Montreal Tech Watch

Tripod Ventures is a new private company, with the management team made of 3 experienced entrepreneurs and executives coming from the photo industry, and they also have Vahe Kassardjian as the CTO of the new venture. Vahe K. was the founder of Integration New Media, a company specialized in multimedia products (think Macromedia Director-like products).

Tripod Ventures is neither a startup or a VC fund, as the name might suggest. It has an original business model: the partners pools money into the venture, and they then partner with experts and external consultants to build and develop products they think will be successful on the market.

One of their first announced product is for instance “Fusion”, which is presented as web platform that would allow consumers to simply upload, process, “beautify” pictures and finally order transformed products. Fusion is meant to be sold to photo retailers, as a solution for digital printing, and a unified platform that would take in charge marketing/distribution/sales.

Tripod Ventures’ partner for Fusion is Future Image, a San Mateo CA, firm specialized in consumer digital photography.

The photo industry is currently reinventing itself, giants like Fuji or Kodak are closing film production and transformation centers by dozens, and I have to say I have no idea whether this new product would be successful. I hope they’ll bring something quickly to the market and see if this fits into the digital market.