Tiny start-up takes on photo sharing big guns

The online photo sharing and finishing market has undergone a transformation in the past few months, with search engine giant Google launching its Picasa service, Yahoo!'s acquisition of Flickr and Hewlett-Packard's purchase of the Snapfish, which has 13 million members.

They join established players Shutterfly.com, Kodak's Ofoto.com and Sony's ImageStation.com to form a list that reads like the who's who of online digital media. The market is arguably heading towards a re-run of the browser and search engine wars in which only the largest remained standing.

But a tiny Hong Kong firm, Fotobay.com, is looking to buck that trend. The 10-man show, headed by a mechanical engineer and a former rocket scientist, launched its photo sharing and finishing service in January, and now boasts 5,000 members mainly in Hong Kong, the United States, Australia and Britain.

Five thousand is a relatively paltry figure compared with the big boys, but founders Casey Chu and Daniel Ang said they had a long-term strategy to secure the organic growth of 'loyal' subscribers.

In contrast with other local internet start-ups, Mr Chu said, Fotobay could afford to take its time building up a subscriber base as its parent firm, eSolutions, already had a profitable business developing Web-based recruitment and human resource applications.