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The deadline to remove videos comes as Cisco is in the midst of reorganizing, shuttering consumer-facing businesses and returning its focus to the enterprise networking segment. The Flip video camera business was just one unit that fell victim to the cuts, as Cisco announced it would shut down the popular consumer video camera manufacturer last month.

Even though Cisco is hastily moving to wind down the business, 30 days isn’t a very long time for consumers to move files from a service like this. Last month, for instance, Google announced it would finally be shutting down its Google Video site to focus on its wildly more popular YouTube service. On April 13, the search giant announced that it would end playback of Google Video files by the end of the month, and gave users 30 days to manually download those files. But despite Google Video lying mostly dormant for several years, users protested the sudden shutdown. Google eventually backpedaled, eliminating the April 29 shutdown date and urging users to transfer their files to YouTube instead.

One of the key advantages of the FlipShare service was semi-private sharing of videos; users that uploaded to FlipShare primarily did so because they could share within a small group of friends and family without posting them for all the world to see. For users that still want their files hosted on the web but don’t necessarily want them viewable by everyone, YouTube offers private viewing controls so that videos can go unlisted on the main site, or will only be available with those who have a shareable link. Shutterfly  and Vimeo  also enable viewers to upload videos and privately share them.

While users will have just 30 days to download files from the FlipShare website, Cisco will continue to support the Flip camera hardware and software for another 18 months. On the Flip website, the company reports it will continue to offer technical support for Flip cameras until Dec. 31, 2013, and the cameras themselves will continue to be available while supplies last. It also said that the FlipShare software will continue to be supported until the end of 2013 as well.

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That’s because the Redwood City, Calif.-based company has seen lots of photo-sharing startups come and go since its inception in 1999, Housenbold told me in an interview last week. Our chat was meant to focus on the launch of Shutterfly’s new Custom Path photo book creator, which is by all appearances a top-notch product. But things really got interesting when I asked how Custom Path compares to the offerings from new entrants in the photo printing market like Postagram and Keepsy.

“Who are the ‘entrants in the market’?” Housenbold asked a bit testily. “We’ve seen more than a thousand venture-backed companies come into the space, and they all fail. They don’t understand scale.” Even big players like Yahoo, AOL, Sony, and American Greetings have “tried their hand” in the photo sharing and printing space only to eventually shut down operations, he said. “If they can’t succeed at it, I don’t think three kids in a garage with $3 million in venture funding can. It’s hard.”

Indeed, Shutterfly stands out in at least one major way: It makes a lot of money. “Instagram has built a nice feature, but it’s a function, not a business. Lots of companies offer great consumer feature functionalities, but it’s not something that people [want to] pay for,” he said. Shutterfly, meanwhile, makes products that people “are willing to take out their credit cards for.”

Housenbold has every reason to feel confident from a financial perspective. Shutterfly, with a market cap of $1.65 billion and a 56-percent gross profit margin on annual revenues of more than $300 million, is absolutely a market leader. But after our conversation about Shutterfly’s competitive landscape, I was left feeling a bit like the CEO doth protest too much. Slamming the competition is a time-honored tradition in the tech world, but when he specifically scolded GigaOM for leading potential Shutterfly customers astray, it became a bit much. Housenbold told me startup coverage like ours “just adds to the consumer confusion in this space.”

Maybe he’s not up nights, but it sounds like he’s not sleeping easy either.

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Keepsy is just the latest in a spate of new startups, like Sincerely and Memolane, focused on preserving and organizing the updates people publish online. But the concept of providing tools for users to create printed albums from their digital photos is nothing new: Products like Mixbook, Blurb and Apple’s iPhoto, to name just a few, do the same thing. Keepsy co-founder Blake Williams told me his company isn’t looking to compete with the existing players in the space, as Instant Album is targeted at consumers who are intimidated by the industry’s current offerings.

“The products that are out there right now allow you to do high-end stuff, coffee-table quality books that take hours and hours to build. We don’t want to compete on that level,” Williams said in an interview. “If you can’t build a great-looking album in less than two minutes with Instant Album, we’ve failed.” The company is also differentiated, for the moment at least, by being the only provider of printed Instagram photo albums, Williams pointed out.

Instant Album automatically selects what it deems the 35 most “interesting” photos from a user’s current Instagram account, based on an algorithm that takes into account, among other things, how many times a photo has been “liked” by other Instagram users. It then uses those photos to create an album within a selected template, like “Wedding” or “College.” Users can then further customize the album by adding, moving or deleting photos; changing the accompanying colors, text and fonts; and inserting clip art. Keepsy then prints the album in hardcover book form and ships it anywhere in the United States via FedEx. The company promises its 11-by-8.5 inch books, which start at $29.99, will arrive within 10 business days.

To date, Keepsy has raised about $1 million in venture capital; its investors include Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund, James Hong, and Tim Connors. The company will likely look to raise another $3 million in the coming months to support its growth and bring on more staff, Williams said.

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With all the excitement surrounding the relatively recent wave of non-relational – otherwise known as “NoSQL” – databases, it can be hard to separate the hype from the reality. There’s a lot of talk, but how much NoSQL action is there in the real world? In this series, we’ll take a look at some real-world NoSQL deployments.

Shutterfly is a popular, Internet-based, photo sharing and personal publishing company that manages a persistent store of more than 6 billion images with a transaction rate of up to 10,000 operations per second. Data Architect Kenny Gorman accepted the task of helping Shutterfly select and implement a replacement for its existing relational database management system: the Oracle’s RDBMS.

Initially, Shutterfly considered open-source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. However, during the evaluation and concurrent re-architecting of the application, it became apparent that a non-relational database might be a better fit for Shutterfly’s data needs, potentially improving programmer productivity as well as performance and scalability. “There are tradeoffs, so we had to convince ourselves that a less mature non-transactional data store would work,” says Gorman.

Shutterfly looked at a wide variety of alternative database systems, including Cassandra, CouchDB and BerkeleyDB, before settling on the MongoDB document-oriented database. MongoDB stores data in a variant of the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format; each document is self describing and can have a complex internal structure.

The document approach matched the Shutterfly XML format while providing scale-out and failover replication. Moving to a document model wasn’t that big a step, according to Gorman: “If you are at the kind of scale where you would be looking at MongoDB, then you probably already have figured out you need to de-normalize your data.”

Like most NoSQL solutions, MongoDB provides a very different model for transactions and consistency – generally not providing immediately consistent or multi-object transactions. Consequently, Shutterfly has deployed MongoDB only for those parts of the application where strict consistency isn’t critical, such as the metadata associated with uploaded photos. For those parts of the application which require stronger consistency, or a richer transactional model – billing and account management perhaps– the traditional RDBMS is still in place. Those parts of the application that were moved to MongoDB were re-engineered with the simpler transactional model in mind.

Despite the significant effort and risks that accompany such a significant architectural shift, Shutterfly reports significant payoffs in terms of time-to-market, cost and performance. Furthermore, MongoDB has relieved a mismatch between the object model used by the application and the underlying database model. In the relational world, this mismatch is usually hidden by the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) which translates between the object and relational models. However, this obfuscation leads to performance and manageability issues. With MongoDB “you have an optimized stack, no ORM complexity, and you have better overall performance,” says Gorman. “At least that’s the hope.”

The compromises required by MongoDB – changes to the data model and transactional paradigms in particular – have required Shutterfly to make significant engineering investments. But so far, Shutterfly is happy with its decision. “I am a firm believer in choosing the correct tool for the job, and MongoDB was a nice fit, but not without compromises,” says Gorman. “In our case, those compromises were relatively small.”

Guy Harrison is a director of research and development at Quest Software, and has over 20 years of experience in database design, development, administration, and optimization. He can be found on the internet at www.guyharrison.net, on e-mail at guy.harrison@quest.com and is @guyharrison on twitter.

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From hit TV show, Men of Certain Age, Courtesy TNT.

Trouble and trends, they say, come in threes. Today, a trifecta of deals shows how old-school web companies are engaging in a little retail therapy because they must, and because Wall Street has given them the equivalent of a year-end bonus, thanks to an uplift in tech stocks.

• Amazon is buying Quidsi, the parent of Diapers.com, for $500 million in cash, or roughly 3 times Quidsi’s 2009 sales. Diapers.com is a hit with the mommy set and is on target to generate $300 million in sales for 2010.  Amazon will assume $45 million in debt as well.
• QuinStreet, an online marketing and lead-generation company is buying CarInsurance.com for $49.7 million in cash and is expanding its footprint in the insurance business. CarInsurance.com, as the name suggests, sells car insurance online and provides leads to automobile insurers.
• Shutterfly, an online photo service, bought the assets of WMSG Inc., for $6 million and will use these to expand its commercial print-on-demand business. WSMG was in the business of helping deliver direct-marketing campaigns for large companies like Toyota and Dell

Now, while we all like to obsess about what company Google will buy next, the recent wave of M&A shows that it’s actually these old school web companies of a certain age that are looking at a current boom in tech stocks as a way to bolster their businesses. A report from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) recently noted that during the third quarter of 2010, there were 104 mergers, a trend they expected to continue. And why not?

Over the past two months, the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite is up almost 500 points or roughly 18.5 percent to over 2800. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the tech stocks in the S&P 500 are trading at 13.9 times their forward earnings, versus the average of 12.7 times for the entire index. The current rally in technology stocks is driven by profits and growing sales for companies such as QuinStreet and Amazon.

QuinStreet’s stock is up 60 percent over the past three months, while Amazon has seen its stock jump 40 percent since early September, and Shutterfly shares have climbed over 35 percent since August of this year. Positive earnings are only adding to their coffers, which in turn means they can be used to beef up their businesses.

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I own a laser printer/copier/scanner, mostly so I can print out legal documents, sign them, scan them and return them. I haven’t actually printed anything besides an airline ticket in years — I can’t remember the last time I wanted a printed photo, but if I had some need for it, I would probably use iPhoto’s printing service, or something like Shutterfly. It’s the best of both worlds, and it saves a trip up the street to Wal-Mart’s photo processing lab. Shutterfly’s customers seem to agree!

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Meanwhile early online photo-sharing and printing company Shutterfly has lost ground in recent years to social and web-savvy photo-sharing offerings from sites like Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket. Shutterfly had $36 million in revenues last quarter and a net loss of $6.2 million. At this point it seems crazy that video-sharing is coming to the service so late, but some customers will surely appreciate it. However, Shutterfly’s not the only photo site to make moving pictures an afterthought. Flickr offered video much later than expected as well and has kept video at the margins, only recently expanding it to unpaid members.

Motionbox, both in its own labeled offering and for Shutterfly, gives limited tools away for free and charges $29.99 per year for added features such as high-definition, unlimited videos, and 1 GB uploads. Motionbox also offers some physical products such as DVDs and Flipbooks — a space Shutterfly operates in as well.

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