"Picasa Templates" - a failed business idea

Aesthetic Studios is a small two man web site design team that would appear to mostly serve a small local market in Texas - for example their portfolio includes a local high school football team.

In September 2004 they registered the domain name picasatemplates.com, and it looks as if they spent a few months thinking about what to do with it.  In January 2005, they put together a business plan, which effectively foreshadowed most of what Google is now offering with Picasa Web Albums - a service that offered to host galleries of photos, exported from the Picasa desktop application.

Income was to come from selling design templates to make the galleries look good, and from hosting fees, and future plans included a photo printing service via a partner photo developer.

Setting their sights high, they looked to partner directly with Google, so that Picasa would link to them when someone tried to export photos from Picasa, and so they could get free use of the Picasa name and logo.

Despite these lofty partnership hopes, the financial projections were decidedly low key - after the first year of operation they expected to run just 4 servers, with 218 galleries, and a total annual income of $7,500.

 

I've no idea if they ever sent their plan to Google, but the website is currently just parked, offering search/ads etc.  The project documents live on at the project extranet site, and make for an interesting read.  There was a business opportunity here, but I'm sure Google would never have considered the partnership proposed - there was just nothing for them to gain from it. Offering web galleries was also a very obvious extension of Picasa, and I'm sure Google didn't need anyone to tell them that.