Lenzr Celebrates Two Year Anniversary, Fifty Contests, and a New Website
Post by Robert Campbell on Jul 10, 2011
Here’s a long overdue update on the continued success of Lenzr.com from me, Rob Campbell the Prime Innovator sharing his insights into the hopes and dreams of this start-up which was ranked at #365 in the Techvibes May 2011 Toronto Start-Ups List, and now in the June 2011 Techvibes Canada Start-Ups list Lenzr is ranked #303, up 62 points, (and ahead of BNOTIONS). The websites listed there on TechVibes are ranked by volume of traffic I imagine? and if that’s the case our enterprise should keep skyrocketing up the charts as our model improves and we host more and more interactive challenges.
Lenzr is a serial photo contest website that aims to be the World’s number one choice for providing custom photo contest solutions. It’s a delivery system designed to make user generated photo challenges easy to create and implement on sponsor business websites. The storytelling can occur in the form of buttons, banners, display widgets and even a small API to allow voting. The idea is that anyone’s blog or company website can be dramatically improved *socially* by adding a clever photo contest to the homepage or blog.
Over the last two years, Lenzr has grown a large community of professional photographers and many of them have now uploaded their profile pictures and links. They all enter the contests regularly and chat with each other in their profile pages and in the discussion forum. But we have even more social surprises to unveil in the months to come…
Lenzr is free to join and free to use, and you’re free to win great prizes.
There are no ads either, and we never sell email addresses or any user information. The new photography discussion forum will soon be filled with helpful site-related queries and replies, and of course some unrelated discourse about the art and science of photography and the business of being a freelance photographer.
With this new custom website we hope to be able (someday) to offer a flawless contest delivery system that will be quite unique in the marketplace and offer users more customizable options plus lots of native traffic.
Lenzr does not own any photographers’ images – the terms of service are very specific. Each participant simply grants Lenzr and the contest sponsors the rights to display their images in connection with the specific web challenge to which the photo was submitted, only. The photos must not be copied and we are working on disabling browser Save Photo feature. That being said we hope to introduce custom photo licensing software that will incent members to join a cooperating image bank and allow others to license their pictures.
The new website launched June 1 at Lenzr.com and it has been a rather bumpy start, but nothing more onerous than our IT solution manager Will Webb of Innate Media Group predicted. The main complaint has been CMS issues – everyone is thrilled with how well the contests look on the front end.
Last month four sponsors broke the ice on the new platform. A Toronto IT staff solutions firm launched Best Office Staff Party which is probably the least successful so far, with only about twenty five photos uploaded. An Ottawa roofing company sponsored Construction Sights because the same firm does vinyl siding and windows and doors. There have been almost sixty submissions so far in that match. Shafts of Sunlight is presented on behalf of a sunrooms installer in Cambridge Ontario, and although there are lots of entries, very few actually have a good tangible shaft; most are just lens flares.
The number one photo contest right now in terms of entries will probably become the most successful challenge ever launched on Lenzr. When last I checked the A Counting Exercise photo contest sponsored by Toronto accountants had 110 pictures uploaded, and there’s still more than fifteen days before the challenge ends. On the 25th of July, after voting ends, the Top Ten images in each match will advance to the Judges for a final decision.
On July 1st long weekend, while I was vacationing at a Muskoka cottage near Bracebridge Ontario, three more photo contests launched. And there have been four Community Contests hosted on the portal since we unveiled the new website on June 1st, 2011.
My sincerest apologies for not updating Lenzr members earlier to announce the winners of the Glorious Colours contest and the What’s In Your Garden photo contest, but I forgot that these were only 30 day challenges – it wasn’t until Saturday July 9th that I took any action to announce the winners, mr_slava and tluvr respectively. The prizes are pretty sweet too, a solar powered radio and an Ames’ lawn buddy.