be a guaranteed hit.  Although the back-end programming of such a system would be very complex, I could see it as being possible.

Thus far, Facebook has been adapting to demanding web technologies such as ‘bookmarking’ and allowing users to import their blogs via RSS, but these types of features could help take Facebook to the next level.  I strongly believe in that.

Shutterfly.com (SFLY), one of the world’s largest picture sharing and printing websites raised a large sum of money from their initial public offering (IPO). Within the first day of trading, SFLY stock rose 12% from $15 to $15.25/share.

Techcrunch reported that “J.P. Morgan, Piper Jaffray and Jefferies sold 5.8 million of Shutterfly’s 23.6 million shares, the company ended the day with a market value of more than $350 million.” Shutterfly has 208 employees and was founded in 1999.

Last year, Shutterfly’s net income was $28.9 million and made $83.9 million in revenues. However between January and June, Shutterfly had reported a net loss of $3.65 million. Currently, Shutterfly and has had a market cap of $367.15 according to Google Finance.

On September 29, 2006, the CEO of Shutterfly had rang the Nasdaq bell to celebrate their IPO. I could imagine the excitement that ensued over the opening because I have also witnessed such an event when the Nasdaq bell was rang at the Infosys Technologies campus in Mysore, India. On July 31, A screen in Mysore projected a feed from the Times Square screen in New York displaying “Nasdaq welcomes Infosys Technologies, Ltd.”

The CEO of Shutterfly is Jeffrey Housenbold. According to the Shutterfly website, Housenbold “received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year®. Housenbold was also a former VP of Business Development & Internet Marketing at eBay.

Amit’s Thoughts:
Personally I am not a user of Shutterfly, but I do know several very satisfied customers that have benefitted from Shutterfly’s low-cost printing services. You can’t really go wrong with a price of $0.19 per print. I’ve seen people using Shutterfly developed pictures all over Michigan State’s dorm rooms and apartments.

The IPO seems to have launched successfully despite the lawsuit that was filed on August 29 by former CFO of Shutterfly, Virender Ahluwalia. Ahluwalia alleged Shutterfly of “alleging breach of contract and claiming that he is entitled to exercise 15,535 stock options.”