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The Adorama Viewer logo. Click to visit the PreClick website! PreClick betas new photo software
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(Tuesday, October 1, 2002 - 16:42 EDT)

New Jersey-based PreClick Corp. has today announced a new photo organising application which it is currently developing.

PreClick's "5-Star Photo Organiser" has already been licensed to two third-parties, New York photo retailer Adorama Camera Inc. and what PreClick refers to as "the Internet's fifth largest photo processing site". Details of the licensing agreements have not yet been announced, and it isn't clear whether the software is intended to be paid for by the end-user, or offered free in hopes of creating photofinishing revenues. (The current beta, which is Adorama-branded, offers photofinishing services through the company).

Discussing his company's new program, PreClick CEO Brian Smiga states: "No products, other than Apple's iPhoto, are satisfying to 'soccer moms,' busy, family-oriented women who make up the new majority of digital camera owners. We focus on building the world's easiest and fastest to learn, all-in-one photo organizer that finds, sorts, prints, shares, and manages these rapidly growing photo collections. Digital camera owners shoot three times as many photos but spend 90% less on prints. PreClick is going to change that for the $30 Billion photo-finishing industry."
The software does indeed seem fairly "snappy" in use, and has a simple, clean interface - albeit at the expense of much in the way of editing features. PreClick's program uses the 'film strip' concept, displaying thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, and allowing the images on the strip to be sorted or filtered in a number of different ways. A larger version of the image is shown above the film strip, with details such as captions shown (or entered) on the right-hand side. Double-clicking on the picture displays it full-screen, and there's also a slideshow function that can work either in the film-strip view or full-screen.

PreClick's Adorama Viewer beta software. Image copyright © 2002, The Imaging Resource. All rights reserved. Click for a bigger picture!

All in all, a simple, clean interface which you could likely teach your non-computer literate relative to use to view images with ease. The editing capabilities are limited to rotating images, and an "autofix" function which is meant to adjust brightness / contrast and color balance without any user intervention. There's no way to fine-tune the "fix" in the current beta, and based on our trial of the program we hope PreClick will address this.

As well as the already-mentioned ability to upload images for printing, you can click on images to select them for emailing, and then press one button to automatically attach the selected images (which are resized and recompressed for you) to a blank email.

PreClick's "5-Star Photo Organiser" definitely shows promise, and the company is currently offering a free download of the beta to the first 1000 users who sign up and provide their name, email address and zip code.

Source: PreClick Corp.

Original Source Press Release:

PreClick Corp. Launched to Provide World's Easiest and Fastest Photo Organizing Software

Apple iPhoto Product Manager Joins Award-Winning Software Team

ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS, N.J., Oct. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- PreClick Corp. announced today its entry into the digital photo software market with its 5-Star(TM) Photo Organizer, currently in beta.

The company also announced a number of recent hires, including John Santoro, a 12-year marketing veteran of Apple Computer and a former UPI photographer, most recently the iPhoto product manager. "I joined this team for two reasons: it built the fastest and easiest photo organizer and the most innovative business model. We generate new revenue for photo finishers, retailers and manufacturers," said Santoro.

PreClick earned its first revenue this month through two licensing deals with the Internet's fifth largest photo processing site and with New York City's second largest photo retailer, Adorama, see http://www.adorama.com. (Editor's Note: details to be announced October 1 and October 14th). The licensed products are based on PreClick's 1.0 product, the 5-Star(TM) Photo Organizer, enabling users to organize, preserve, print and share their photo collections.

Brian Smiga and Tony Mann, software veterans each with 15-years awarding winning product experience, co-founded the company in September 2001.

"No products, other than Apple's iPhoto, are satisfying to 'soccer moms,' busy, family-oriented women who make up the new majority of digital camera owners. We focus on building the world's easiest and fastest to learn, all-in-one photo organizer that finds, sorts, prints, shares, and manages these rapidly growing photo collections," said Smiga, chief executive officer. "Digital camera owners shoot three times as many photos but spend 90% less on prints. PreClick is going to change that for the $30 Billion photo-finishing industry."

PreClick is entering a market with robust growth, with 30% annual sales growth of digital cameras projected to penetrate 50% of US homes by 2005. The company recognized that owners of digital cameras would need a new client software model to effectively find, organize, print, and share their pictures. Instead of a mere scrapbook, the founders foresaw the opportunity for a "lifetime media management system" that would automate the distribution, printing, and preservation of digital photo collections among friends and family. Once established, the community of users will be self-perpetuating, creating increased revenue from printing, processing and add-ons.

PreClick's founders include Brian Smiga, chairman and chief executive officer, Tony Mann, chief technology officer, and Josh Muskovitz, senior software engineer. Smiga is a veteran entrepreneur with 15 years of award-winning software development and company formation experience. His first product, Dynodex, won Best Contact Manager for Mac in 1991-1994; his second product, Actioneer, was a top product for Palm and Lotus Notes from 1998-2001. He was recruited as Senior Vice President, Business Development and Marketing for 1ClickCharge, which he profitably sold to CMGi for $35 million. In 1999, Brian was recruited as CEO of 3Path, a peer-to-peer priority content delivery company, where he raised $10.5 million from Intel, Goldman-Sachs and BRM Capital.

Tony Mann, CTO, is an expert in user-centered design and extreme programming who first worked with Smiga in 1991. Mann has since designed and built collaboration, artificial intelligence, education, and consumer applications.

"Our wives, parents and friends are the users we focused on," said Mann. "They voted clearly for fast, easy-to-use photo management on their computers, not on the Web. As networked client software, we take advantage of the resources and privacy of the customer's personal computer to deliver significant ease-of-use, speed, convenience, and power advantages over in-store kiosks and sites like Shutterfly."

Josh Muskovitz, senior software engineer, has shipped software products for distance learning (Mentergy), artificial intelligence (WebMind), security (OpenService), and imaging (IBM, Lectra).

This founding team previously has co-authored four relevant U.S. Patents. They are joined by John Santoro, a former UPI photographer, who was most recently the Product Manager for Apple iPhoto; Laird Popkin, who is the co-chair of the Internet Content Exchange (ICE) standards group and was most recently CTO at 3Path, Sothebys and Newscorp; and Beau Roberts, former Director of Product Marketing at MacAfee.com, and Reseller Account Manager at Computer Associates.

PreClick's corporate advisors bring a wide range of relevant experience and contacts. They include Jay Torborg, former Director of Multimedia at Microsoft, Doug Rowan, former CEO of Corbis, Rick Smolan, producer of "A Day in the Life" Series, and William Bevington, Chairman of Information Communication Design, Parsons School of Design/The New School and author of Designing with Type.

PreClick is a digital asset management software company founded to provide digital photographers the fastest, easiest and most convenient way to organize, print, preserve and share their digital photos. Its photo management software provides customers a convenient "kiosk in the home" for processing and printing. The company is interested in talking to license partners in the $100 billion photo industry, particularly camera and hardware OEMs, photo-finishers and retailers. More information is available at http://www.preclick.com.

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