Smilebox Blog

My nephew Hugh is one and a half years old and lives in Australia, where my wife is from.  She was recently there, and took some really fun photos and video clips of him, his parents, and gunga [grandma in Aussie slang].  After coming back to Seattle, she dropped them into a Smilebox and emailed them to Hugh and her Aussie family.  Hugh is now in love.  We were told he asked to play it 4 times [apparently, he quite enjoys watching himself in the videos].  He also loves the Hoops & Yoyo characters that are part of the Smilebox design, commenting on the photos and videos and making funny sounds.  It is hard for us living so far away from home – Priscilla is from Australia I am from Greece, and we live in Seattle.  But knowing that we can share precious family moments such as Hugh’s ongoing adventures while he grows into a boisterous little boy makes us feel like part of us is there and makes living away from home more bearable.  We are actually expecting our first baby ourselves this coming February, and as a first-time dad I am already thinking of all the ways I can share the little one’s adventures with our loved ones back home using Smilebox: announcing the baby’s arrival, sharing slideshows with fun characters capturing simple everyday moments, creating a scrapbook of the first year’s best photos.  That’s what I love most about Smilebox: It connects me with the people I care about, no matter how far away they live from me.  And, if I am as smart as my nephew Hugh, I can just play it again, and again, and again. Yannis

Click to play | Make your own Smilebox

We continue to work hard to make Smilebox better and better. We recently shipped a new catalog which was almost a year in design and about 4 months in implementation. The goal was to make it much easier to find the right content whether you are searching or browsing by occasion, style, artist, project type or number of photos. The results have been great – we have seen an overnight increase in usage of around 20% as people are able to find content nd complete their projects more quickly. This week we will ship much better printing support, as well as enhanced blogging support including support for automatically adding Smilebox creations to Facebook profiles. The printing will make it really easy to print an entire scrapbook at one time as well as specific page ranges. Up to this point we have only provided the ability to print a page at a time. Our focus moving forward and into the holidays is to start to build out the Smilebox community capabilities in a way that continues to make Smilebox and richer and richer way to communicate and stay in touch with your friends and families. Stay tuned and we will report on advances as they come to market. In the mean time, here is a little Smilebox to introduce you to our company and some of the team members.

Click to play | Make your own Smilebox