StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

QuickLinks For 2008-10-01

• Edited interview with iStock´s Kelly Thompson:
  
  • Question: "Beyond that, will you still look for other niches to get into?"
  • Answer: "We have a couple of pretty game-changing things that we can’t really talk about yet... . I think they stand to fundamentally change the stock industry; not to sound too over-the-top, but some of the things we´re introducing could change the stock industry as much as microstock did in the early days."
  Article by Australia´s smartcompany in the "Lunch with an entrepreneur" series.
  Interview by James Thomson as MP3 file (5.8 MB/17 min.).

Idée's Leila B. on TinEye

If you yet lacked the time to deal in-depth with Idée's new TinEye search engine:

• Below is a recent (nextMEDIA meeting) interview (8 min.) with Leila Boujnane.
• More background information from PopPhoto (1; 2) and Google Blogoscoped.

 

 

Idée Inc Launches Image Search Engine TinEye

On Tuesday, local tech startup Idée Inc. will publicly launch a search engine [TinEye] that its co-founders boldly say will do the same with images as what Google Inc. does with text. [...]

With a small, dedicated staff and several years of R&D work, Idée has managed to develop a set of algorithms that takes an image, compares it to about a half-billion indexed pictures, and returns a list of similar looking pictures along with their online URLs within milliseconds. [...]

The service could be a blessing for publishers, brand marketers and copyright compliance officers who want to track how products are being distributed on the Web. [...] 

Idée's [other] existing service is used by about two dozen clients which tracks down publishers who use their copyrighted pictures and bills them accordingly. The service brings in about $15,000 to $75,000 per client and is growing at a rate of about 10 new customers per month.

QuickLinks For 2008-03-04

• In "a tough business" Vator Box takes a look at ScanScout, Adify and Pixsy:
  Citigroup Internet analyst Mark Mahaney joins our usual crew to help us rate pitches from ScanScout, Pixsy and Adify. Pixsy is a video and image search startup that also sells white-label search platforms to networks and sites that don´t want to spend the resources to build their own.
  One of the company´s main value propositions is that it does image search better than Google, and image search is one of the fastest-growing search categories, according to Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin.
  
  But as Mahaney points out, how much capex [capital expenditure] spending will be acquired to build the server farms needed to scale the business? A more likely path for Pixsy is the same one taken by Truveo, the video search provider that was acquired by AOL. Advice to Pixsy -- "find a big media company who loves what you do and squeeze a term sheet out of them".
  Vator.tv (the part about Pixsy starts at 12:10 and ends at 15:40).

"So tell me about BrightQube ..."

A very general introduction by Lee Corkran, BrightQube´s Founder & CEO and earlier Digital Railroad´s VP of Products, from this year´s PhotoPlus Expo.
(Interview: Scott Sheppard)

 

 

QuickLinks For 2007-11-15

• Celeb pic agency Splash in MSN web video deal:
  British-owned US celeb news agency Splash News has launched an online "paparazzi" web TV programme about celebrities in four languages for Microsoft. The agency is shooting and editing three daily three-minute clips. Microsoft and Splash are sharing advertising revenue on the project, and plans are being drawn up to expand the programme worldwide.
  Splash chief executive Gary Morgan, said: "There is a severe lack of edgy Hollywood magazine shows on any of the media platforms."
  Press Gazette.

Pino Granta: Everybody wins but not the photographers

Many photographers complain these days that they see their pictures published in very important newspapers and that they don´t get paid for the usage.

What they do is that they call the agencies which distribute their pictures and ask for some explanation. Most of the times these agencies don´t know anything about the usage, so they call the publication and after some discussion they decide to bill the unauthorized usage.

QuickLinks For 2007-07-21, II

• EU Google Competitor Gets $165 million Kick Start:
  Theseus, a German based project that is aiming to develop "the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet" will receive a cash injection of $165 million from the German Government [...]
  According to an AP report, the German Government will initially fund Siemens AG, SAP AG, Deutsche Thomson oHG and EMPOLIS GmbH to kick start the project [...] Theseus was inspired by a perceived need by European countries to challenge American hegemony on the internet by Google.
  Like just about everything in the history of Europe, France and Germany disagree. France is said to be discussing a similar subsidy plan with the European Commission that is aiming to deliver $112 million to a French Google competitor Quaero, a project previously supported by the Germans, which is led by French video-technology company Thomson.

QuickLinks For 2007-07-10, II

• xcavator.net launches RF stock photography with iStockphoto:
  Visual Search portal newcomer xcavator, developed by CogniSign and launched in May this year as Beta with 300,000 images from Photovault, is out with the news that the portal "has just been updated with 1.8 Million Royalty Free photos from iStockphoto". iStock´s exact image count is currently at 1,888,000 pictures.
  Who´s on CogniSign´s Advisory Board? Doug Rowan, the former CEO of Corbis.
  But in this very moment the Royalty Free link on xcavator´s website is not working.
  Related:
  •CogniSign Launches xcavator.net™ Beta (May 23, 2007)
  •All entries in the Image Search Technology category
  Tags: xcavator CogniSign iStock iStockphoto

QuickLinks For 2007-04-25

• Autonomy Exercises Option To Buy Blinkx, Will IPO it in London:
  Rafat Ali is just out with "this is among the first such IPOs in the still-nascent online video search space, and almost solves the mystery of the weirdly secretive relationship between the data/information search company Autonomy and video search consumer site Blinkx. Also, keep in mind that Blinkx was on the block for a while two years ago, but a deal never materialized.
  Anyway, the announcement on this from Autonomy is very dense, so I’ll try explaining here".
  paidContent.
  Just yesterday
  
  • the goldfingers from Draper Fisher Jurvetson funded video search technology company CastTV, with Marc Andreessen on the Board of Directors.
  • Jupitermedia announced the Conference Program for the WebVideo Summit 2007
  Related: The Coming Earthquake in Photography (April 13, 2007)
  Tags: Autonomy Blinkx