Kyle
As an Apple and Mac user for over 25 years I’ve never really had to go elsewhere to find a screen shot. My fingers just inherently go command+shift+4 anytime I need a screenshot and we tidy them up in photoshop. Apparently though, it’s not as easy for those of you using a Windows based machine. Thank goodness for startups like PagePeeker.
PagePeeker is a Romanian startup that makes screen shots and thumbnails a breeze. They bill themselves as the first commercial provider of full page screenshots. Now in all fairness full page screenshots can be tricky even for a Mac. They also offer a superior two step thumbnail generation. Everyone needs a great place to find thumbnails, just take one look at the train wreck of a slide show that our theme creates.
PagePeeker keeps things quick. In fact they are so quick that they keep a current graph on their website that shows the load time for their site, often times with very little load at all.
Does this mean no ones using the service? Well according to PagePeeker co-founder Sorin Vinatoru, they have plenty of customers and their process is so efficient the load time is often next to nothing. This is important in the fast paced blog and websphere.
We got a chance to interview Vinatoru in the interview below:
What is your startup, what does it do?
PagePeeker converts web pages to screenshots and thumbnails. We provide this as an API based web service. This is interesting for a wide variety of audience, and has proven popular for directories, blogs and social media related sites.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds
Sorin Vinatoru: Co-founded a software development company in 2001, was CTO for a few years, then sold it. Former CTO, then General Manager for Europe operations @ Island Logic Inc. Experienced in managing geo distributed teams.
Alex Florescu: Serial entrepreneur since 2004, with many sites created and grown during the time. Has founded allsubs.org in 2006, and then sold it in 2010.
Where are you based?
We are based in Bucharest, Romania. That’s in the eastern part of the European Union.
What is the startup culture like in Romania
It’s in its infancy, but growing slowly. People are great and there are a number of events each year where you can meet fellow entrepreneurs and potential investors.
What problem does your startup solve?
We provide a simple, cost effective way to generate and display screenshots from web pages. We do this so well, we can provide the service for a fraction of the cost the established players in the market charge. We are hoping to disrupt this market, as it is dominated by stale players with cost prohibitive services.
What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?
In this industry, the bulk of the cost is generated by the render farm. That’s the servers that convert the web pages to screenshots and then generate thumbnails from them. Our main challenge was to identify a way to generate screenshots that is fast but not very resource intensive. We have achieved this by custom coding our screenshot robot in C++ under Linux. As a result, it can run on commodity hardware and provide us with a huge competitive advantage.
Another challenge was generating screenshots from broken sites. Since we have no idea what sites we will be asked to generate screenshots from, we had to do a lot of testing to make sure our service works for every site. After a lot of work, we ended up using a two step model. First we try to generate the screenshot using a webkit based browser. If that fails, we try using a gecko (mozilla) based browser. That helps us render almost any site thrown at us.
Who are your mentors and role models?
We are firm believers in the lean startup and MVP methodologies. Therefore, the role models are Eric Ries and Steve Blank.
What’s one thing the world doesn’t know about you or your startup?
We are located in Romania, but very few people get to read our about page and figure that out. Now that I put it in this interview, a lot more will know. Even though we are located outside US, the founders have had a lot of experience working with US based companies and individuals.
What’s next for your startup?
On the technology front, optimizing it even more and monitoring more closely what sites fail to render. Also, adding more services, such as PDF screenshots. HTML to PDF conversion will be coming soon as well (currently is in beta).
On the marketing front, we are trying to reach more of our potential customers through social media.
We are also trying to raise angel investment, so we can get more involved with the US based tech sector, where our target audience is.
