Viadeo - Foros Cambridge

Should a Christmas present be practical, useful or personal?

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:54:30 GMT

When well being and friendship become more important than material goods, then the way presents are selected changes, too. Here a list of Christmas gifts available online. The gift ideas range from the decorative, the practical to family friendly games. They all have in common, that they can be personalised with own images.�

Christmas, celebrating reunions

Searching for and buying Christmas presents can be completely relaxed when done from home on the Internet. Questions like: "What would she like or what would be useful to him?" or "Does it have to be that expensive?" have become redundant in our affluent society, where people have already bought the things they want and what they have not bought yet they don't really want. For this Christmas here a list of individual gift ideas to preserve personal memories and to celebrate families and friendship. These are largely photo gifts, personalised with own images.

Greeting cards don't have to come a of the shelf

Greeting cards with their own interesting or funny pictures are much more personal. Photo services like FotoInsight print photo greeting cards usually in sets of ten as picture postcards or folding greeting cards (with image and text on-print on all four pages) with their envelopes . Hint: The cheapest photo greeting cards are on photographic paper, where the front can be edited in full colour, costing only �3.99 including 10 envelopes.�

Calendars with own photographs

There can hardly be a better Christmas present than a photo calendar, let it be a wall calendar, a desk planner, a table picture calendar or kitchen calendar, it needs a new one every year. The FotoInsight Designer software provides many calendar templates for photo calendars in different sizes at http://fotoinsight.com/calendar. Similar to the photo book layouts, a virtually unlimited number of pictures can be applied and layered. A birthday calendar can include passport size pictures on birthdays in the calendars.�

Those who want to print calendars on a printer at home (that will still be possible on the last day), will do well with the photo calendar software from greenstreet, the voucher TEST0825 gives a 48% discount (�12.99 at http://greenstreet-online.com/offers/iitm-calendar/index.htm). Photobook calendars from Printing-1 are the alternative to wall calendars. They can be up to 250 pages thick with much space for pictures and notes.

Family stories in pictures

With pictures from a family or holiday there will be a story to tell. The ideal medium to preserve these memories is a photo book, printed with personal photographs. The holiday season is the time to share these memories with the whole family. Another photobook service, http://www.Printing-1.co.uk/ launches a new photo book style just in time for the season. In this new glossy photo book each page is sealed with a glossy, environmentally friendly vanish. With the glossy finish the photo book should be protected from all the finger prints friends and family will leave on the pictures as the photo book is passed around.�

Photo crystal

A photo heart glass block with a laser engraved photograph and other photo crystal gift ideas can be found in Fotoinsight's Crystal section. Prices range from �9.99 / €12.99 for a crystal key ring (with LED light) to �19.99 / €29.99 for a laser engraved crystal photo (the engraving process is apparently military technology).

Photo games at Christmas

The picture pairs game Remembory is ideal for families, as it suits children from the age of 4 years young and unites families. 25 of your own photos (family, holidays, et al) suffice for an individual gift (�12.99 / €13.99 +p&p), which families can play over the holidays. Photo puzzles too are popular during long winter nights.

Christmas 2009 - personal values for post consumerism

What could be more personal than a photo gift? What preserves memories in vivid colours? In the digital age the photo gift printing industry seems in tune with modern consumer values.

Publicado por Klaas Brumann

FotoInsight Designer v.4.5 now also for Mac OS and Linux.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:40:30 GMT

Today FotoInsight launches a new version of FotoInsight Designer with new lines of photo albums on photographic paper, new features like fading frames and festive templates and the addition of Linux and Mac OS versions.

Image layering and blend-in image masks

According to FotoInsight: "layering images in any order or position has been one of the outstanding features of its Designer software for photo books. With the new software upgrade a range of different shapes or blend-in image masks can be used as image frames. There are also plenty of new frames and clipart to decorate photo gifts for Christmas, school, wedding and other themes.

Mac OS and Linux, too

Compatible with Windows XP, Linux and Mac operating system 10.5 Leopard and above, version 4.5 of the FotoInsight Designer software is now available to download from http://FotoInsight.co.uk/book. The software upgrade sees greater functionality for editing, sorting and arranging photos, as well as for creating personalised photo gifts that preserve photographic memories.

Publicado por Klaas Brumann

Product Personalisation through Mass Customisation

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:14:41 GMT

The expression Mass Customisation is oxymoron, joining the opposites "Mass Production" and "Customisation", which has lately become fashionable. Mass customisation aims at producing goods and services to individual customer specifications with efficiencies and costs similar to mass production. Some firms in the growing photo gifts market, for example http://FotoInsight.co.uk, apply this strategy, using new technologies and innovative structures to submit mass produced items like key rings and water bottles to an individualisation process, applying user photographs. To achieve costs and delivery times similar to those of mass produced standard items, the production architecture has to be structured in a way that the individualisation takes place at the rear end of the production chain. These firms acquire mass produced components produced benefiting from large economies of scale. As the individualisation can only be applied after an order has been placed, the process is called an "X-to-order" production. The gift items market with its strong seasonal fluctuations towards Christmas and Mother's day requires a particularly flexible production.

Realising own ideas

Services that want to survive the fast changing photo printing market have to produce goods in a way that each customer will find exactly what he or she wants. A growing number of items ranging from the useful to the decorative undergo customisation by application of customer photographs. Users can turn own ideas into realities, which often have an artistic theme or are aesthetic, funny or personal.

Do you have truly innovative photo gift ideas. We are constantly searching for new products for international commercialization.

Regards from Cambridge

Klaas Brumann

http://www.memopix.com

Publicado por Klaas Brumann