Tuesday 3 April 2007 — This is over 17 years old. Be careful.
On the same day that we announced the HP acquisition, Tabblo launched a new product that got a little lost in the commotion. The Tabblo PhotoCube is our first print-at-home product: it’s a five-photo cube that you print yourself, cut out, and fold together. It was a lot of fun to launch.
I did the paper engineering. The challenge was to find a way to construct a cube that wouldn’t require tabs and glue, but would hold together well enough to feel satisfying when you’re done. My first attempt was an interesting construction, but required a PhD in folding to put together. The final result is simple enough to explain that people seem to have no trouble putting it together. The compromise is that there are only five photos, the bottom of the cube is open.
I like the result. It’s free, and it uses your photos, and although it’s a physical product, it has an immediacy that ordering books from us doesn’t have.
The PhotoCube nicely combines Tabblo’s emphasis on telling stories with your photos, with the matter transporter nature of paper models on the internet.
Comments
I love these things! I also love your business card cube you posted a while ago. Just one question, what are the chances of more complex objects? I have a pattern for making a sturdy 12 sided ball out of three sheets. Granted this would require having pentagram shaped pictures which tabblo does not (yet?) support.
All that said, though, if you can send a link or a template, I'd love to see what other objects are interesting to you...
I totally want to see foldeys for simple oragami shapes that have lots of open spaces like the wings on a standard swan, or panda (although that's 2 pieces of paper). It would be really cool to have a whole line of 1 sheet oragami tabblo "foldeys".
Can you chat about how it was decided to use the WikiWord naming convention for the PhotoCube?
DeanG: I'm intrigued by the possibility that Seth Godin might be interested, though I don't see the connection. As to the name, it's not like we had a big focus group or anything. Antonio said, "called them PhotoCubes", and we did!
I wouldn't be surprised, or bothered, if we didn't start seeing some HP encouragements in the empty space around the cube. Imaging how cool it would be to have the subliminal association of "this cool cube i just made" with HP brand ... even better, Imagine what would happen if you put a link on the page that said "Want to see how spectacular this could look an a HP(some model name/number) ? " which goes to a tabblo page where the person can enter their shipping address and HP would send them a free copy of the cube printed on whatever model it was they were trying to promote. Yeah it wolud cost a stamp, envelope, and someone's time to stuff them but I would imagine the resulting sales of ink for said new printer would be worth it. Limit it to one per customer per model promotion.
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