If you can build it cheap and fast, so can the next guy…

Cameroid Logo

In relation to the topic, “If you can build it cheap and fast, so can the next guy” in my opinionI think that to build a good website for instance takes alot of time and growth and does not happen overnight. Therefore if you build it cheap and fast, it will not work, because as the topic clearly says that anyone else can achieve what you have just done and technically put you out of business.

However that being said, with the arrival of Web 2.0 technologies, it technically can be rather cheap to register yourself a new domain, grab a good hosting package and develop your idea from there. You can use content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, or blogging tools like PHPBB, or fully develop the website yourself using technologies like PHP, ASP.NET and Adobe’s Flash for instance. Then add RSS Feeds to the mix and you think you might have yourself a winner. Nope… you can forget that!

Cameroid Smurf

There is nothing wrong with using any of these, but in my opinion it really lies with the idea. I think that you should research the area of industry and intended target audience that you are wanting to attract for this. As I said earlier, if the idea is right and as time goes on growth will happen. Therefore you may have achieved this relatively cheaply, depending on how many of you there are, but you have taken a substantial amount of time to get too where you are.

In saying all that, the application for this week is Cameroid. They allow you to use your computers webcam to take photos online and share it through blogs or popular social networking sites, or you can email it to friends and family. Cameroid gives you a default templates that you can apply around your photos or add some special effects like distort and twist to really spice up your photo experience.

Cameroid actually reminds me of Apple’s PhotoBooth program, however that is part of the Mac OSX and runs off the users computer. PhotoBooth also utilises the computers webcam (which all Macs come with nowadays called the iSight) and allows users to add special effects to the image.

In wrapping up, why I believe that Cameroid will survive is that it’s entirely free and all done through the users internet browser. The only plugin needed is the Adobe Flash browser plugin which is most likely already installed on most computers anyway. Therefore you aren’t going out of your way to install a plugin that you may only use for Cameroid. Who hasn’t had fun with manipulating images or adding special effects to them? Thats why I firmly believe Cameroid is here to stay.

Share it. Email it.

References:

Cameroid. 2007. Use your webcam to take photos online! http://www.cameroid.com/ (accessed May 9, 2010)

Apple PhotoBooth. 2010. What is Mac OSX – PhotoBooth. http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/photo-booth.html (accessed May 9, 2010)

Killer Startups. 2010. Get Snap Happy with your webcam. http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/cameroid-com-get-snap-happy-with-your-webcam (accessed May 9, 2010)

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