Blog

After 5 years of trying to break even we decided all the work and effort wasn’t worth it to keep our Bayshore store open. The mall management had changed and were simply not caring of small businesses (too much trouble) and unaware of our contributions (7000 Santa packages delivered yearly, in less than 10 minutes on chemical prints every season). Oh well they will find out the hard way but I am sure they couldn't care less. Bottom line for them is only revenue of course, not the success of local small businesses. New management at Bayshore Mall started a strategy of having less services type stores wherever possible.

RIP
MotoPhoto Bayshore

The other issue had always been lack of efforts from the franchisor. In fact the last three years it was blatantly obviously that the franchisor was only interested in milking all franchisees for every cent possible before (in their view) the photo business imploded. I would advise anyone to avoid the people, who I have heard many call scam artists, who ran CIS Franchising, the Hamam brothers. Apparently the Motophoto Canada President, Sam Hamam, is now a franchise business consultant at a Toronto consulting firm. If the intent of the consulting is to maximize the profit of the franchisor, he's definitely the man for the job. However if the role is to come up with processes, marketing, innovation to help a franchisor and franchisee to succeed in difficult times, I would steer away from his consulting firm. The Hamam brothers (Sam & Bill) drove MotoPhoto into the ground with nary a concern for the hard working franchisees. The goal was to maximize all franchisor profits before the end, which they must have clearly seen (if they didnt they were incompetent). They were good at this, carefully managing all franchisees correspondence. One trick was to send all emails to individually franchisees, each with a different message. This prevented a common email list being used, thus reducing the possibility of an uprising. They could cater their extortionist messages to individual owners. They pushed different buttons for different owners. For the last 3 years they were in business, 99%+ of all phone calls and emails I received had one message "Where's our Royalties?". No marketing plans, ideas, innovations; just where's my royalties on your money losing businesses, "Pay up, our Lexus leases are due". Their marketing plan, when produced usually was a photocopy of the one from MotoPhoto USA. Not so effective in the Canadian marketplace.

Luckily most of our regular customers have followed us to our Carlingwood location and we are beginning to get our lives back!! We have been using the EasyPrintPhoto name for over 18 months now.

last year my most expensive piece of equipment broke down. When I originally purchased the Noritsu 3011, it it cost more than a couple of Porsche’s. Funny the bank will loan you money to buy a Noritsu 3011 but not a Porsche, although both are delicate and may break down at anytime. The laser went on the 3011, repair costs are anywhere from 18K to 50K. This along with a very depressed market for 5 year old chemical labs was a scary situation. I had to revisit the whole printing technology market. I really didn’t want to repair the old Noritsu or buy a used one as the laser could just fail again. Maintenance of the wet lab was just too time consuming (my time).

Lucky for me, the failure occurred a couple of days before our yearly photo store buying convention, the PMA, this year in Toronto. Thus we raced to Toronto to look at the available technologies. I had seen the dry labs last year and scoffed at them (after all, I had a beautiful functioning cadillac of printers - the 3011). This time I really looked at them. The prints produced by the D701 seemed very accurate. It is hard to explain but they appear “more digital” with an obvious chroma boost. Some purists may claim the prints to be inferior to a wet lab silver halide print, however 98% of my customers will probably prefer the prints of a D701. When I tested the printer on a selection of my own test prints, some actually looked better than I ever printed them on the 3011. Most were similar and the odd one worse. My test prints are generally scanned from 35mm negatives, the D701 seems to perform best from digital camera input.

Another key factor that sold me was the per print cost had come down considerably since I glanced at them last year. More than a wet lab but competitive. Best of all, Noritsu had some clearance demo models that week, as they were now pushing the D703 (same as the D701 but with a second magazine). My machine was the little used model from the training office in Montreal, and very well maintained! Fuji also has a similar model, however the user interface is different and print quality may be slightly different.

The D701 is easier for staff, as paper changes are simple. It prints 4x6’s, 5x7’s and 8x10’s with very little manual intervention. It uses the same user interface as the 3011 but with some obvious timely software upgrades. The D701 allows me to have the user interface on my front counter, so the staff can watch the store while orders are being processed or manually inputed. It works with all my existing Santa and web net order software, so all would be well for Christmas. It instantly worked with all my Kodak Kiosks. It also has a 36inch advance, thus it can print a gorgeous 10”x36” panoramic print!

The D701 is very light as you can roll it around or it can be lifted by two people. It would also fit easily into a van or SUV for transport. The actually space used by the D701 is about half of that of the 3011. The video below show a very compact footprint, however if you add the sorter and place it on a table (recommended), it takes up more room then you may expect. I’ll make a video of my set-up, however for now here is the only video on the web of the D701. I will follow up with a proper review once I break it in properly.

After years of writing Perl, html and previously doing some Carbon and Cocoa I decided to write a couple of iPhone apps. I reached a point where I couldn’t properly test or do what I needed so I decided to become an official iPhone Developer. After a couple of applications, faxes, emails, $99 and 3 months I received word that I’m in. While I was waiting I let all my programs and ideas hibernate, thus now I slowly have to get back into it. I have some ideas, and hopefully at least one will be accepted into the app store.

One of the first issues I encountered was provisioning my iPhone.

One of many common provisioning error

A common error when first provisioning an iPhone using xcode seems to be:

Code Sign error: a valid provisioning profile matching the application's Identifier could not be found

Searching on the internet and through Apple’s literature there seems to be quite a few solutions out there. Some involve going though the whole provisioning process again; removing and re-installing the profile in the xcode organizer window or even playing around with your keychain defaults. None of this worked for me when I too had this error.

After a visit to the dog park on tenth line road - Niko really liked it, it is like an asteroid impact crater - I sat back and tried a couple of little things. What finally worked was simple and involved my project target info.

In the xcode for your project, under build/Edit Active Target, you required to enter your identifier. I naturally entered the format provided by apple

XXXXXXXXXX.com.yourdomain.*

what is required is something along the lines of

com.yourdomain.com.testapp1

Where yourdomain is your domain in the apple identifier and testapp1 could be anything you wish to call your project. This does the trick. In my case all compiled and installed on my iphone immediately after this change.

Over the last 5 years I seem to have become the King of Santa Photos. I really do not believe there is a better setup in North America (and probably the world - seriously) for my implementation of Mall Santa Photos. I did not see this coming when I was doing telecommunication switch diagnostic code or writing predicted train meet algorithms for the railroad. My stores in the Bayshore and Carlingwood Malls have printed over 30,000 santa picture packages and well over 200,000 santa pictures and cards. My setup allows the choice of 12+ packages in a remote santa village in the mall for pickup in my store. Generally 95% of all packages are available within 10 minutes of selection. Our packages this Christmas looked like this.

The key to the success is the specialized code in the village and in the store. All code is written in perl to run on web servers and standard browsers. For this I use my trusty macs for the santa village and the store. I have changed my network setup over the years from a wifi setup with repeaters, to a wifi setup with a stand-alone apple base station half way in the mall, to a broadband setup last year.

Last year I did not do the Bayshore service and as a result they went from a choice of 12 packages to 2 and my delivery time of 10 minutes became anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days from Blacks. Apparently they only showed the customers the pictures on the back LCD of the camera, and ran the memory card to their store every 6 customers. Wow, thats one technologically advanced outfit! This is even more ridiculous since they were fifty feet from the santa setup and my store was on the other side of the mall. Compare this with my setup, where they saw all pictures taken on a large screen, and if, for example they choose the north pole package, within 15 minutes they could pick up 1 8x10, 2 5x7’s, 4 wallets, 2 photo gift tags and 40 photo Christmas cards!

Last year I made a couple of key changes that were very successful. With every package I provided a free sample greeting card with their own santa picture. The customers then had an option of buying more for immediate printing (typically 5 minutes) or anytime later. From past experience, people tend not to see the value of such a card without seeing it. Another addition was a photo gift tag was provided with every wallet set ordered. I did this as I had to manipulate the wallet set anyway, due to Noritsu software shortcomings, so while I was coding (perl & imagemagick) this bit, I filled the unused paper on the 6 inch print with a photo gift tag. This also was very popular. I have some more ideas for next year ..... gotta stay the King.... I guess.