We recently had a tête-à-tête with Carlos Garcia, Co-founder & CEO, Scrapblog.com, an online service that provides a unique combination of scrapbooking and blogging. Scrapblog enables users to tell stories with pictures and share them as well. We tried to figure out what was really behind his service offering, its motives, purpose and a sneak peek into its future.

Carlos Garcia has also founded Nobox, a marketing and advertising enterprise. Along with Carlos, there are three other partners that help him run Scrapblog and Nobox. Carlos' expertise in web usability and rich Internet applications combined with his strong interest in Web 2.0 business models has been key in the formation of Scrapblog. His relentless perseverance in pursuing his vision of Scrapblog has led an exceptional team to develop an innovative and easy-to-use Internet application.

What is the concept behind Scrapblog.com? How did the idea of the service come about?

Scrapblog was initially discussed when my wife and I attended the first Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October 2004. We were looking at a lot of really cool photo-sharing sites including Flickr, which had just launched a few months prior to the conference. Margarita and I were discussing what would be the logical evolution of photo sharing and photo blogging now that a lot of the technical limitations of the web are disappearing.

At one point, our conversation focused on how the traditional photo album has evolved into the richer, more creative experience that scrapbooks offer. We then concluded that all the photo-sharing websites of the time were the online equivalent of the traditional photo album where users just display their photos. We wondered what it would take to offer users the creativity and storytelling aspects of scrapbooks online. That is precisely what our beta does. Nevertheless, our beta is just a small fraction of our vision for Scrapblog. Scrapbooking is currently a $3 billion industry in the US alone and starting to grow in Europe. Combining scrapbooking and blogging will only increase that market potential.

Scrapblog isn’t meant to be competition to Flickr, Shutterfly, Kodak EasyShare Gallery or any of these established photo-sharing applications. Scrapblog is actually a complement to these sites and we are proactively trying to connect our service to theirs. For example, we have now allowed our users to create Scrapblogs with their Flickr photos. This was something our users were requesting since we launched. The reason is that Scrapblog’s users, like traditional scrapbookers, only use their favorite photos when creating a scrapbook. Therefore, it is expected that users will store and organize their photos in other sites and bring some of their best pictures to Scrapblog for an enhanced photo-sharing experience.

How is Scrapblog different from other online story telling services like “OURSTORY”?

I’m acquainted with OurStory. They were called Wisdom Ark when they released and I have been following them since they launched. The main difference between Scrapblog and OurStory is that at the core of Scrapblog, we have the most robust and versatile and rich application for designing and publishing content from the Web to the Web. In their case, (OurStory) it’s more about creating an online journal that is time stamped, so there is a chronological timeline and that’s how you create a story in OurStory.

I think it’s good, they are innovating in this space of what I call “rich media photo sharing” and “rich media blogging”. We are going to see different ways in which entrepreneurs and companies innovate in their desire to include storytelling in their service offerings instead of just plain photo-sharing.

What should the users of Scrapblog expect from the service?

What we have online, is literally a prototype of the application. We have worked very hard for almost a year to develop an application that would allow users to design and publish a scrapbook from the Web to the Web. That is something that nobody in this space offers.

We have now expanded our development team and we are working on features that will allow users to share and collaborate in different ways. For example, you will soon see a feature, which will allow our users to create groups. It has been something that our users have been asking for.

We are working towards an end-to-end solution that will keep other online scrapbooking sites following our trail. The new version of Scrapblog is being built from the ground up to comply with our vision of rich-media blogging and offer high-quality photo books and DVDs.

There is no evident business model for Scrapblog. Is the funding coming in from NOBOX? Could you elaborate?

The funding right now is coming from the four partners here at Scrapblog (the same partners as NOBOX). We consider ourselves to be our own angel investors, since we made a conscious decision to fund this venture ourselves during this stage. We will be looking for venture capital later this year, but at this point, we are more focused on the development of a great product.

The Scrapblog service is only a beta, a prototype, for us to get feedback from users, so there isn’t any revenue model currently. But we intend to have various revenue streams in the near future. The one that we are working on right now is being able to offer high quality photo books to scrapbookers. Users will pay for ordering photo books on Scrapblog in the next few months.

Another revenue stream will be advertising. Advertising will appear only in the free account of Scrapblog. Very soon, we will be offering paid Scrapblog accounts. The difference between the paid and free accounts will be the amount of photos one can upload to Scrapblog, similar to the subscription model that Flickr has.

We are going to be very careful with the advertising on the free accounts because we do not want the advertising to be intrusive to the users. We do not want the advertising to affect the user experience. The advertising will be from major brands that will be relevant to the user and will be discreet as well.

The core team at Scrapblog also functions at NOBOX, how do you divide time between the two companies – Scrapblog and NOBOX?

Well, in terms of operations, Scrapblog and NOBOX are two separate companies. I started NOBOX myself. Now, we have 4 partners and 30 employees in NOBOX. Margarita and I are the operational partners of Scrapblog and handle its day-to-day operations. We are fully dedicated to Scrapblog. Jason and Monica, on the other hand, handle operations at NOBOX.

The four of us own both companies equally. NOBOX has major accounts like Toyota, Lexus and Procter and Gamble. Plus, recently it began an agency relationship with the Mozilla Foundation and has already done some great work for Firefox. We are very proud of this achievement!

We have a team here in Miami, Florida that concentrates on the development of Scrapblog. A small developer team that’s based in Bangalore, India, they help us with beta testing and streamlining our R&D process.

If you don’t mind, could you tell us the kind of traffic that Scrapblog receives?

It isn’t much of a secret. If you look at the Alexa charts you will know what kind of traffic we have. Right now, we have close to twenty thousand registered users over a span of ten weeks. That’s not a lot but we are very happy with what we’ve got. Currently, our point of focus isn’t on how many users we have registered on our site, but is more on product development and keeping our current users happy.

But we hope that these numbers go up as we incorporate more features into the service offering. About a week and a half ago, when we started offering the creation of an unlimited number of scrapblogs, many of our users started coming back to create more scrapblogs like their kid’s birthday or a recent vacation. We are seeing that our users are becoming very active post the feature enhancements.

So, stay tuned to Scrapblog because we are going to introduce a lot of new features, themes and many more creative elements to have fun with your photos.

We would like to thank Carlos for the valuable time he took to talk to us about Scrapblog and the efforts he and his team are taking, to improve their service. Also, keep your eyes peeled for a review on Scrapblog, which will feature on NEO Binaries!