Aficionados of high-end professional travel photography, brace yourselves for some bad news.
Fotopedia, the award-winning, curated travelog photo Website, which launched more than a dozen companion iPhone and iPad apps, is closing down on August 10. On that date, all servers and services will be shuttered, the company says.
Fotopedia posted the following statement on its site:
We are sorry to announce that Fotopedia is shutting down.
As of August 10, 2014, Fotopedia.com will close and our iOS applications will cease to function. Our community of passionate photographers, curators and storytellers has made this a wonderful journey, and we’d like to thank you for your hard work and your contributions. We truly believe in the concept of storytelling but don’t think there is a suitable business in it yet.
If you submitted photos and stories to Fotopedia, your data will be available to download until August 10, 2014. After this date, all photos and data will be permanently deleted from our servers.
Photographers have until August 10 to remove their work from Fotopedia’s servers using the link provided.
The Fotopedia site was launched in 2009 and gathered more than 12 million in funding over time. In 2012, the company launched a partnership with Expedia designed to let users book travel reservations more easily through Expedia’s mobile app. Its CEO is ex-Apple application division CTO, Jean-Marie Hullot.
Fotopedia went on to launch a total of 15 iOS apps, available in nine languages, and seemed to have no problem generating traffic, recording more than 3 billion image views by late 2012, according to a report by TechCrunch.
Despite the high quality of its content, a dedicated following, and various strategies over time to finance the venture — including paid apps, an ad-based model, and the Expedia partnership — none proved enough to keep the company afloat.
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