Case Study Panoramio Business ideas for geographic information systems “Panoramio was started in the summer of 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela and Eduardo Manchón Aguilar, two Spanish entrepreneurs. It was officially launched on October 3, 2005, and by March 19, 2007, it had archived over 1 million user submitted photographs. Three months later, on June 27, 2007, the number of photos reached two million. After a further four months, on October 25, 2007, the number of archived photos reached five million.” (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoramio) “Some days ago Panoramio reached the magic number of one million geolocated photos. Thanks to the most wonderful community of users around the World now our planet is pretty much illustrated. Since we launched the site in October 2005, 300.000 people have signed up at Panoramio. On February more than 4 million unique visitors came to Panoramio and made 30 million page views. As you can imagine, all that traffic made our little team extremely busy, specially the last three months. Joaquín Cuenca has been working very hard optimizing our two servers with great results. Now even at traffic peaks the site downloads at a nice speed. We are doubling our servers right now; we want to be ready for future increases. Together with the traffic avalanche we received lots of e-mails from the users reporting bugs, questions or requesting features. We replied personally to more than 99% of the e-mails, but if for whatever reason we missed yours, please send it again, we will try to do better this time. Those e-mails provided us with very useful information to fix some hard to find bugs and make the site overall more usable. Panoramio is now translated to 8 new languages: Bulgarian, Norwegian, Greek, Finnish, Slovenian, Brazilian Portuguese, Persian and Traditional Chinese. It is a very nice feeling knowing that many people can enjoy Panoramio in their own language. In my previous post I spoke about new features coming. The first one available is the "popular" tab at Panoramio map where you can see a selection of the best photos ordered by popularity. We lost hours looking at them.” (Eduardo Manchón Aguilar, http://blog.panoramio.com/2007/03/one-million-geolocated-photos-at.html) “Panoramio is a geolocation-oriented photo sharing website. Accepted photos uploaded to the site can be accessed as a layer in Google Earth and Google Maps, with new photos being added at the end of every month. The site's goal is to allow Google Earth users to learn more about a given area by viewing the photos that other users have taken at that place. The website is available in several languages. Panoramio asks users to organize images using tags (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Panoramio was also an early website to implement tag clouds, which provide access to Fallstudie Panoramio, Informationsmanagement im Tourismus, M. Landvogt 1 images tagged with the most popular keywords. The website also hosts a list of world famous sites. Currently, 1 million photos uploaded to the site in about 20 days. Images that have (or are perceived to have) as their central subject people, machines, vehicles or anything within the interiors of structures, or depict public events such as fairs or concerts, are excluded from the GoogleEarth layer, as are any potentially controversial images. No waivers are granted even if the images are historical or otherwise vintage in nature. Images judged to be too creative or "artsy" in concept might also be excluded from GoogleEarth regardless of other requirements met.” (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoramio) “With the Panoramio Widget API you can display the photos from Panoramio on your own web site. Geolocated photos from Panoramio are great to enrich your maps or illustrate information where location is an important factor (real estate sites, hotels and vacation sites, routes, trails...). The Panoramio Widget API is a JavaScript library that provides easy-to-use graphical UI elements and search capabilities so that you can show Panoramio photos on your web site. In addition, we provide ready-made HTML templates that you can embed in a web site using iframe tags so you can take advantage of the Widget API without the need to write any JavaScript.” (Panoramio.com, http://www.panoramio.com/api/widget/api.html) On May 30, 2007, Google announced plans to acquire the website, and Panoramio was acquired by Google in July 2007. Geo-tagging photo site Panoramio announced on its blog this morning that it will be acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum. The company is a one and a half year old startup based in Spain. Co-founder Eduardo Manchón writes: “The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence.” “(Fehrenbacher, http://gigaom.com/2007/05/31/google-to-buy-geo- tagging-site-panoramio/) This case study was prepared by Markus Landvogt, www.m3l.de, 2012 Questions 1. What were the reasons for Google to acquire Panoramio and for Panoramio to sell to Google? 2. What could have led to a decision by Panoramio not to sell to Google? 3. Develop a business model for Panoramio which could have been a better business proposition for the owners of Panoramio? 4. How can this page be useful for tourism purposes? Fallstudie Panoramio, Informationsmanagement im Tourismus, M. Landvogt 2 .