The european photo trade show CEPIC 2005, June 16 - 19, Prague, started for me with the long and annoying registration procedure at the desk in the entrance hall that late registrants like me and other usual suspects truely deserve. Fortunately the two beautiful ladies of the newly founded consultancy Pepper Stark Ltd. in London were right in front of me.
I had been warned by someone who is more clever and smart than I ever will be that "In my experience, these conferences are mostly about schmoozing, meeting, greeting...not my strong point, anyway" but as always I was blissfully ignorant. And in fact, the best place to meet people had been in front of the Zofin palace, just on the right sight in the garden and parkway vis-a-vis the river Moldau.
After the late registration, the second disaster is that networking thing. If you talk to everyone about his business, you´ll have no one to talk to in-depth in the evening simply because you would have to answer to all these myriads of plans, new projects and alliances "Hey, are you sure or don´t you just don´t know what your competitor is doing and planning?"
So there is little to report from my side. I had to learn that Getty Images is picking up another agency - Retro File. Yet there is no confirmation avalaible on the net, but the information is from a TOP 10 photo agency and thus a source that I trust (the same kind of information I had about a year ago when Thinkstock was sold). [Update June 24: int the meantime this deal is confirmed: see PDN]
IPNStock is partnering with german Fotofinder, but obviously no one over there knows how to handle Businesswire or a similar service, so again there is no confirmation avalaible on the net. And before I could ask Ali Paczensky, Fotofinder´s CEO , he left the scenery with a bottle of sparkling wine to celebrate another deal he just closed with another CEO I´m to shy to name.
The biggest miscarriage happend in the Rights Seminar. Without advcance warning, a german lawyer started to talk about his subject - in german. I don´t know what all the other visitors from Spain, Japan, the Antarctic etc. were thinking in this moment. Shortly after he began, his speech was simultaneously translated into english by another lady. So shortly after the german "blablabla" the english "blablabla" followed. That for sure had been one of the most painful experiences in 2005.
Then, in the opening plenary session on thursday, there had been a panelist speaker who simply couldn´t open his mouth to talk. Only a small gap between his teeth showed up and a long and meaningful "Zzzzh" left his mouth. Fifteen minutes of "Zzzzh" can be real long. One CEO entering the door of the auditorium listened shortly, started to giggle and left the room laughing.
On the other hand the exceptional presentation of James West/Alamy ("Image Trading in 2010"). I have an old presentation from him ("The Digital Exchange Model"; use this link for downloading the old ppt-file) from the year 2000, but this time: no slides with words, just a few pictures to illustrate his ideas. BTW: Picture Archive News features an interview with James. Although it is likely that this was an email interview, the stunning news is that Alamy has 86 employees. Recalculate this to what is spent monthly for employees and compare the number of employees to the staff number of photo agencies in the worldwide TOP 5 - TOP 15 area ... .
Had to learn again that outside Central Europe obviously no one knows what these (and formerly here mentioned) new Middleware Technologies like the Communication Server (ConfessMedia) and OpenGate (PictureMaxx) are about. But outside in the garden I ran into Dr. Hartmann of VISUELL and hopefully we will be lucky to sketch out the advantages together with some testimonials in the autumn issue.
Talking to portal owners, I underwent the fear some are having regarding the technology and the business modell of StockPhotoFinder. How many customers will this company attract who later will say "Goodbye my dear" to classical portals? Anyway, earlier I wrote about "Those who attended New Orleans [last PACA meeting on November 2003]
will remember the fireworks sparked when one art director said she
prefers using GOOGLE to going to an agency ...". Dagmar Fabricius of StockPhotoFinder explained that this incident had been one of the bottom ideas to found the company.
So far. What amuses and amazes me the most is how small these conferences and trade fairs of the "Stock Photo Industry" are. No comparison to any convention of the professional field I used to work in earlier. The RSNA for example has some 60,000 attendants.
And what happend elsewhere? Kodak announced the end of an era in these days when they said they
would no longer manufacture black-and-white papers after the end of the
year; the Photolibrary Group has acquired the Garden Picture Library; Bahar becoming an early pensioner (50+), although his company Index Stock launches a company blog; Alan Meckler realtime blogging from the CEPIC; and finally Jay DeFoore leaving PDN ("Send ... vitriolic send-offs to jdefoore@pdnonline.com").
