Flickr: Another Vancouver, BC, Canada technology company success story in the making

To those of us in the Vancouver tech community, it will come as no surprise when Ludicorp hits the big-time with their amazing web-based photo-sharing application Flickr that allows its users to:

• upload from Macs, PCs, and cameras
• create albums for their friends to view
• blog their photos to any blogging application
• put comments, tags (keywords), and notes on the photos
• and then feed their photos via RSS & XML

The flash-based application is absolutely brilliant. And the team behind the company, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, seem to be universally revered by their friends here. In particular my good friends Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao  tell me that both Stewart and Caterina have brains the size of planets.

Their flickr site is so popular that they are attracting some big name attention. Early on, local technology entrepreneur Dick Hardt (formerly of ActiveState and now launching Sxip Networks) joined the board along with a star team of advisors. Then somewhere along the way, Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson started sharing his photos from his flickr page. Esther Dyson, the grand-dame of technolgy from EDVentures has invested. And now Joi Ito, master blogger, has also declared his own investment in the firm (Thanks Roland for the tip.)

I expect that we will see a lot more from this incredible team and that Flickr has the potential to be a wickedly scaleable success story. I predict that they are approaching the fast part of the curve and that they are going to boom very soon.

Best of luck to the whole team!