Wednesday, May 07, 2008

An Interview with James Old, Managing Director of Magnolia Box

The Managing Director of Magnolia Box explains how the next generation of Internet software is offering new opportunities for picture businesses.

With a background in strategy consultancy and dotcom start-ups, James Old was initially a stranger to the art world and its numerous facets. However, all this was to change when the best man at his wedding presented him with a limited edition print.

He told the writer: “I loved the picture and went online to try and get a similar image to pair with it. As I was searching I discovered three things, [one] I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, [two] a similar product was exceedingly expensive and [three] the market was dominated by a couple of technically sophisticated websites whilst the rest were extremely basic, often failing to offer even rudimentary e-commerce.”

James soon realised that if he could provide a solution to help resolve these issues then he might be on to something. He continued: “If I could take what I knew about the Internet, coupled with some of the things I’d done in other industries in terms of bringing people and partners together, I believed I could create something with appeal to a variety of different art businesses.”

James’ initial aim was to produce an online “hub” by employing the same Web 2.0 principles used in popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Friends Reunited.

“These sites have become phenomenally popular by aggregating content and connecting it with interested and engaged end-users. Applying this concept to the art industry means connecting content originators, owners and publishers with product manufacturers, their clients and the eventual consumer. If I could achieve this, then there could be something in it and so I founded Magnolia Box to do just that.”

So convinced was he on the success of the venture that he has self-funded the operation in its entirety, resulting in an extensive suite of products tailored for Artists, Galleries, Photographers, Framers and Museums.

James takes up the story once again: “The art industry is immense in respect of those with potential ‘content’ or ‘products’. It’s Picture Libraries who have digital images that they may wish to turn into a physical product. It’s artists, traditional framers, high street galleries or large retailers. It might even be magazine and publishing houses as well as national museums. Helping these disparate bodies use the Internet effectively is a complex business but one that also presents a massive opportunity.

“For instance, we’ve got The Bridgeman Art Library using our software, selling large volumes of art as well as providing digital content for other clients to take advantage of the advances in digital printing via Art on Demand.

“The ‘On Demand’ sphere is one of the areas where we believe our clients will be the most successful. Our society is rapidly adopting ‘on demand’ models for the distribution of films, television and music and the art world offers a ‘media’ that can be exploited in this way. You can massively increase your image inventory, gaining many thousands of products in an infinite number of differing varieties without ever holding any stock and without incurring any costs. It’s a 100% cash business. Our clients only ever buy something after a customer has already purchased it!

“With Art on Demand you can give the customer a better choice,” advises James. “They can decide the media they would like to output an image onto. They can decide the size and the frame and our responsibility is to find quality content and manufacturing partners who can produce the products. Indeed, we are always seeking out such alliances, it’s one of the main things I spend my time doing and we are keen to hear from anyone that would like to get involved with our network.”

James further advised that his main aim is to provide website solutions that allow each one of his clients to be as successful as possible, rather than Magnolia Box itself becoming a major art retailer. He said: “We do have a retail site which we ‘market to’ and ‘drive traffic towards’, but the idea is to populate that self same site with content from our clients. So not only will they have their own branded site, but in addition, if they so wish, they can appear on our marketing site and even those of our other clients as well. It’s all about network marketing and proliferating content. There is an Internet marketing phrase: ‘increasing your online footprint’. We believe this concept is of fundamental importance and those in other industries that have distributed their ‘content’ as far as possible tend to be more successful than their peers.”

It is a recognised fact that the first thing people do nowadays, when looking for works of art or galleries in their locale, is to search the Internet. So just from a pure marketing point of view, Magnolia Soft would appear to offer a great opportunity for any art gallery. It gives them a presence online to market to their would-be customers and to encourage them to actually visit the physical store.

“We appreciate that some art needs to be seen in person,” acknowledges James. “But we also know that consumers are evolving and people are more comfortable spending larger sums online. Many customers now recognise which websites offer best-practice security measures, have fraud prevention checks and comply with Web compatibility standards. All of this inspires confidence and is naturally something we provide each client with.

“Do you really need to understand such technicalities? Possibly not. It’s always easy for IT people to get bogged down discussing features and functionality but in the simplest terms we provide sophisticated technology that is both inexpensive and easy to use. We help ensure it is written in a search engine friendly way that can be optimised for your particular niche. We provide sites to help drive traffic to your content and we help lower your trade prices through combining our collective purchasing power. You can in-source all of your printing, framing and delivery or you can outsource any part. You can apply any design, layout or look and feel. Our clients pay a simple annual fee of £1,200 and our service includes design, deployment, operation, security, management, bandwidth, enhancements, training and support. And that’s not all; our pricing remains the same whether you are turning over £1,000 or £1 million in online sales.”

Tel: 0870 300 1171

email: enquiries@magnoliasoft.net

www.magnoliasoft.net

Another award nomination for Magnolia Box

We've just found out that we are in the hunt for another couple of awards at the Fine Art Trade Guild; getting through to the shortlist in both the Website of the Year and the Innovation categories. The awards looks like fairly pretty lumps of metal so we are hopefully going to be coming back with at least one. If not . . . tables might be flying in Bristol, 17th May.

New! 3D slideshows with PicLens

We have just added a shiny new slideshow to our search results. This can be viewed in 3D, if you have the free PicLens plugin (for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7).

See it in action on the recently launched Autosport Prints store. Click on Start Slideshow

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Taking Google App Engine for a test drive

There are always plenty of new and interesting technologies to experiment with, but you have to invest precious time in setting up your development environment before you can start taking your first, undignified steps with the code. After all of this, where do you deploy your new app to, without digging into your wallet and paying for some hosting? Today I took the Google App Engine for a test drive, and within 30 minutes, my application was live for the world to see, at no cost, and without the usual set-up woes. This post will outline the simple steps I took to launch an application on the Google App Engine.

Sign up

Get your name down quick, or you may have a while to wait: http://appengine.google.com/

Set up

A painless development set-up:
  1. I installed Python
  2. I installed the Google App Engine SDK
  3. I added the pydev plugin to my Eclipse IDE, but any text editor would do the job
  4. I added python to my Windows PATH environment variable, no need to add the Google App Engine as this is done during its install process.

Some files

I quickly ran through these simple steps to create a primitive application.

It works!

A quick line in the command prompt and my app was ready to view in my browser.

Some Code

That's the boring stuff, now all I had to do was write some code. I don't have any previous experience with Python, but the learning process was a breeze with a little help from Google's sample applications.

Its live!

One more line in the command prompt and my new app was live, that's it! So what did I build? A simple interface to the albums I have been listening to lately, pulling the data from the Last.fm XML webservices. You can take a look at www.zefer.co.uk.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Magnolia Box Scoops First Website Award

The Magnolia Box team attended a prestigious award ceremony on Thursday night after being nominated in the best company website category. This category was the mostly hotly contended of the evening with 8 nominees in total and we were both surprised and delighted to come away with the honours. Our success was toasted royaly that evening resulting in just three minor casualties: to Joe, to Stuart and to our slightly chipped glass trophy. Well done us!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Magnolia Box helps St Trinian's Girls Steal Priceless Vermeer In Movie

During the past year we've been surprised by the number of requests we've had to provide fine art prints for TV and film productions. Recently, Mayhem Films - producers of the new St Trinian's film starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Mischa Barton - needed a priceless work of art for a grand heist in the movie and we were happy to help out with their prop requirements. A large part of the plot apparently revolves around those dirty St. Trinian's strumpets attempting to steal Vermeer's famous 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. If you actually read the plot summary on Wikipedia then our little picture appears to have one of the more substantial roles. Unfortunately, not a single member of the team, nor any of our extended friends and family, have seen this movie so we have absolutely no idea about how well our print comes across. Nevertheless, if anyone wants to buy a version 'As Not Seen on Screen' then you can get Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring Print here.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Changing the colour model of a BufferedImage in Coldfusion 8

We carry out a lot of image processing to achieve our photos to art solution and our frame and canvas preview feature. Most of this code was written before Coldfusion 8, which introduced lots of new image processing features native to the language. As a result, we have written Java code, some in-line with our Coldfusion, some in external Java classes. When trialling our upgrade to Coldfusion 8, we were pleased to find that our existing Java image code worked just as it did previously on Coldfusion 7. However, a week ago, we discovered that that some users were receiving timeout errors when uploading JPEGs to our photos to art solution. It turned out that the error only occurred with certain types of JPEGs, those which Java's BufferedImage class considers to have a custom colour model. We have code which converts these to workable RGB images, but it was this code which was failing on Coldfusion 8. I put the code in its simplest form, into Java...

BufferedImage bi_out = new BufferedImage(bi_in.getWidth(),
     bi_in.getHeight(), BufferedImage.TYPE_3BYTE_BGR);
Graphics2D g = bi_out.createGraphics();
g.drawImage(bi_in, 0, 0, null);
g.dispose();
...and ran some tests outside of Coldfusion, through both the JRE 1.6.0, and the one in my standard Coldfusion 8 install. Both JREs worked without problems, which meant the problem must lie with Coldfusion, which led me to this solution. So if you are having problems using Java to convert a BufferedImage of TYPE_CUSTOM in Coldfusion 8, you could try one of the two fixes below, as outlined here:
  1. Remove clibwrapper_jiio.jar from "lib" folder.
  2. Or, set this system property to the JVM. -Dcom.sun.media.imageio.disableCodecLib=true . You can set this in [cf-install_dir]/runtime/bin/jvm.config if you are using standalone coldfusion server.
So far I have been unable to find any negative side-effects of this fix.

 
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