Kicksend partners with Walgreens for 1hr photo printing from your iPhone

Do people want to print photos?

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes. Many of my (female, older) relatives use synthetic pigment attached to plant matter with animal proteins as both their primary transfer mechanism and storage media for photos. Ruriko's mother and my mother got virtually instant Dropboxed/Facebooked photos from the wedding, cooed a bit, and then went head over heels when they got the "real" photos. (Not the professional photos, which will be delivered in data and print -- just the same friends' cameraphone/point-n-click candid shots printed out at Walgreen's for $6.23.)

If true (and I'll assume it is) this is just a basic conversion-funnel problem. If your funnel looks like this:

  - user takes photo on their iPhone
  - user successfully learns of Flickr's existence
  - user successfully opens Flickr account
  - user successfully uploads photo to Flickr
  - user successfully navigates to Flickr, sees photo
  - user decides to order prints
  - user finds and navigates "order prints" workflow
  - user gets prints in the mail three days later

  - user takes photo on their iPhone
  - user decides they like photo and want a print
  - user goes to local store which has sold photo prints for 30 years
  - user hands camera and $5 to store employee
  - user receives prints ten minutes later

I think it really depends on the user experience. Once you have that dialed in it changes everything.

I think people would be far more interested in being able to get a print of their photos in an hour (although there's no reason for it to take remotely that long), than in being able to get them after several days.

Because doing an app well is hard. It's much much easier to wait until someone like Kicksend establish themselves, then give them some money and have them integrate.

And then there's the marketing: Walgreens would peddle the app to people who are in the store and thinking about printing digital photos. A Kicksend user might never set foot in Walgreens, but if he knows about the feature in the app (it's pretty discoverable), he might decide to print a few photos to stick on the empty wall next to his desk.

I believe this has almost nothing to do with servers and upload time etc.

People, naturally, don't tend to download some app to print their photos. In fact, people are not inclined to print photos. So there's an app which people actually use every day, it partners with a service provider to sell a service and get commission out of it.

There are examples like Song Pop game gives you to opportunity buy the music you guessed from iTunes. There's an affiliate problem of iTunes for that. Because Apple (iTunes) itself won't be implementing a game to increase sales.

Here, the point is, people won't print their photos every day. But people will take photos every day. So if I would download Walgreen app and can't find anything to print at a moment, I'll forget to use and print it when I take a picture with Instagram. So if I would see a print button integrated in Instagram, it will dramatically increase sales.

This is actually based on an iOS and Android SDK that Walgreens created, allowing any photo app to integrate with photo printing.

http://news.walgreens.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=561...

Walgreens (and others) already have kiosks like this. Haven't used them, so not sure if it's only for raw USB storage or they speak PTP (which most phones seem to have).