Phanfare was an online subscription-based photo sharing and video sharing service. It was introduced in November 2004 by Phanfare, Inc, a company founded by Andrew Erlichson and Mark Heinrich.

Overview

Phanfare was targeted at

prosumer A prosumer is an individual who both consumes and produces. The term is a portmanteau of the words '' producer'' and ''consumer''. Research has identified six types of prosumers: DIY prosumers, self-service prosumers, customizing prosumers, coll ...

s and serious amateurs who desire archival photo and video sharing. Consumers could upload their digital photos and videos to Phanfare. Phanfare provided each customer with a destination URL where they could direct viewers. Phanfare integrated address book and invitation tools to allow the consumer to efficiently send out invitations to view albums. It backed up and held original fullsize images using Amazon S3, allowing the consumer to retrieve their original digital assets in the event that they lose their local copy. Phanfare was acquired by Carbonite on June 6, 2011.

Uploading of photos and videos

Phanfare distributed a photo and video organizing program called Phanfare Photo (Windows and Mac compatible) that uploaded photos and video in the background while the consumer adds captions, edits and organizes the content. Phanfare could import

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...

PSD images as well as

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

WMV Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

and

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic video coding format, coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of Lossy compression, lossy video compression and ...

movies. Phanfare also provided an Apple iPhone app, Phanfare Photon, for uploading and viewing photos and videos as well as plugins for major photo and video organizing programs. Phanfare has been noted by the Wall Street Journal for its novel approach to video sharing and its media retention policies. The ideas for cache-coherent synchronization of photos and videos to a local application cache can be traced back to work in

Cache Coherence In computer architecture, cache coherence is the uniformity of shared resource data that ends up stored in multiple local caches. When clients in a system maintain caches of a common memory resource, problems may arise with incoherent data, whi ...

in shared memory

Multiprocessing Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...

History of Phanfare

First released in November 2004, Phanfare initially provided simple web hosting of photos and videos at short URLs in the Phanfare domain. Phanfare provided viewing and sharing without requiring that viewers register with Phanfare. Phanfare sites were optionally protected with site passwords. In January 2008, Phanfare introduced social networking features to the Phanfare system, de-emphasized the desktop clients, and began offering a

freemium Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (o ...

level of service (initially 1GB free, and later reduced to 256MB free) which lasted until 2009, as well as printed products including silver halide prints, digitally printed books and cards. On June 6, 2011, Carbonite acquired Phanfare. Carbonite declined to honor Phanfare lifetime memberships, instead granted lifetime members $299 in Phanfare credit which would expire after three years if unused. Two days later, Phanfare founder and CEO, Andrew Erlichson notified lifetime subscribers that customers requesting a refund will be paid not by Carbonite, but what remains of Phanfare, Inc. In May 2012, Erlichson left Carbonite exactly one year after the purchase. Carbonite shut down Phanfare on May 28, 2017.

References

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External links

*http://www.phanfare.com Image-sharing websites 2011 mergers and acquisitions American photography websites