Polaroid, the vintage camera brand that has fallen on hard times, is currently engaged in a multi-prong strategy to resurrect its good name and refresh its product line for the 21st century.
One such effort launches today with the release of Polaroid Blipfoto, a pairing with and relaunch of the popular British online one-photo-per-day personal journal. Polaroid Blipfoto is now available across all mobile devices, with its free apps for Android and iPhone, and can also be accessed via the Web.
A host of changes accompany this re-launch and refresh, including a complete overhaul of Blipfoto’s design, updates to its mobile apps and a migration of all images to new servers for better performance and resolution of technical issues.
Polaroid Blipfoto encompasses a community spanning 170 countries and houses some 5 million days of human history. A successful photo sharing service now more than a decade old, Blipfoto aims to be the opposite of Instagram and Facebook, which encourage volume over selectivity. By limiting member postings to one photo per day, the service forces people to consider and document the most important parts of their lives.
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Blipfoto founder Joe Tree
Considering that people currently post more than 1.8 million images every day, Blipfoto offers a way to build a personal history and allow users to not only document their lives but to make emotional connections to what and how they share. Polaroid Blipfoto offers a clean and uncluttered ad-free interface.
Meanwhile, Polaroid’s business model has shifted from a vertical operating company to a licensing model that seeks out compatible worldwide partners, including manufacturers, distributors and service providers — for example the company’s branding of the Socialmatic camera and the Cube camcorder. Like those partnerships, Blipfoto and Polaroid consider each other to be perfectly aligned.
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