Flickr on Newsweek

From the Times Colonist, March 31, 2006

Darron Kloster

Former Victorian makes mark with Newsweek appearance

A computer programmer and software developer who grew up in Victoria and sold his company to Yahoo! Last year for a reported $35 million has made the cover of Newsweek.

Stewart Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake, the founders of Flickr, one of the world’s most popular photosharing Internet sites, are part of Newsweek’s April 3 cover story Putting the We In Web.

Butterfield, 33, was born in Lund on the Sunshine Coast but attended South Park School through his elementary years and St. Michaels University School grades 7 – 12. The son of developer David Butterfield, who is best known for building Shoal Point near Fisherman’s Warf, Stewart Butterfield graduated from the University of Victoria and, later, Cambridge University with a master’s degree in philosophy.

He and Fake were married June 1, 2002, in a ceremony at the Victoria Golf Club. The couple moved their company and 11 staff from Vancouver to Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., last June after the Internet giant bought Flickr for a reported $35 million. Flickr allows users to share full-resolution photos with friends, family and the open Internet for a yearly $25 fee.

Butterfield was traveling between New York and his San Francisco home Thursday and wasn’t immediately available for comment.

The cover story is part of Newsweek’s Next Frontier Series which examines how technology is changing the way we live. The U.S. based magazine with a circulation of 3.1 million calls the couple innovators in the next stage of the Internet. Commonly referred as Web 2.0 or the ‘live web’, companies like Flickr represent a new user-generated movement on the net.

In the past, the Internet was known as cyberspace, a vast impersonal realm. Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy and silicon Valley correspondent Brad Stone say innovative companies have transformed the Web from a place to go to a place to do things, a place for personal expression and a means to connect to others.

Other companies featured in the cover story include MySpace.com, a “hangout” for 65 million young people and thousands of rock bands, movie stars and marketers; and, Facebook.com which brings seven million college students and graduates into blogs.

Flickr built a membership base of almost three million who get unlimited photo storage, sharing and other features. Butterfield and Fake had originally started a company called Ludicorp to develop online games, but in the process created a tool to share photos and save them to the Web. Flickr emerged and, less than two years later, is one of the Web’s fastest growing properties.