The Fotiva story

Posted 12 November 2006

I’ve just reached the end of a seven-year adventure into software for digital photography. The adventure began with my first digital camera, a Nikon 950, in July 1999. My frustrations with the difficulties of working with digital photos on the PC led me to conceive of a digital photo appliance, a “photo tablet,” during the Thanksgiving weekend that year. In February 2000, my cofounders Ken Rothmuller and Bernard Peuto had signed on, and PhotoTablet was incorporated. A couple months later, we closed on $2 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, thanks to the vision of general partner Stewart Alsop.

During the next six months, we realized that our tablet appliance concept was ahead of its time. Our product plan evolved by September 2000 to be based on a PC application, and by early 2001 we had built a great executive team, including CEO Jim Heeger and VP Marketing Tanya Roberts (both now at PayCycle). We renamed the company Fotiva, and set out to raise a second round of financing to bring the product to market. Alas, the fall of 2001 was the worst of times for raising money, especially for a consumer-focused digital photography company. We ended up selling the company to Adobe Systems in December 2001. The software that we built at Fotiva turned into Photoshop Album, and then into the organizer mode of Photoshop Elements. (Update November 18, 2011: Jim sold PayCycle to Intuit, and he and Tanya are both at GreenRoad

Along the way, I learned a great deal about the photo industry, the shrink-wrapped software business, and life in a big company. It was a grand adventure, but I’m thrilled to now be returning to the world of building a small business.

View the Fotiva web site, captured for posterity as a PDF file before it was taken offline. (Keep in mind that this is more than five years old now, so many of the external links and email addresses no longer work.)