Metasys Technologies Ltd
Background
A bit of background...

Storing & selling images online is not a new concept, however the implementations to date have generally been expensive, difficult to customise and often based on technology designed for "offline" usage - i.e. networked image storage systems which then have a web component "tacked on". Often these systems need some serious hardware to run properly too. At the other end of the scale there's the "yahoo images" type sites which aren't professional looking enough to be useful in a business context.

Many of the larger systems are also massively overkill for what most users want. Someone dipping their toe in the water of online/image retail probably doesn't want to have to sink thousands of pounds into something which may or may not be right for them and takes 3 months+ to put together, and which they've still got to promote on top of the setup costs.

JPEGStore does things differently. It is completely web-based and has deliberate limitations built in at design time which mean it must conform to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach. That doesn't mean it's not ingenious but it does mean that most of the areas where problems arise have been simplified or removed completely. It uses a SQL database but its usage is very efficient (one database call per page normally rather than tens or more) and puts a very minimal load on the server which means we can run many sites on one server with no noticable degradation in speed - this makes it cheap to host too which keeps the overall cost to a minimum. It runs on IIS5 on windows2000 servers. All database calls are handled by custom written COM components for maximum speed.

Version 1 has a simple basket system which links to a user's paypal account which will handle the credit card payment. Fulfillment is then up to the user (just like with a telephone card payment).