My great and talented friend, Aarti Sequeira, proves that social media can help make your dreams come true. She turned her homemade YouTube-based cooking-variety show, Aarti Paarti, into a spot on The Next Food Network Star, premiering this Sunday, June 6, at 9p/8c on the Food Network.

Aarti’s show features original how-to recipes with distinct India influences that just about anyone can make. I was fortunate to interview Aarti and learned a few things I didn’t know about her fantastic journey from laptop to living room. Enjoy!

What first inspired you to create Aarti Paarti in early 2009?

I was floundering at the time — my career in journalism had evaporated, and I hadn’t had that fire in my belly to chase it. I had just finished co-producing Sand and Sorrow, one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life; I’d had the chance to work on a story that really impacts our humanity, for a Peabody Award-winning director, narrated by George Clooney and eventually bought by HBO. How can you top that?! I tried to find more documentary work, but that was right as the economy was shrinking, so there wasn’t money or interest in doing “another Africa documentary.” Isn’t that sad?

Anyway, at that time, cooking had grown into a real passion in my life. I had completed a part-time cooking program, interned at a James Beard Award-winning restaurant (Lucques, helmed by Suzanne Goin) and realised that restaurant life was not for me. I was totally stumped about what I supposed to do with my life, and it was depressing me. Here I was, a Northwestern graduate, a former CNN employee, a documentary filmmaker… with no drive to do anything but make dinner. Finally, one day, my friend said, “You need to do a cooking show, a cool one, where there’s someone in the kitchen with you and you’re chatting through the whole cooking process.”

My husband, Brendan, ran with the idea, and within a day, had written a complete one-sheet with a solid concept for a show called “aarti paarti”, where I would be cooking for a bunch of my friends, who we’d cut away to as the food simmered or roasted — since all my friends are actors/performers, they’d be doing something amazing. We shot it one day, and we got 13 hours of footage. It was unrealistic to try to put that together into a pilot by ourselves, so months later, I got so frustrated that I just picked up the camera and shot a quick 10-minute episode myself. My husband shot the next episode and we started incorporating the variety show angle, which I just love. And the rest is history! We’ve shot over 30 episodes so far, featuring everything from a uke-strumming juggling clown to singing puppets to a belly dancer!

(I made a cameo [4:20] in this episode, which for some strange reason has more views than any other…)

What equipment/knowledge/materials does someone need to produce a show like this?

We borrow the camera, a Panasonic dvx100, an older model that still shoots beautifully, but not in HD. It’s our dream to upgrade to an HD camera — can you imagine how good the food will look in HD?! Those cameras don’t cost more than a few hundred dollars these days, but you need a good cameraman to shoot, which normally is pretty expensive. Luckily, I’m married to one! Tape is pretty cheap, $100 for a box of 64-minute tapes. We also borrow mics whenever we can, because good sound psychologically makes your visuals look better.

I edit the show on my Macbook Pro, using Final Cut Pro, which is pretty expensive but wonderful. I taught myself how to use Final Cut by using the classes at lynda.com, which is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 a month. Food costs are pretty low, about $50 per episode, and we get to eat it afterwards!

What advice would you pass on to someone starting their own YouTube show?

Make your show look good — get someone who can really shoot, who’s got a steady hand, who can shoot from different angles. I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve seen where the cooking show host is just facing the camera head on for the entire video. So boring! And stuffy! Make your show as fluid as possible.

Also, make sure you get close-ups of all the food and action, and capture any natural sound too — they make for nice breaks in the action, just like a little breath. And speak normally, in regular English… don’t try to be anything you aren’t. The more you try to fancy yourself up, the stiffer you’re going to come across.

How long was the show posted before it started to get attention?

At first, my videos got about 100 views, and that stayed pretty steady until I started doing videos for Goodbite.com a couple of months into it. Then the numbers rose to somewhere in the 300-400 region. I realised that when naming my videos, I had to include words/phrases that people would be searching for. For example, my samosa episode got about 1000 views, probably because people were searching for a good samosa recipe. Now that the Food Network Show is about to start, I assume I’ll get somewhere in the region of 10,000 views, fingers crossed!

(Great SEO instincts, Aarti! Learn more about SEO)

Is it difficult to keep up with the schedule and come up with new ideas? What keeps you motivated?

It *is* hard to stay motivated. Toward the end of each season, I inevitably feel like I don’t have any energy or ideas left. But having your husband as your producer is good (and bad!!) for that, because he pushes me when I don’t feel like I have anything left to give. Every season, we try to have the recipes and the variety acts planned out before we start shooting, so I’m not scrambling at the last minute. But, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the ideas for recipes come effortlessly. Sometimes it’s much harder. Usually that’s when I’m overthinking it. And Bren is great at coming up with the variety acts.

What other social media tools/sites/channels do you use to promote the show? Are these critical to its success?

I update my Twitter and Facebook accounts when a new video is up. I also created a fan page for Aarti Paarti on Facebook, and I put the video up on that page first. And, I send out an email to over 500 people with a link to the video. Oh! And of course! I write out the recipe with a back story on my blog, aartipaarti.com.

Why did you go with YouTube over other video sites?

I wanted to put them up on ONE venue so that I wasn’t splitting viewers between sites. I much prefer the video quality and layout of Vimeo, and the cool community of artists gathered there, but I found that some people’s computers couldn’t play their high-quality videos. I also wanted to garner the most eyeballs possible, and since YouTube is still the biggest outlet for videos, I figured that when people want to see online cooking videos, they’d go to YouTube before they went to Vimeo.

How much professional cooking experience/training have you had, and is that more or less important than just getting right to the experiments?

I trained at the New School of Cooking — I find that essential in understanding the science behind cooking, so that when I want to make food with particular flavours and textures, I know how to get there. It shortens the experimentation process. My journalism training definitely helps me write on my blog and stay comfortable on camera.

How important is collaboration for your show?

I couldn’t do my show without collaboration. Full stop. My husband is just as vital to the show as I am. And I couldn’t do it without all the artists who perform on my show!

Did Aarti Paarti help you get selected by The Food Network?

Aarti Paarti gave me weekly practice at my dream job for about a year! Every week, I got a little more comfortable talking to camera, whilst preparing food, which is a little bit like rubbing your tummy whilst tapping your head. That meant, by the time I sent in my application video to the Food Network, I had gotten pretty good at letting my personality and my food style shine through. Being on camera is much harder than you think!

Check out Aarti on The Next Food Network Star premiere this Sunday on The Food Network at 9p/8c, Sunday, June 6.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web

People have been serving customers in “real time” ever since there have been customers. So this is not a new concept. In fact, we’re using technology to correct a problem that technology introduced–distance between company and customer.

If someone walks into your store with a problem, you fix it immediately. If a customer calls you on the phone, you talk to them (hopefully) immediately. But what if someone posts something negative about you on Twitter or to an Internet Forum? What then?

Real time search allows you to monitor those types of interactions, complaints, and complements. It’s still your responsibility to respond, but the time needed to find such messages has been greatly reduced.

The lines between marketing and customer service are blurring. Quickly responding to someone on their own turf in a respectful manner has potential not only to set them straight, but also increase the likelihood they will tell other people about your remarkable effort to make it right. And your public response will serve as a permanent record for anyone else who sees the comment.

Twitter is currently the primary source of real time content, but expect others to get on board quickly. Twitter’s success has driven the major search engines to add real time search features to their products. But Twitter still manages the majority of real time traffic, so you can use Twitter’s built-in search engine as a place to hear what people are saying about you. Otherwise, expect popular online listening tools to start accommodating real time search in the near future.

This certainly won’t pre-empt any traditional forms of customer service, but people are out there talking about you online one way or another. You’ll be better off if you’re aware of it, since it’s not just going to go away on it’s own. At the end of the day, you should view this as an opportunity to serve people better.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

The right CMS allows you to focus on your website content rather than the tools that run it. Numerous options meet the demands of countless websites. Astek designed Webany for you.

By now you should know why you need a CMS and how you can use a Content Management System to keep your website up to date. I wanted to share some tips about choosing the right CMS to make your Web life easier and more productive.

There are four basic types of CMS:

1. Open source applications that require configuration from a Web professional
2. Boxed desktop software that allow you to edit your website from one computer
3. “Boxed” hosted software that requires configuration from a Web professional
4. Hosted software as a service (SAAS) applications that relieve you from the burden of worrying about the backend

Here is some more info on each type of CMS to help you make the right decision:

1. Open source means that the code used to create the software is publicly available and takes advantage of a huge pool of resources (programmers) to develop. There are advantages and disadvantages to open source software. Since development is not regulated by a single entity, it also means that version-control isn’t 100% predictable or reliable. Typically this weighs on the side of advantage since there are a number of passionate, dedicated developers to fix problems that arise.

Open source developers create add-on modules or plug-ins to provide extended capabilities including forums, blog, wiki, web-stores, photo-galleries, contact-management, e-commerce, etc. It can be time-consuming to find the right plug-in, verify it works with your website and does what you need it to do, but chances are there is a solution out there for you. You will typically need to work with a developer to install, configure, and develop an open source CMS for you to use.

We like to use WordPress for blogs, which is an open source CMS for publishing. For blogs it’s nearly perfect, but we find that for creating more complex websites it has some limitations that inspired us to create Webany.

2. You can purchase boxed CMS desktop software like you would a word processor and run it from your computer. Adobe Contribute is a fairly capable desktop-based CMS. Typically these are designed for one person to manage one or more websites from one computer. While they can sometimes handle multiple users, this gets expensive quickly since you have to purchase additional licenses of the software for each person.

Some boxed CMS products are far more expensive and do offer a greater array of features. These also require set-up from a knowledgeable professional and rarely work perfectly “out-of-the-box” as their packaging might suggest. Again, these products are usually not designed to handle highly complex websites like our solution.

3. There are a few “boxed” hosted solutions out there that are not open source, but may still offer a suitable range of options for your Web needs. These are “boxed” solutions in that they are purchased as a single license, but are not designed as do-it-yourself products. You will need the help of a Web developer to install and configure these products on your Web server, as well as train you to use them. Telerik’s Sitefinity is a good example.

4. That leaves us with SAAS or hosted Web CMS. These have a big advantage in saving you time and money with set-up since they are maintained by the company who provides the service, which means you don’t have to worry about it! Some hosted CMS’ have pre-made templates for you to use, and only a few allow you to use a custom design.

You may still need the skills of a Web professional, especially if you are custom-designing a website to match your brand and specific needs. Astek specializes in this type of development, but we were consistently disappointed with CMS solutions that sacrificed features for ease-of-use, or packed in so many features that that they became cumbersome to use. Rather than settle for another solution, we decided to make one that meets our ideal for a CMS.

Webany is just right. She offers more flexibility than you’re likely to need while maintaining an intuitive design that makes managing your website a snap. You can update anything from words to photos to movies to custom forms without any knowledge of HTML. Use a custom design from Astek or anyone else.

Most importantly, Webany makes sure that your updates won’t counteract the effort and money you put into creating a custom-tailored look and feel. Auto-archiving and user workflow ensure a painless approach to website maintenance.

If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us for a Webany demo.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

I’m typically skeptical of new whiz-bang Web sites, tools, and features that set out to “change the way we work” until I’ve actually seen the benefit. Google Wave seeks to do just that. Rather than piling on one more piece of technology or layer of abstraction, they cleared the slate by asking, “How should all of this work?” rather than, “How could what exists be better?”

I’m intrigued because I’ve been having a lot of the same thoughts and discussions lately. Email has existed more or less the same way for well over a decade. People have built new interfaces, ways to tie conversation threads together, and new free services, but fundamentally the idea of sending messages with attachments back and forth in a time-shifted manner is the same.

Google Wave seeks to reinvent real-time interaction and collaboration by treating these interactions in a centralized, consistent manner. This makes sense to me. The more applications we layer on and rave about being “the new thing” (Twitter comes to mind), the more fragmented our communication becomes.

Google Wave may or may not be the answer, or it may just be a step in the right direction. At a glance it seems to be trying to solve something that’s been nagging me for awhile. We are so focused on the tools, we often lose sight of what we are trying to communicate and the value contained therein. At the end of the day, what matters is that we want to share ideas and messages with people who will find them relevant in the most efficient manner possible, no matter when or where they happen. If we’re developing a global hive mentality through our communication technology, it will depend on messages seamlessly interacting across mediums, languages, locations, and context. This is a lofty goal, but it’s one worth shooting for.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Technology, Web

We get this question regularly enough that I wanted to share a few quick talking points you can use to convince your boss that engaging with social media is not optional. The longer you wait, the more you’ll miss. A common reaction to social media is that companies don’t want to use another marketing channel, or they don’t have time to join yet another social networking site. Well, it’s time to make time. The good news is you can control how much you get involved — just be sure to get involved.

1. Low cost of entry

The key thing to realize with social media is that it costs very little to get started. Free tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are available to connect directly to people and get your message out. Free services like Google Alerts give you a glimpse into what people are saying about your company. Free blog hosting makes getting started easier, though we usually recommend spending a nominal amount on some custom branding and consulting so that your blog stands out and is found on search engines.

Rather than money, what social media requires most from you is time: time to participate, time to contribute, time to engage. If you are fighting an uphill battle in the office, then you may have to consider investing your own time off the clock to get the ball rolling and produce some tangible results. Try one or two services at a time until you become comfortable with the medium. You are better off fully engaging with one or two social media tools than signing up for all of them at once.

2. The conversation is happening. All you can do is join.

Social media is less about delivering a one-way message and more about engaging with your clients. The fact is that people are out there having public conversations about your company or products. Social media is your opportunity to meet them on their own turf to talk about their experiences, complements, and complaints. Think of it as an opportunity to gain insight into the mind of your clients rather than a burden.

It’s important to listen before you join a conversation, as you would at a party. Make sure you understand the conversation and represent yourself honestly and transparently. Be sure to disclose your relationship with the company and express your genuine opinion, update, or concern. People will often tell other people about the interaction just because you bothered to reach out. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.

3. Demonstrate credibility

You are good at what you do. Your boss is even better. Your clients know that, but bringing in new business requires convincing new people that you have what they need. Starting a company blog and/or podcast, commenting on other sites such as forums and wikis, contributing to the body of social expertise that is being constantly updating and expanded are all ways to show people who you are and how you think. And chances are you offer services with which even long-standing clients aren’t familiar, which could lead to more business when they see what you publish.

What results can you expect?

People respond positively to increased customer service with responses to comments wherever they are, access to real representatives from a company not hiding behind phone banks, and direct timely expertise in the form of blogs and commentary. These are all tools that work together to deliver leads and expanded trusted networks.

As long as you consistently represent your brand and exercise full disclosure, people will remember where the information came from. It won’t happen overnight, but over time you will see benefits as people become more deeply aware of what you offer, whether or not you’ve done business yet. If you combine social media with traditional relationship building, you’ll increase the chances of earning their business.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

There has been a lot of discussion recently about URL shorteners, which have exploded in popularity due to the limited character count in Twitter (140 characters). Rather than wasting precious message space sharing a long URL, turn it into a small one that redirects people to the proper place.

TinyURL was the most prominent one initially, but many have sprung up, each offering various services and features. The allure is being able to track the specific URL that you created, which means that you can track your social influence by seeing who passes on your version of the particular link.

Bit.ly is one that does a good job of providing metrics and analysis to help you figure out where your link has travelled, but Digg.com is getting into the game. They have devised an elegant approach where you simply put a URL after “http://digg.com/” and it automatically turns it into a shortened URL, displays the site you linked, and a toolbar across the top with more options. Try it out:

http://digg.com/astekblog.com

URL shortening doesn’t come without implications for the structure of hyperlinks, which still rule the Web roost. Adding one more layer of interpretation has the potential to slow things down, cause more errors, or just complicate the system. Additionally, you should be aware that search engines place a substantial amount of weight on the keywords that you have in your URL, so if you are relying on inbound links (and who doesn’t?), it’s worth considering that search engines will not count these shortened URL’s in the same way as the permalinks you’ve worked so hard to optimize. For example, notice the category and title keywords in the URL for this blog:

http://www.astekblog.com/index.php/marketing/try-diggcom-for-url-shortening/

I see URL status moving in two directions, which should each be considered and used appropriately. 1) Permalinks (links that search engines see and won’t change like the one above) will continue to be essential in creating and classifying content on web sites. We will use search engines to reach these links. 2) In the social sharing world, shortened URL’s will gain more popularity as people start tracking their individual influence. It’s natural for Digg to get on this bandwagon since the entire point of Digg was to give people credit for “digging” URL’s, sharing them and gaining notoriety for finding cool things. Perhaps one or the other will win out. If it’s the latter, then sites will need to start building this social tracking capability directly into the permalinks themselves, which must be short enough to share.

It’s not going to take long for monetization to enter this game, where people receive more than social currency for initiating a link chain. One’s social network will become an even more valuable tool as advertisers begin to see the value of tracking recommendations amongst individual people. These recommendations will be more directly attributed to sales, which gives companies incentives to offer cash compensation or commissions to people who did the referring.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

I think it surprises most people to learn that Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) are not profitable enterprises. It takes more than extreme growth and steady usage to make money, as explained in this post urging us not to forget lessons learned from the dot-com bubble bursting. Personally I feel that there are opportunities to monetize Twitter than haven’t been full explored. There is money to be made in the spin-off apps such as Twitterrific, which syndicates ads from The Deck in order to provide a free version.

The problem is an antiquated method of procuring profit from eyeballs. Many of the tactics that used to work simply don’t fly in the social media world. I’m not against making money, trust me, but we need to get more creative about it. Word of mouth marketing exists on Twitter. I have purchased a few items that I can trace to friendly tweets. But no one from those companies knows it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Web

With billions of web pages out there, the web would be utterly useless without search engines and tools that help us label and categorize content to make it easier to find. This taxonomy breaks down into “meta data,” which is extra information that you attach to a piece of content to help describe it, and the content itself. A good example is a digital photograph. It’s likely that you usually only look at the photo itself, but your camera automatically attaches meta information such as date/time and perhaps location. New face recognition software makes it even easier to find that particular photo you’re looking for in your library of thousands.

What do categories, tags, and keywords all have in common? These are all tools we use to organize and classify information in order to make it easier for people to find when they need it. I’ll describe each below using this blog post as the consistent example to illustrate the differences.

I’m going to start with categories since they are the most intuitive. Categories are used to define general topics of interest related to a subject. You can see the Astek Blog categories listed to the right of this post. Categories serve two very useful functions when applied to blogs. 1) It helps the readers know at a quick glance the general topics being covered by the blog. 2) It helps the author(s) stay focused. Blogs are best when they are focused around a certain set of topics and this is an easy check to make sure the blog post is still on track. It is common to see something generic like “General” as the only category. While this can be applicable in some cases, it’s typically not an effective way to label your posts.

Categories are common in blogging software. You can typically define the categories you want to write about, and each time you write a post simply select the categories that apply to that post. If you find yourself commonly wanting to write about a category that isn’t in your list, go ahead and add it. Just remember to keep your list relatively short (fewer than ten) to make it easy on the reader. In this case, I used the following categories for this post:

Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

As it becomes easier and easier for anyone to create and distribute content of all types on the Internet, categories quickly start to become a fairly limited way to organize information. Enter tags, which have become popular in the past few years. While I recommend putting a limit on the number of categories you use, there is no practical limit the number of tags you can attach to your content. Any significant concept word that is related to your text is worth putting in as a tag.

Tags are single-word labels that you can add to as you go. A tag “word” might actually contain more than one word, but it’s important that the tag have no spaces for consistency. Whereas I felt limited to five related categories for this post, I assigned ALL of the following tags to describe the article I’m writing:

Tags: apple, astek, blog, bookmarking, categories, community, content, design, distribution, how-to, information, internet, keywords, Marketing, media, publishing, search, seo, sharing, social, socialmedia, tags, Technology, tip, tool, Web, web2.0, writing

To get an idea of all the specific areas we cover in the Astek Blog, check out our tag cloud:

Okay, that looks cool, but what does it mean? Notice how some of the words in the tag cloud are larger and bolder than others? Technology, Web, socialmedia, Entrepreneurship, etc. The more a single tag is used to describe each post on this blog, the larger and bolder that tag will become in the tag cloud. This makes it easy to see at a glance which topics are covered more than others, which gives readers a more detailed topical view of the blog content. Click on a tag to see all the posts related to that word or concept.

Tags emerged from social media. Delicious.com and Flickr.com were at the forefront of developing this technology a few years ago. Since then, tags have become the commonplace method of assigning labels to vast amounts of information to make it easy to find later. I recommend you sign up for a free account at Delicious.com to store all your web bookmarks in one location (great for accessing from various locations). There is also no better way to demonstrate how tags depend on the community to make sure people are using them consistently. When you bookmark a site in Delicious.com, the community suggests several tags that other people have used to describe that web site. Typically the community gets it right, which means you have to think less about what tags to use. It makes everything quicker and more reliable.

In the following example, I tried to bookmark Apple’s web site in Delicious. Since I had already bookmarked it, Delicious shows me all the tags I had already used (highlighted in gray boxes). However, since that was awhile ago, the community has applied many new tags to describe the site. All I have to do is click on the new tags I want to assign to the bookmark.

Then, when I want to find a particular web site, I can use tags to filter my bookmarks. In order to find Apple on my Delicious.com account, I might type the following tags:

Tags: computer hardware ipod

In that example Apple is the only site that has all three of those tags attached to it. If I remove the “ipod” tag, I get six results (including Apple) that are related to “computer hardware.” Go ahead and try it yourself.

In the blogosphere, prominent blog search engines like Technorati and blog authoring tools like WordPress collect tags from all the people who use these services. When you write a post on WordPress, it suggests tags that others have used based on the content you are writing. The more people consistently use tags to describe content, the easier it becomes to discover content that relates to other web sites. We’re moving away from meticulously crafting the taxonomy, and instead tossing it all in the bag. The trick is if we put a tag on everything on the way in, we’ll know where to grab it on the way out.

Last, but certainly not least, we have keywords. I’m going to save an in-depth discussion of search engines for another ePiphany, but keywords are used most heavily when using sites like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. to find specific content on the web. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also called search engine marketing.

If you’ve stuck with me so far, you might be asking yourself what the difference between a keyword and a tag is. The key difference between the two is that tags are attached to content and keywords are IN the content itself. It’s a special combination of art and science to properly optimize a page on a web site. First we find the keywords that people are using to find that type of content, which is not always intuitive and requires research. Then we integrate these keywords directly into your content through strategic copy writing to allow search engines to find them contextually. The trick here is preserving the integrity of the authored material while making it searchable.

Gone are the days of loading up meta keywords behind the scenes and being done with it. A good SEO strategy requires consistent monitoring and tweaking.

A Few Things To Keep In Mind:

Pluralization and alternate forms are always a bit weird with tags. I usually just put both forms in. You never know if someone will search for “finance” or “financial” or “finances.”

Spelling is something common to all of these. A misspelled tag or keyword will result in the content potentially not coming up. Some people optimize for misspellings to grab some low hanging fruit (e.g., micorsoft).

There is common confusion about the “rules” of tagging. Particularly when you get into the semantics of multi-word phrases like “social media.” My advice is to use any variation of the tag you think is appropriate. In that case I would use “socialmedia,” “social,” and “media” as separate tags.

Feel free to post questions in the comments.

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

In the Woodfield Apple Store last night, I noticed that Apple is now displaying ads for Yelp and Twitter on their walls. This is part of the huge campaign to promote iPhone apps, but I was encouraged that these services (especially Twitter considering the benefit of using it on a mobile device) are now considered mainstream enough to get people’s attention in such a heavily branded environment.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Everyone who takes and edits photos (isn’t that everyone?) should check out Picnik. This service is going to give Adobe Photoshop a run for its money. It’s by far the most comprehensive and easy-to-use Web-based photo editing software I’ve ever seen. I like that you don’t have to have an account to try it, which makes it easier to sample. Integration with popular photo-sharing and social networking sites makes it a breeze to use in those spaces. I’m glad someone got this right as it’s been needed for many years.

We’re looking at their API feature for integration into our future projects. But don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web