Peecho FAQ

What is your mission?

Peecho's mission is to allow for the transformation of digital information into other forms. We want virtual information to be readily accessible as tangible objects - but only by means of local production, to minimize the environmental footprint.

What is your business model?

Peecho operates as the intermediary between many applications and only the best print facilities in the world. We facilitate ordering, production and shipping. On every order, we make a small margin. To our customers, we are like a giant print facility in the sky.

What is the background of your idea?

Until the end of 2009, the founders of Peecho were involved in the success of AlbumPrinter, one of the largest photo product providers in Europe. By winning the "Deloitte Fast 50" for the fastest growing technology company in 2008 and 2009, it proved the value of turning digital photos into physical products.

However, there was a bigger fish to catch. The staggering numbers of digital photos and publications stored across the web are a huge, but untapped potential. At that point, there was no simple way to convert this huge amount of digital content to physical products. Peecho was launched to provide that service, opening a giant new market for print on demand. As a result, the company won the award for Best Business Model at TheNextWeb conference in April 2010.

In 2011, Peecho launched the ultimate way to sell physical products from digital publications: a simple print button. It only takes a few minutes to create a button that connects your website or application to a network of the best production facilities in the world. Peecho handles payment, data conversion, production and distribution. There is no minimum order volume or investment required. You can set your own price and the profit is yours. The concept was chosen as the most innovative e-commerce initiative at the Accenture Innovation Awards 2011.

Who is behind Peecho?

• Management team

• Martijn Groot

  Former commercial director Albumprinter

• Sander Nagtegaal

  Former chief architect Albumprinter

• Developer community

• Marcel Panse

  Chief architect and technology guru

• Willem Vermeer

  Java sage and master of ceremony

• Stephan van Eijkelenburg

  App authority and chaos monkey

• Henrich Volkshöfen

  Print expert with over 65 years of experience

• Advisers

• Joris Keijzer

  Former CEO at Albumprinter

• Peter van Teeseling

  Cross media specialist

What does the word Peecho mean?

Noun. Pronounced: Pee-cho. The word is used to describe a person, place, thing or behavior that is one or all of the following: incredibly cheesey, corny, lame, poser-ish, and generally trying way to hard to be cool. Read more in the Urban Dictionary.

Why the penguin?

Over 20 years ago, the penguin was designed as a graffiti symbol. Sander used it as an alternative for his graffiti tag name to prevent handwriting experts from the justice department to spoil the fun. By the way, Sander has been a law-abiding citizen ever since he turned 18.

What is the Peecho platform?

The Peecho platform is the system that powers the print button. It exists in the cloud only, growing when needed and becoming smaller if it can. The system takes in print orders, magically transforms any data into print-ready files and routes the orders to the facility that is closest to the intended recipient.

What are the advantages of such a cloud?

See this list. Next to that, cloud computing allows our infrastructure and associated costs to scale up and down along with order volumes, eliminating costly overcapacity at all times. This way, Peecho automatically responds to changes in demand due to seasonal peaks.

What technology do you use?

Peecho exists completely in the cloud of Amazon Web Services, using SimpleDB, S3, SQS, EC2, RDS, Route 53 and Cloudfront. At all times, the system runs simultaneously in two AWS availability zones to guarantee maximum uptime. We can scale up and down automatically by using load balancing and auto-scaling, while the data is stored in auto-clustered relational storage with RDS, No-SQL technology using SimpleDB and as flat files in S3.

How do you develop?

We develop according to Scrum. We use Jira with Greenhopper for requirements management, Bamboo for continuous integration, Sonar for code quality monitoring and Mercurial for distributed versioning.

We develop with really short iterations. On average, we release new software to our production environment once a week. Every month, we organize a developer dinner for the whole company. During that event, demos are shown and everybody cheers and applauds for the new stuff.

How can you add enough facilities?

We use the networks of large print manufacturers like Xerox and HP to select the right facilities for each product and region.

Connecting a print facility is really simple with our Printclient software. Works out of the box. Once volumes increase, the facility may choose to integrate their own workflow system with our production API. They can program their own integration or request a custom connection with the Print Hub