Hi PJ,
Great post and nice to see you thinking this through. Let me respond to your questions and let me know if you need more details...
1. Absolutely, the ecard market although highly popular has hardly touched the paper card market. See this current and interesting article citing both Hallmark and American Greetings...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070213.wecardss0213/BNStory
/Technology/home 2. Our ramp up time to make this public to shoppers is the 100 artists and 1,000 cards. We are just a couple of weeks away from that goal. As a complete business model, GCU is one small piece of a much larger business (see
www.BigDates-Solutions.com btw: that's me on the home page "hi!"
). We are committed to not only making GCU a prominent greeting card destination site but more importantly, providing a great and unique selection of cards for our reminder service based sites. We've been in that business for over 6 years.
3. The real business opportunity is both for shoppers to send directly to the recipient and to themselves first (typically to hand sign). Of course the more info a shopper has in their GCU address book and reminders the easier it is and the more likely they'll use GCU to send cards each year.
4. Yes, the reminder service is the marketing drive for this business. Leveraging our BigDates reminder service sites to "push" the right cards to the right people at the right time. Moving GCU cards into reminders outside of GCU is scheduled for 3/1.
5. This topic of image protection has just come to the top of the list. We're looking at watermarking the larger images (not thumbnails). Please follow this topic in the News & Anno forum topic I'll start today.
Thanks for your great questions
Mindy