PhotoSweep: from company to community with desarrollo

Sara and Jeremy Snyder shared a passion for photography and travel that frequently led them to the same problem: they had no easy way to get prints of the photos they took on their trips without going through the tedious process of selecting and printing photos in-store. They needed a simple way to sweep their photos from their phones to their front doors, and they created PhotoSweep as the answer. 

They developed a business plan and rolled out their product while in school, and since then PhotoSweep has grown to help them share photos from all their special occasions with friends and family. The process is is simple. PhotoSweep asks for a mailing address and credit card information. Then the user selects how often they would like photos printed. Finally, they select photos to be printed, and hit "Done." After the first time, the only step is the last one, and people can have prints of their photos mailed to their door as often as they like. Add the mailing addresses of additional recipients and grandparents and friends can have pictures of birthdays, holidays, music festivals, and nights out on the town without the time consuming chore of using an in-store printing service. "Everyone loves getting pictures in the mail!" Sara and Jeremy said in an interview.  Their vision is that people can have refrigerators covered in beautiful, current pictures of loved ones.

Sara and Jeremy want PhotoSweep to help more people enjoy their photos, and have come to desarrollo to help them face certain challenges. The company was renting an office before they joined Flock #2, and immediately benefited from desarrollo's free office space, cutting an estimated 95% of their overhead costs, and allowing them otherwise impossible flexibility to respond to marketing needs. "Our main challenges currently are monetary," they said. "As for future challenges, growing our customer base as wide as possible, marketing and brand awareness are at the top of our list." The shared space and resources at desarrollo help them to function at a lower cost during these nascent stages of the business, but more importantly, desarrollo offers them guidance from experienced mentors and other entrepreneurs and startups on the company's journey to become people's first choice for printing photos. Jeremy said that the mentors will listen to his ideas, point out what they thought was good about them and supplement that with ideas of their own. This is especially helpful for the company as they begin to shift their focus toward fundraising, and are mapping out the direction those funds will take them, including diversifying the options available for print size, print quality, and other aspects of the product.  Desarrollo provides Sara and Jeremy with unique opportunities to connect with the local entrepreneur community through its network of mentors, and they hope that the help they receive will extend far beyond their six-month enrollment in the desarollo's PhxFlight program through continued collaboration and cooperation. 

Companies like PhotoSweep contribute to the growing number of success stories coming out of Arizona's entrepreneur community, and with desarrollo's help are becoming the type of company that can give back to the community that supports it. 

To learn more about PhotoSweep, visit their website at http://photosweep.com/

Want to learn more about desarrollo? Watch this inspiring and informative video!

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About desarrollo [de-sar-roy’-yo]

desarrollo™ is a community initiative to support Arizona entrepreneurs of any stage or size. We look to develop a community of collaboration, growth, knowledge and inspiration to develop Arizona into the premier destination for entrepreneurs.... And Do It in Less Than Five Years! For more information, visit www.desarrollodeaz.org

desarrollo [de-sar-roy’-yo] – Spanish for development

Read some of the great things, others have to say about us:
AZ Tech Beat - http://aztechbeat.com/2013/06/desarrollo-not-your-typical-incubator-launches-today/

Phoenix Business Journal - http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/print-edition/2013/07/05/new-incubator-aims-to-up-ante-for.html

Storynamics: How collaboration turned a dream into reality

Miguel Lopez, the founder and CEO of Storynamics, says that when he first started this company, his dream was to make educational graphic novels to reach out to underserved communities in America. Storynamics' comics use visuals, color and story to "save the day" for many people in America who are living in poverty and illiteracy by presenting healthcare information to them in an accessible way. Storynamics' unique format can increase willingness to read, comprehension, retention and readership by 74% and higher, educating people in households with low health literacy about making good healthcare choices.

When Lopez first pitched his idea to companies, he cast a wide net over a broad market, and the response was low. He knew he needed to narrow his focus to the people who really needed his product, and he came to desarrollo for help. The collaboration and workspace he found at desarrollo allowed him to bounce his ideas and hypotheses off of other startups facing similar problems, and eventually to refocus his efforts on healthcare, where there was a real need to reach out to people who had little knowledge about managing their health. Desarrollo allowed him to go through the learning process necessary to identify where there was a real need for Storynamics. The company now serves the population that needs it by focusing on pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and local government entities as its main customers. 

Collaboration and community at desarrollo helped Storynamics to reach underserved communities with information about a wide range of healthcare needs, from the challenges children with diabetes face at school testing their blood sugar levels, to the importance of adults living an active lifestyle. Storynamics still uses desarrollo's space for the collaborative atmosphere, and pays it forward by helping the other startups to overcome their own challenges. 

Storynamics is an example of the power of community to transform a dream from a great idea into a viable, sustainable company.

Check out the Storynamics website! 

About desarrollo [de-sar-rol’-lyo]

www.desarrollodeaz.org

 

desarrollo, is a community initiative to support Arizona entrepreneurs of any stage or size. We look to develop a community of collaboration, growth, knowledge and inspiration to develop Arizona into a premier destination for entrepreneurs.... And Do It in Less Than Five Years!

For more information, visit www.desarrollodeaz.org

desarrollo [de-sar-rol’-lyo] – Spanish for development

Follow desarrollo on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn

Intellectual Property. A Magic Potion for Creating Value.

Pic courtesy of  Startup Quote (http://startupquote.com/post/11990980073)

Intellectual Property. You may have heard about it. It’s kind of a big deal if you are an entrepreneur or an inventor. You see it talked about in newspapers, in the context of multi-billion dollar jury awards for infringement. You see it played out in movies like the Social Network, where entire friendships or dreams can be destroyed because of a lack of careful I.P. planning. It has evolved into this kind of nebulous, perhaps intimidating concept that encompasses a huge array of subject matter. A concept that seems so fundamentally easy to understand (i.e. inventions of the mind) yet is accompanied by all these seemingly-conflicting statutes and confusing court opinions.

How do you make sense of it all? How do you determine whether you need I.P. protection?

Start with this concept: I.P. is a core asset. It is as important as the land and machinery that's used to make your products. While I.P. used to be used as an offensive and defensive tool by companies to keep others from encroaching on company rights, today companies are recognizing the need to utilize their I.P. in a completely different light; as a means for promoting innovation, growth and development of businesses ultimately leading to revenue generation. I.P. is seen as a strategic tool that can mirror the goals and mission of a particular business. It therefore stands to reason that no two businesses should have the same I.P. strategy. For example, one business may focus more on developing a particular type of technology and seeking a mix of patent and trade secret protection in one specific country, while another company might go all-in on patents and seek protection in multiple countries. 

So, if I.P. is no longer a sword or a shield, how should it be envisioned? Where do you start in the protection process? How do you innovate and publicize your product without it being copied by your competitors? These questions involve dual considerations rooted in legal and business principles. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be posting short blurbs about intellectual property and how it can be used to add value to your business. 

To keep things easy to understand, I will lay out the I.P. lexicon for each type of I.P. protection. Because I.P. overall is actually characterized by different branches, with each branch having a different rationale acting as the foundation for providing protection, it is helpful to use a lock-box analogy. For each type of invention of the mind, there is a separate lock-boxes that can be used to protect the idea:

• Patents protect inventions or discoveries of new and useful processes, machines, articles of manufacture, or compositions of matter. There is also a special class of patents solely devoted to ornamental designs.

• Trademarks are any word, graphic, symbol, sound, color, or even scent that is capable of identifying the source of the trademark. This means that almost anything can be a trademark, so long as it has source identifying capabilities.

• Copyright protection extends to original works of authorship like books, songs, pictures, paintings, even computer code (the underlying source code itself, not the actual processes being performed by instruction from the source code).

• Trade secret protection extends to a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information which is not generally known and which affords a business an economic advantage over competitors or customers. 

So there you have it. What I call the “lock-boxes” of I.P. Each can be used strategically by a business to bring specific advantages either in the form of exclusivity or as an added-value component in the form of licensable rights. But there are nuances associated with each branch of I.P., especially in the way you acquire rights and your ability to enforce the rights against third parties. In the next I.P. post, we will start with an in-depth look at trademarks and how a consumer’s recognition of a particular symbol in the marketplace is legally protected.

Justin Clark
I.P. Attorney
The Luther Law Firm, PLC

Justin is one of desarrollo's community partners and works out of the

Chandler, AZ launchpad a few times a week. He also will be a regular

contributor to the desarrollo 'inspire AZ' Blog.

Developing Arizona Into The Premiere Place For Entrepreneurs

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Our new blog (inspire AZ) will be flowing soon. 

It will be an avenue to inspire, be inspired and share knowledge.