A yearbook for the Facebook generation: Rich Barton, Mike McCue back Treering

By John Cook Call it a yearbook for the Facebook generation. Treering, a San Mateo, California startup, has landed $3.6 million from some heavy hitters in the tech industry to radically upend the traditional yearbook industry.

Among the backers of the company are Zillow co-founder Rich Barton; Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and Seattle area venture capital firms Second Avenue Partners (Mike Slade) and Cedar Grove Investments (Tom Hughes).

Treering’s proposition is pretty simple. The company allows yearbooks to be built online through one’s online social network and printed on-demand with personalized pages for each student. More than 1,200 schools have already signed on to the program, with 125,000 yearbooks printed to date.

Prices are comparable to traditional yearbooks. For example, an 80-page hardcover yearbook with two custom pages for the student costs $28.94. There are no minimum orders or commitments for schools, meaning that schools don’t get stuck with a lot of leftover inventory.

“Treering has ingeniously combined the new capabilities of print, social, and design technologies. Not only does this change the American yearbook forever, but this will change how students capture their memories and remember their youth in years to come,” said Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

The idea is interesting in part because Treering isn’t looking to eliminate the physical yearbook altogether, but rather use technologies to make it better.

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More school yearbooks adding online content

Creating high school memories digitally

by Art McFarland 

EAST SIDE (WABC) -- Like any yearbook staff, seniors at East Side Community High School put in long hours.

"At first I found it a little difficult, but then I thought about it. It's like a Facebook page," staff member Joyce Perez said.

By using a website called Tree Ring, the students were able to use laptops for creating the record of their high school memories.

"I'm glad that we had the opportunity to make our own yearbook and put what we want in it and have a say in what we wanted our own yearbooks to look like," student Eric Russell said.

Their work will be printed with a choice of soft or hardcovers.

This will be the first yearbook at Eastside Community High School in 3 years, due to cost considerations, and there have been other years when the small high school has not been able to afford a yearbook.

"It felt horrible just to decide that you couldn't get something that's part of a rite of passage for seniors," principal Mark Federman said.

But because the students have done all the work, and bulk ordering is not required. The cost is half, or less, than the school's last published yearbook. Also, they were able to include photos of a trip this spring to a Mets game, because digital deadlines are more flexible.

"The fact that we have so much time to put everything in the yearbook the way we wanted is the best thing ever," student Shannon Thomas said.

"I'm really proud of it because we all worked really hard on it throughout the year and I think it turned out great," Brianna Barrett said.

The yearbooks are due on graduation day.  READ MORE

One of the most anticipated times of the year in high schools across America is the day when yearbooks arrive. This year, some local schools are turning to a new type of the annual that each student gets to personalize.

One of those students is Sarah Cummings, a sophomore at The Douglass School in Leesburg, who says that getting her yearbook hasn't always been the best experience.

Now, though, she's guaranteed to like her pictures - after all, she picked them.

"I always flip through and make sure my picture looks good, and if it doesn't, I go and cross it out in everyone's yearbook," Sarah said.

This year, the school switched to a new type of yearbook that students can customize. Instead of flipping to find a small picture of herself like in yearbooks of yesteryear, Sarah will have two full pages of personal photos.

"I'm going to put in all the pictures from the day I was born until now," she said.

The switch isn't just for fun, either. The main reason the school switched, they said, is financial. Other companies required the school to buy a minimum number of yearbooks upfront, but many didn't end up being purchased.

That wasted hundreds of dollars and left schools with stacks of yearbooks that were not sold.

"The fact we can order only the number we do sell makes it much more cost-effective for us," Douglass School principal Jack Robinson said.

For the students, though, it's all about having a say in creating their lasting memories; for some to express the things that mean a lot to them, and for others, the people that mean a lot to them.

"I dedicated one whole page to my mom," senior Jessica Redmond said.

Students have until the end of the month to design their pages, and in about three weeks, their personal yearbooks will be ready for each other to sign.  READ MORE

Remember searching through your school yearbook for pictures of you and your friends? Well, that could be a thing of the past. A California based company is taking advantage of digital technology to personalize yearbooks. It's all thanks to a new service called Treering.

"We use this latest digital printing. So, for Treering, we're basically disrupting this multi-billion dollar industry that's been around for a long time with innovation that ends up being better for the student and better for the school," said Aaron Greco, the CEO of Treering.

Treering is different from a traditional yearbook, in that, you're doing it all online, which makes it a lot easier to share pages with other people that are working on the yearbook with you. You also have the ability to customize the yearbook for your child.

"Our family, what we decided to do, was instead of ordering three different yearbooks, we decided to make a custom page for each of our children so that we could have all three in here, and we added a fourth page with all three of them together so that they could share the yearbook," said Sue Kim-Ahn, a parent.

In recent years, a number of schools in California have cancelled yearbooks because of cost. Now because of Treering they're saving a lot of money. Parents can deal directly with the vendor themselves, and buy the yearbook from the site, only if they want to. Treering also plants a tree for every book they print.

By Blake Ellis  

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- As graduation day arrives, students will say goodbye to their classmates and teachers. And many are departing without a traditional yearbook to preserve those memories.

State budget cuts and the weak economy are causing elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges across the country to either do away with yearbooks or look for more cost-effective publishing options.

Research firm IBISWorld estimates that the traditional yearbook publishing industry has seen sales to schools decline by 4.7% a year over the past few years. The decline has come as both public and private schools struggling with insufficient funding put their limited resources toward areas like staffing instead publishing yearbooks -- many of which go unsold, especially in recent years as disposable incomes have suffered.

"Our country is handing out pink slips to teachers right and left, and if it comes down to teachers versus yearbooks, yearbooks are going to lose," said Marc Strohlein, principal at consulting firm Agile Business Logic.

Budget crunch

This is the first year that Indiana's Huntington University isn't offering yearbooks, after budget constraints forced the school to reallocate the $40,000 year it typically spends to publish 750 yearbooks.

"Budgets being what they were and the economy being what it was, forced our hand on this one," said Ron Coffey, Huntington's vice president for community development. "But I think given the economic times, the students are understanding of the difficulties that we and other schools are experiencing."

Students at Mokena Junior High School, in Illinois, won't be taking home yearbooks either, after the school district lost funding for all extracurricular activities this year. And Blaine High School in Washington is in the same boat, and likely won't be handing out yearbooks next year due to a severe lack of funding for the program. But while some schools are abolishing the keepsake altogether, others are turning to new online yearbook companies like YearBook Alive, Lulu, Lifetouch and Treering. Treering, for example, is an electronic yearbook company that lets schools design yearbooks, giving students the option of viewing them online, or ordering a printed copy for just $12 to $17 per book. More than a million photos have already been uploaded, and more than 50,000 students are using its services.

Treering says it is now providing yearbooks for hundreds of schools that would have otherwise eliminated the tradition altogether. Sales have soared 600% since the company launched two years ago.

The company estimates that each school saves an average of $100,000 to $600,000 a year in unnecessary printing costs.

"We just signed on with a school in San Francisco that was losing almost $2,000 a year in leftover books," said Aaron Greco, CEO of Treering. "It's just so crazy, because $2,000 could buy five computers with an education discount."

While the major publishing companies mass produce yearbooks using the traditional -- and expensive -- printing method of offset, electronic printing has improved so much recently that the quality is just as good, said Greco. The company will also soon introduce an online signing function, so students can digitally sign each other's yearbooks books. One inner-city elementary school with a large population of lower income students, Alvarado School in San Francisco, wasn't able to afford offering yearbooks at all until it heard about electronic options that don't incur costs on the school.

"Financially, it would have just been ridiculous to try to do it -- the school can't even afford paper and pencils, so to outlay money for a nice-to-have item like a yearbook wasn't even something that was considered," said Tim Smith, a parent and teacher at the school. This year, nearly half of the school's 484 students bought yearbooks, averaging only about $13 each. The others were still able to create yearbooks, view them online and share them with friends.

Breaking with tradition Budget crunches aren't the only reason for the shift. Huntington University's Coffey said while the school's budget crunch was the main culprit, students are simply more interested in reliving school memories with photos and comments online. Electronic yearbooks give students the ability to customize pages, and share them using social networking sites.

"The personalization makes it into something about the student, not just the school," said Greco. "We're seeing a death of the traditional yearbook and an age of the personalized yearbook." Coffey wonders whether social media and Facebook will eventually replace yearbooks altogether.

"Our view is that interest in yearbooks has waned to some degree," he said. "It's not that no students are interested, but with the advent of Facebook and other social networking opportunities, these are often more readily available and interesting venues than the old yearbook world." But the disappearance of such a long-standing tradition is always hard for some people to accept. "The tradition is the biggest factor -- it's always hard for students to think of life without it," said Coffey.

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Have you ever noticed that school yearbooks only have about 2 photos of your child? Recently, I’ve discovered a company that is trying to change that and personalize yearbooks. It’s called www.Treering.com, and it allows the yearbook team to create a bulk of the yearbook online, and each student or parent creates their own personalized pages with photos and memories from the past year. Upon completion, parents purchase the yearbook and hard copies are delivered to the school to keep up with the school spirit. Because families create and order their yearbooks directly online through Treering, schools no longer have to pre-purchase and resell yearbooks, an antiquated and wasteful practice that regularly leaves schools with unsold books and lots of wasted money. Treering’s innovative automated process eliminates the financial burden on schools to pay upfront fees for conventional yearbooks. Treering even plants a tree in honor of each yearbook sold. Like the growth rings of a tree, each memory in a Treering yearbook is marked in a student’s personalized copy. The memories, accomplishments and activities of each student's life are capture and preserved, so that years from now they'll look back at their Treering yearbook and remember all of their great times they had each school year.  READ MORE

Crowdsourced, personalized, and cheap--it's a yearbook for the Internet age.

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Technology gives, and technology takes away. The digital age has brought us so much--tablets! Facebook!--but as a result, old and declining technologies seem to be walking around with targets on their foreheads. This is increasingly true in schools, which have been jumping on the digital bandwagon of late. Each day seems to bring a new report of how the iPad, for instance, will be ousting an obsolete paper-based technology: the textbook, the notebook. 

And what of the yearbook, that paper-based technology that almost seems designed to be obsolete? When we flip through them, it's to laugh at the past, its funny fashions, its dated buzz phrases, its unfortunate braces. Surely Facebook, which keeps people in touch and helps them share photos and memories, has delivered the fatal blow to that annual compendium of awkwardness that is the yearbook?

Think again. A company called Treering offers what it calls "yearbooks for the Internet generation"--actual, printed, physical books, albeit with a digital twist. 

A traditional yearbook is made entirely by a school's self-selecting squadron of nerds. Treering's yearbook brings everyone in on the fun. While 80% of the yearbook is still made by the school's yearbook team, 10% is crowd-created. 

The books that go out, then, are 90% identical. What about the remaining 10%? At the high school I graduated from before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, only the seniors counted themselves lucky enough to get half a page to create themselves (with maybe a bit of extra vanity content in the form of embarrassing advertisements bought by grandparents). Underclassmen got nothing. But in the Facebook-enabled age of self-casting, such a meager fraction simply won't do. To that end, the final 10% of Treering's yearbook is personalized, created entirely by the individual who will wind up with that particular book. 

It's all managed online, with simple drag-and-drop tools, and you can source your photos from places where they're already likely to be: Facebook and Flickr, for instance. 

The Internet, vanity, social media, crowd-sourcing--Treering has all the major bases of modernity covered, then, right? But something's missing... Oh, right: green cred! Don't worry: Treering plants a tree for every book sold.

The whole scheme winds up saving everyone money, too, because Treering only prints as many copies as are demanded. A slim, 20-page softcover can cost as little as $10 or less (though a more standard bulky hard-cover, hundreds of pages long, can run up to $60 or considerably more). A virtual copy of the book lives online, meaning even if they lose their printed copy, your classmates can still laugh at your dated hairdo years hence.  READ MORE 

District Administration Magazine Awards Treering 2010 Readers’ Choice Top 100 Product

District Administration—the most-read magazine of America’s school district leaders—announces Treering as a recipient of the Readers’ Choice Top 100 Products of 2010.

Redwood City, CA – December 2, 2010.— Readers of District Administration are the top public school administrators in the country, and they know from experience what works and what does not work within their districts. As part of its annual award program, District Administration asked its readers to nominate the hardware, software, books and materials, Web sites, or facilities products that have made a positive difference in their districts in 2010.  Treering’s customizable yearbooks that eliminate costs for school’s earned the distinction this year in its first time nominated.

The winning products were determined by the quantity of nominations received per product as well as evaluating the quality of readers’ nominations and explanations. The 2010 winners were selected from hundreds of nominations received over the last six months, a significant increase in participation from the previous year. “These product recommendations included extensive descriptions from school administrators of how these products are used in their districts, making it very challenging to choose the top 100 products. We hope these products, and their accompanying testimonials, will act as a valuable resource for our readers,” says District Administration’s editor in chief, Judy Faust Hartnett.

“This year’s winners were a very diverse group of products, ranging from classroom resources to district-level management tools,” says Kurt Eisele-Dyrli, products editor. “Many of them, from online assessments and notification systems to thin clients and projectors, enabled readers to do more with less, which reflects the challenging times faced by many school systems.”

“It is an incredible honor to receive District Administration’s Top 100 Product award.  It’s quite humbling to be mentioned alongside Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle as the best products of the year for schools.  The excitement our customers have for our product drive us to continue to improve the product and revolutionize how yearbooks are created and purchased.” said Kevin Zerber, Treering Co-Founder.