Photobook printer shuts down operations worldwide! (UPDATED)
By
Mike Tomkins
(Friday, March 9, 2001 - 19:35 EST)
(November 2009 update: Please note that this article refers to the original owners of the PrintLife.com domain, an Israeli company which used it to operate a photo book publishing business from 1999 to 2001. The current owners bear no connection to the original PrintLife organization. With that important note out of the way, back to our archived news item as written in September 2001.) Sad news reaches us of another dot.com wind-down...
OANI (Online Access Networks Inc.), who've appeared on the News page numerous times with news on Sanyo's digital imaging products, have dropped us an email this evening with some unfortunate news from PrintLife.com. If you're not familiar with PrintLife, they specialised in producing "PhotoBooks", customised hard-back books with about 16 double-sided pages of your photos... The concept was extremely promising to say the least, and when we tried the service out we felt that it more than met up to that promise.
Sadly, it seems that PrintLife have become the latest victim of a global market that has grown wary of investing in dot.com companies. The company will apparently be closing down their operations at their Japanese and US retail operations, as well as all research and development at the Israeli headquarters from which the business first appeared.
No official notice has appeared on PrintLife's US or Japan website as yet, but following is the text of the email forwarded to us by OANI: "To Printlife friends,
Printlife announced today that it is discontinuing its operations. As of March 7, 2001 the company will discontinue its marketing and manufacturing in the US and Japan, and research and development in Israel.
Although the company has successfully launched its business in Japan and the US, the tightened venture capital markets were not receptive to the ongoing capital needs of the company. Printlife has found that the unsettled economic environment coupled with the recent volatility in the digital imaging marketplace made it impossible to raise the additional capital necessary to sustain the business.
As employees of Printlife we are all tremendously disappointed. Come the end of the day we all feel proud to have created a product that customers love and launched it globally. Many people have believed in the product and the vision, and dedicated tremendous effort, energy and resources in a short period of time to make it a reality.
We want to thank all of our investors, suppliers, partners and other friends for your help and support over this past year.
Meg Weston,
President & CEO
Michael Loria,
Vice President of Business Development
PrintLife.com" Our condolences and best wishes to the folks at PrintLife. We really did feel that they had an amazing product, and we're sure everybody that tried their service will miss it very much.
UPDATED 2001-03-13 16:45ET: We note that PrintLife's website has now been removed and replaced with Meg Weston's note as in the news item above... PrintLife Japan's website is still accessible currently with no news of the closure having been posted at the time of this writing...
UPDATED 2009-11-27 02:15ET: The PrintLife.com domain now belongs to a different company, who have no connection to the original owners of the domain. At their request, this news item has been updated to ensure that the article couldn't be read as referring to the current company.
Thanks to
Online Access Networks Inc.
for this item!
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