Check out the new Fotopedia Heritage, with Visual Stories to help you discover a new part of the world every week

Created in cooperation with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Fotopedia Heritage was the first of our mobile applications. Today we're giving it a makeover with some exciting new features.

The Fotopedia Heritage app now features beautiful content, updated weekly and delivered as Visual Stories, allowing travel enthusiasts, world explorers and photographers to discover a new place every week.

Deep integration with Facebook Open Graph lets you circulate your own discoveries and explorations on Facebook. Stories are meant to be shared!

These updates are available for Fotopedia Paris and Fotopedia Japan too, so don't forget to update your apps on your iPhone or iPad.

For those of you who don't have Fotopedia Heritage yet, you can download the app for free on iTunes.

2012 Chinese New Year: call for photographers

Chinese New Year is coming. Also called Lunar New Year or Spring Festival, this is the most important event of the traditional Chinese holidays.

photo by Luzal - Some rights reserved

This year, the lunisolar Chinese calendar determines that the Chinese New Year will start on Monday, January 23, 2012. This will be the year of the Dragon, as it was the case in 2000. 

Chinese New Year, in addition to being the beginning of a new year, is a time not to be missed for photographers. 

Everywhere in the world where Chinese communities exist, red lanterns and red spring scrolls will be hanged on windows and doors to fight against the Nian, a mythical beast that would come the first day of the New Year to devastate villages. Firecrackers are also used to frighten the beast, and today this legend is deeply rooted in the Chinese culture. To learn more on the Chinese New Year, read this article on Wikipedia.

So let's celebrate this new year all around the world on Fotopedia. From Pekin to San Francisco, I'm sure there are festivals and parades in your city, or even some events in your Chinatown if you are in a big city.

Help us document this year's celebration by publishing your photos in the Fotopedia article Chinese New Year. For the best shots, we may have a surprise.

If you have any question, please post your message in the comments of the article.

Stumble Fotopedia Magazine on StumbleUpon

If you are using StumbleUpon to discover great content, we have a good news for you! Fotopedia Magazine just created its channel on StumbleUpon, so that you can stumble our stories when using the service.

This channel is a good way to discover old stories that you may have missed, so if you are a member of StumbleUpon, please follow Fotopedia Magazine and spread the word.

Vote Fotopedia for Best Tablet Application for the 2011 Crunchies Awards

Dear members,

The year 2012 is starting at top speed here: Fotopedia has been announced as finalist for the 2011 Crunchies Awards in the Best Tablet Application category!

The Crunchies Awards are an annual celebration of startups and technology, rewarding the best products, ideas and people of the year on the tech scene. Fotopedia is proud to be among the finalists, and you should be proud too.

This is the final race, and we really need your help to make Fotopedia the Best Tablet Application of the year. Please vote for Fotopedia as the Best Tablet Application. You can vote each day until Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:59pm PST.

Also, if you really want to make us happy, you can share this link with all your friends on your favorite network (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Email).

Have a nice day and talk to you soon.

The Fotopedia team

Thank You and Happy New Year

2011 is slowly coming to an end, and we wanted to take some time with you to talk about this past year, and about what is coming next at Fotopedia.

Thank you for this great year
First of all, thank you for all your contributions and feedback during this year. Fotopedia could not be what it is today without you. Whether you are new to Fotopedia or have been here since the beginning, we really appreciate your work.

7 new apps
During this busy year, we launched 7 new apps and reached the milestone of 5 millions downloads for our apps. This is huge, and within Fotopedia Paris and Heritage, community photos have been browsed more than 343,000,000 times, giving you a great exposure! If you missed one of them, you can see all the applications on this page.

A new design and new features
The encyclopedia also received an overhaul revamp. We worked on a new design for articles, with a better mobile integration, and also improved the way you can vote on photos, focusing on quality and relevancy. To reward our best contributors, we also introduced a reputation system. It still needs some tweaks, but more on this later.

Visual stories with Fotopedia Magazine
We launched Fotopedia Magazine, a new way to discover the world with visual stories. Everyday, several photographers are featured in those stories, and you will soon be able to create your own stories.

A new community page
We introduced a new version of the community page (in beta). Have a look at it. We really want to focus on votes at this moment of the adventure, to make sure that when people come to Fotopedia they see high quality and high relevant photographs first.

This is just the beginning...
During this year, Fotopedia has seen a lot of changes, and we will continue in 2012, with a strong focus on the community. This means you will see a lot of beta signs on the website, so don’t panic. Also, the current version of the encyclopedia is still not fully baked, and we need to work on user profiles, the community page, reupload and tools for the community like a new blog, a new forum, and the implementation of comments on photos.

Enjoy the holiday festivities and happy new year!