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Interview with eSolutions' Casey Chu

Following up on my last article on Photo sharing with Web 2.0, I had the pleasure of interviewing eSolutions' Casey Chiu.
Written by Andy Chun, Contributor

Following up on my last article on Photo sharing with Web 2.0, I had the pleasure of interviewing eSolutions' Casey Chiu. eSolutions is the company behind FotoBay.

Fotobay is a really neat software. How did you guys come up with this idea in the first place?

Our company, eSolutions Ltd's, primary business is web based business applications and related services. But for sometime we have also wanted to develop a technology and business that targets the consumers. Once our business applications business became stable, we utilized our spare time and resources to look into potential consumer related online markets that we could tackle. We found that even though the online photo imaging market is huge, the technology has a lot of room for improvement, so we decided to target the market. We set out to create something unlike anything before in terms of ease of use, fun factor and actual business potential (not just a gimmick). We utilized many of our expertise building sophisticated business applications for large corporations to create an online imaging system like nothing before, and it has proven to be successful. It's been a very exciting journey for us, and now we have users from all around the world who love our system.

When was fotobay launched and what are the demographics of your users like?

Fotobay was launched around the beginning of 2006, users are primarily young people who want to add more fun and excitement to their online photo experience. Our largest group of users are from Hong Kong, but there are also users from around the world (US, Australia, England, India, China, Japan, etc)

What features of fotobay are you particularly proud of or are unique?

We are proud that it behaves completely like a desktop application in terms of speed and ease of use (this is a major problem in many other imaging websites). We are proud that it allows free-form personalization of photos. And we are proud of it's simple and intuitive interface. We are also proud that the fully personalized photos can be made into products to make money.

What new features can we expect in the coming months?

We are expecting to allow people to apply their personalized photos to many more products which they can order online. We are also hoping to partner with a company that will allow us to use branded characters for personalizing photos. Finally we are also working to allow the system to directly grab photo albums from other services such as Flickr so you can in essence convert your Flickr static album into Cool Albums and customize it like never before.

Fotobay uses a Flash/Flex-based architecture. What were the key factors behind selecting this platform?

Fotobay actually doesn't use Flex, but uses an internal Flash-based frame work we build from scratch. Similar in concept for flexibility, it incorporates some very unique features to provide an intuitive user interface which mimics the way people organize photos, tells photo stories and organize them into albums and groups. We chose Flash because of its market penetration and the ability to provide the rich and slick user interface that is not possible using HTML or DHTML.

What are the key challenges for you in running a Web 2.0 company in Hong Kong?

The key challenge is to build and sustain a business using web technology. Many companies either change business directions to something that generates revenue but less web related and others simply run out of funding. Expanding the market beyond Hong Kong is also a key challenge because in general, Hong Kong has not been known for technologies or web innovations. It's an extra hump we have to climb over when going beyond the local market.

Anything else you want to share with our readers?

We have created something unique and exciting which many people's initial reaction is one of doubt that another online photo service can be unique, especially since it was developed in Hong Kong. This doubt often and quickly bursts in excitement and laughter when they see their photos being enhanced with some of our funny "Cool Objects". It is a little disappointing that even local people have the perception that Hong Kong have difficulties producing original and innovative web services. We hope the work force, especially the young blood from Universities, can be encouraged, can find the inspiration and can really push the technical boundaries to help take Hong Kong's software and Internet web to the next level.

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