Panstoria last month launched a new version of Historian software under its own brand, after eight years of successful sales through a private label agreement with another company, officials said.
Historian 4.0 software gives users tools for organizing and preserving their digital photos, while Artisan 4.0 allows them to create scrapbooks, greeting cards and other items from their photos. The software is intended to be user-friendly, unlike products such as Adobe Photoshop, which can be difficult to learn without training, said Mike Carroll, Panstoria’s chief executive.
“The idea of the software was to provide some very powerful and creative features to people who wouldn’t know how to use the, say, 17 steps in Photoshop to do a particular feature,” Carroll said. “They can use the software here just to do it in a few clicks and make very nice looking pages.”
The company started in 1993 as Interpersonal Computing Inc., which developed software to control machines and business processes. In 2000, the firm narrowed its focus to commercial products and changed its name to Caspedia Corp.
Carroll said that shift resulted in part from changes at NCR, which put outside contractor work under third-party management, and Giddings & Lewis Inc., a Wisconsin-based machine tool manufacturer that was bought by German industrial giant Thyssen.
“Two of our major customers being gone, we had to re-examine things and it was, ‘Let’s do something we like,’ rather than another piece of banking software,” Carroll said.
Panstoria Chief Technology Officer Paul Schweizer was interested in photography and Carroll was a genealogy and history buff. The company’s co-owners turned to creating products that would overlap their personal interests and meet the needs of the growing “memories” market.
More than 24 billion photos were taken in the U.S. in 2010, and more that 16.5 billion photos were printed, according to estimates from the Photo Marketing Association.
Carroll and Schweizer launched their photo editing and organization software in 2005, followed by the first version of Caspedia digital scrapbooking software in 2006.
The Historian software uses the company’s patented “vault” technology, which draws on the developers’ experience with corporate networks and databases. The vault tracks original photos, as well as revisions and related files, allowing them to be moved to other folders or computer disks without being lost.
“One of the great evolutions of data management was when they went from worrying about where the files were stored to SQL (structured query language) databases, where they … started worrying about its logical structure,” Schweizer said.
“We thought the same thing true of photos. Why do people have to know physically where it is on their disk? They just need to know it is in the vault. Then once it is in the vault we can manage it at a logical or informational level,” he said.
The company changed its name to Panstoria in 2010 to prepare for the release of its Artisan 4.0 software, as well as other new applications.
Panstoria is now selling both Artisan 4.0 and Historian 4.0 software through its website. The company through which they previously sold the products declared bankruptcy in the spring.
“It is more of a challenge, but it is potentially much more lucrative because there are a number of revenue streams,” including software, print and digital content sales, Carroll said.
Panstoria recently announced a deal with Utah Print Solutions to provide printing services for Artisan software. Starting in September, Artisan users will be able to order books or other printed items directly from the software, without having to upload files to a printing company.
In addition, Panstoria announced a partnership with an Australian company that is offering its digital scrapbooking software in that part of the globe under the name “My Story Designer, powered by Panstoria Artisan.” That company is offering the software as a free download, tied to its printing services.
Panstoria is a privately held company. Carroll and Schweizer are its only full-time employees, and use contractors and outsourced services as needed. They declined to disclose product sales figures or revenues.
Schweizer said the company may have to expand if its own software sales are successful.
“We like to focus on what we do best, product-wise,” Carroll said. “If we can outsource other functions and keep the core small, that’s what we want to be able to do.”
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