Lifeblob is one of the fastest growing photo sharing services in India and we have over 5 Million photos on our service as we speak. A few months back, we turned on the lifeblob personalized gifting store so that you could customize and order high quality photo gifts directly from our site.

Today, I would like to announce an opportunity for all of you to be a part of our growth story. For the past few days, we have been secretly testing out our affiliate program and today we would like to open it up for everyone.

What is an affiliate program?

An affiliate program allows you to partner with us and sell our personalized products on your website or blog. All you have to do is put up a lifeblob personalized gifting store banner on your site or blog and you will receive a commission for every sale that happens when a user clicks that banner and places an order.

How much will I earn?

We look at you as our partner and we have created a win-win situation where you can grow as we grow. Our affiliate program is a performance based program, based on the volume of sales you do each month. If you drive a higher sales volume, your commission percentage goes up. For more details on the commission slabs, visit our affiliate program page here.

This sounds too good. Is there a catch?

There is no catch here. Just try it out for a month and see what kind of results you can achieve. Remember, if you aren’t satisfied with what you are earning, you can simply remove the links to our site. It’s that simple!

How do I join?

To join our affiliate program please send an email to affiliate@lifeblob.com with your website details and how you plan to sell Lifeblob personalized photo products. We do not tolerate people becoming an affiliate just to receive a discount on the Lifeblob products.

Rakhi is around the corner and we are excited to announce new template designs for all our products. Here are some of the designs that you can use to create excellent personalized photo gifts for your sister or brother on this Rakhi.

Rakhi Greeting Cards

Rakhi Photo Mugs

Rakhi Designer Photo Frames

If you are not sure about what to gift and need suggestions, do write to us at buy@lifeblob.com and we will be happy to help out.

Two months back, our first version of the lifeblob store opened to a tremendous response, thanks to all of you.

During the course of operations, we have been observing the user navigation patterns on the store, silently taking note of the problems you are facing in configuring personalized products and also listening intently to all the feedback. And today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our new lifeblob store that takes configuration of personalized photo products to a whole new level.

Basic Design Principles

“It should be so simple that even my dad can use it without any help!”

This was the underlying principle that we had in mind as we thought about designing the new store. And this translated into 4 attributes that you will see stamped throughout the store:

a) Intelligent defaults

Personalized photo gifts are primarily about turning a cherished memory into an artifact. Hence, the first thing that a user should choose while designing the personalized gift should be the photo. Infact, a user should be able to create a great looking personalized gift by just choosing a photo.

As a result, we introduced a default template for each product, so that you can simply choose a photo and have your personalized gift ready. Also, when you choose your photo, we try to size it optimally so that you don’t have to spend time choosing the right size for your photo. Ofcourse, there is the option to choose a different template or increase/reduce the size of your photo if you want.

b) One click personalization

With intelligent defaults in place, you just need a single click to personalize your photo product. We are also working on a “Zero Click Personalization” option so that if your starting point is the photo page, you see your personalized gift right away.

c) Save work in progress

With the introduction of multiple page products like calendars and upcoming photo books, it became increasingly important that you can save work in progress and be able to finish it later. Hereafter, you can add incomplete products to your cart and edit them again to finish the personalization before you place the order. And yes, we do show a prominent message in the cart so you can quickly see the products that are incomplete.

d) Power user options get triggered on need

We understand that some of you do like to get into thick of the things and like to leave your personal stamp on the personalization. So if you are a power user, there is plenty of stuff under the hood to excite you. You can zoom-in, zoom-out, add multiple photos in the same slot, move photos around etc and create your own thing.

Do check it out and let us know what you think! Your feedback is the only way we make things better and we sincerely look forward to it.

Click here to see a larger version

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Lifeblob has been shortlisted for NASSCOM Emerge 50, 2010. There were 200 companies in the fray and it feels good to know that the jury members and Zinnov found us worthy of being on this list.

I would like to thank each one of you for your support. And if you are going to be at the NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave in Delhi on August 25, I look forward to catching up with you.

For a complete list of companies that have been shortlisted, you can go here.

Our friends at Nature Wanderers have a series of wildlife photography workshops lined up between now and April 2011.

Do take a look at the schedule below and book well in advance if you are interested – the seats tend to fill up fast. For any queries or additional details, you can reach out to Shivang Mehta of Nature Wanderers.

Thank you all for the overwhelming response to the lifeblob store.

We are glad that you like the choice of products on offer and we are working hard to provide you options that give more more control over the design of products and also offer you a wider choice in the designs available. But thats stuff we are working on and something that I will detail in a future post.

In our continued efforts to make it a rewarding experience for you to purchase personalized photo gifts from our store, we are now offering free shipping on the entire range of our products. Yes, you read it right, you don’t need to pay a penny for shipping as long as your order exceeds Rs 150/-.

So what are you waiting for – visit the lifeblob photo gifting store now to turn your photos into magical gifts and bring a smile on the face of your loved ones.

Calling all photographers – The lifeblob photo contest for the month of July is now open and the theme is:

Rain Rain Rain – Share your photos of the beautiful and joyous rainy day

I love dancin in rain.. by Sneha Rathod

And this time, we are not giving away one or two prizes but a total of 16 prizes:

• 1 Gold prize winner will receive a cool Rs 1000/- gift voucher to the lifeblob store
• 5 Silze prize winners will receive 10% discount coupons to the lifeblob store
• 10 Bronze prize winners will receive 5% discount coupons to the lifeblob store

So what are you waiting for. Grab your cameras and get going, for the rain does not always come when you want it to. For more details about the contest, visit the photo contest page.

One of the things that we constantly think about is how we can make it easier for our users to use the service. And as a big step towards that, I am pleased to announce our integration with pixelpipe, the San Francisco based content distribution gateway service.

With this integration, you now have tools to upload your photos directly from a variety of mobile devices, including Apple iPhone, Nokia S60 Series, Nokia N900 Series, Google Android and Palm Pre devices. There are also extensions that you can use to directly upload your photos from Mozilla Firefox, Nokia Photos, Adobe Lightroom 2.0 and Windows Xp Web Publishing wizard.

You can find the complete list of supported devices and the configuration instructions on this page.

So how do I get started?

Getting started is really simple – simply follow the steps below to upload your first photo from your mobile device:

a) Sign up for a pixelpipe account at http://www.pixelpipe.com. You can also log in using your twitter account there.

b) Once you are signed in, go to “Add pipes” menu item on the left and type “lifeblob” in the search box. Alternatively, you can scroll down to find the lifeblob logo among the supported services.

c) Click on the lifeblob logo – this will take you to an authorization page where you need to grant pixelpipe access to update your lifeblob data. Don’t worry, you can always revoke this permission later in the lifeblob settings if you like.

d) Thats it! You are now ready to start uploading photos to your lifeblob account through pixelpipe. All you need now is a client for your mobile device – you can follow the instructions here to choose the one that will be appropriate for your mobile device and start uploading.

We need your feedback

Do let us know how you find this integration. Do you have other ideas to make it more productive for you to use lifeblob?

Do write in to us at feedback@lifeblob.com with your thoughts and suggestions – for all you know, you may win a cool gift voucher for the lifeblob photo gifting store if we like your idea.