Web 2.0 Asia

Enbee.com is an end-to-end photo management service that's by and large similar to HP's Snapfish. The name comes from E-NoteBook, but the abbreviation "ENB" sounded meaningless so they put additional "ee" and gave it a nice little bee icon.

But compared to Snapfish, Enbee.com provides a more holistic digital photo managing experience. For example, on Enbee, printing is less of an integral part of the service than it is on Snapfish.

First, user starts by transferring the raw files onto the online storage. The process can be aided by installing optional "EZ uploader" (an ActiveX control). Once uploaded, photos are automatically rearranged based on dates (extracted from EXIF data) or by user-defined categories. You can tag a specific date with keywords to make the later searching easier (e.g. "Excursion to Namsan").

Next, users hand-pick good pictures (digital cameras can produce many sloppy photos you know) and put them together into a Photo Clip. Photos on Enbee are managed by Phoco Clips, the way individual music files on iTunes are managed by Playlists.

Value Adding Services

Pictures in Photo Clips can be viewed (changing the order or size of the pictures is done in a smooth, Ajaxy way), printed, published in various formats (book, postcard, or newspaper), and sent to blog. Enbee offers its own blog, and also an upload API to 3rd party blogs (the one for Tattertools is on its way).

Printing currently is Enbee's prime revenue source: A nice example of Freemium business model. (I told you they are already profitable.) Enbee has its own virtual currency called (fittingly) Honey, which helps promoting the service with free Honey coupons.

Enbee is actually owned by a publicly traded company (which is another reason why Enbee isn't just a quick startup, but is a pretty stable, longshot company) specializing in digital publishing. As such, Enbee's book/newspaper publishing service is pretty artsy and high-quality. Enbee should be able to further leverage on its parent company's digital publishing capabilities to provide a more all-rounded book publishing service like Blurb.

Just as Slide and Photobucket help users integrate photos into their blogs / Myspace pages, Enbee also generates code snippets so the photo slides can be inserted to other web pages.


Web 2.0 Analysis

Despite being a well-thought, end-to-end photo management service, Enbee seems a little short on the Web 2.0-o-meter. Most notably missing feature is the Flickr-like folksonomy tagging. Also wanted is allowing direct upload of photos from a cameraphone.

But Enbee.com is a purely browser based service that doesn't require any download of program, which makes the service a Web 2.0 contender.

The CEO, Soo Man Park, is a well-known blogger (he blogs only in Korean) and he translated Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web. The first two characters of Park's name in Korean happens to sound the same as "Applause" : I think I can say just that for Enbee.com as well.

I'm thinking of profiling these Web 2.0 companies in the next few days/weeks :

• Enbee.com : End-to-end photo management service (Snapfish + Flickr?) that's actually (drum rolls please) profitable! Whoever said Web 2.0 companies can't make money?
  
• Ola Works : Picasa-like program that entails (surprise) superb face recognition technology and more -- Picasa + Hello + Riya
• Tattertools : #1 Blog company of Korea (also getting some tractions in China even with zero marketing) that's leading the open source movement -- Wordpress of Asia
  
• Beedeo.com : YouTube-like service that's being spearheaded by the founder and ex-CEO of Cyworld (Just about the best track record a Web 2.0 entrepreneur can get, isn't it?)
• Ohmynews : The icon of citizen journalism already quite well known across the world -- I'll try to focus on their new initiatives

In between, I might profile other companies, or give my 2 cents on the happenings around the Web 2.0 sphere.