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Posts Tagged ‘fotolia’

Microstock photography giant Fotolia is launching a new site, called Flixtime, that allows users to create simple video slideshows. Similar to the simplicity of Animoto, Flixtime allows you to produce 60-second videos from your photos easily and quickly.

Once you register for a free account, you’ll be upload your own photos or stock photos from Fotolia’s selection of images. You can also upload your own music, or choose from Fotolia’s stock music collection. And you can add text to any slide as well.

Once you create a video, you can share the file to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other destinations. You can also choose to download the file to your computer for further editing. Check out the video I created in a matter of minutes here. Flixtime actually offers a considerable amount of stock photography and music to choose from; so it’s easy to make a pretty slideshow combining your own photos and Fotolia’s offerings. The music is powered by AudioMicro, a music startup that helps license stock audio files.

In my opinion, Flixtime is a more basic version of Animoto, which has been steadily ramping up its offerings. Fotolia took a massive round of investment last year from TA Associates last year and has been steadily growing its userbase. It reached one million registered users and five million images for sale last February, introduced microstock video in April, hired an iStockPhoto co-founder in May, and launched a royalty-free photo site called PhotoXpress. The site also rolled out an add-in ribbon for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2007 that gives users instant access to the company’s vast library of images and vectors from within the application.

No one likes the food at San Quentin State Prison. That’s the gist I get from reading its reviews on Yelp. Yes, it’s on Yelp.

Maybe this shouldn’t be all that surprising since there is a museum that you can take a tour of (and they occasionally do private tours). But if you read over the reviews, a number of them are from people who have family inside or have been in themselves. Sure, they could be lying, but it’s still kind of humorous. California’s oldest prison, with the largest death row in the country, is being actively reviewed on Yelp.

Here’s one reviewer — a supposed former short-term inmate — that gave it 2 stars:

The 4 days I spent here were miserable. We all arrive on the grey goose & are schackled and escorted to a main pen to be counted & dispersed.

This place is cold & damp and just like every prison movie -(the green mile) you have ever seen depiciting a shit hole prison.

Yeah they play baseball with local sF organizations and they have deathrow inmates but mostly its a minimum/medium security facility with a bunch of short timers.

It’s kind of nostalgic because of its sorted history but…

This is not a place you wanna end up. Not all big bad & scary like the movies make it, but cold,damp and miserable with really shitty food.

AVOID AT ALL COST!

Ouch.

And Yelp isn’t the only social site showing San Quentin the love. They have a Foursquare page too. Seven people have checked-in so far, with one Jeff D. lucky enough to be the mayor (with three visits). Gino W. left a tip:

Stay away. The food is horrible

I can’t find the prison on Gowalla yet. If some inmate is reading this, consider making the venue.

In the first half of this year Adobe will release Flash 10.1, which will add support for the countless Flash apps around the web to many mobile devices, including Android. That sounds exciting, but it’s still unclear just how well these Flash apps will perform on mobile devices — for one, there’s the matter of processing power, but there are also issues with screen size and input methods. Now Taimur Asad over at Redmond Pie has installed a pre-release version of HTC Desire ROM (which includes Flash) onto his Nexus One to get an early look at how Flash will perform on the device. And for his first test, he’s put Zynga’s massive hit FarmVille though its paces. We’ve embedded his video walkthrough below.

So how does it look? Passible, at best. Some of Asad’s finger taps don’t seem to register properly (though he admits to not knowing how to play, so he wasn’t always clicking in the right places). But even if the game worked perfectly, the small screen size clearly isn’t ideal — you’re forced to constantly pan and zoom to get anything done. That said, the application did appear to run pretty smoothly on the Nexus One’s Snapdragon processor.

Given these issues, I suspect developers behind popular Flash applications will build versions that are optimized for mobile form factors. And while these Flash apps won’t work in the browser on the iPhone, developers should be able to bundle them into native applications using Adobe CS5’s export tool.

Note: If you want to try this yourself it’s possible to install the early ROM to your own Nexus One, but you may well run into some major bugs — this isn’t something for the faint of heart (yet).

Twitter is now processing 50 million Tweets a day, which comes to about 1.5 billion Tweets a month. Royal Pingdom recently reported that Twitter passed one billion Tweets a month last December and measured about 1.2 billion in January. On a daily basis, Royal Pindom was measuring 27 million Tweets a day back in November, 2009. But the latest data comes from Twitter itself (after attempting to strip out spam Tweets).

In January, comScore estimated that Twitter.com attracted almost 75 million unique visitors worldwide. But the number of messages going across Twitter is perhaps a more useful metric because it cuts across all third-party Twitter clients as well. At its most fundamental level, Twitter is a communications service, and 50 million messages a day is certainly a healthy number. What Twitter doesn’t say is how many of its users are responsible for those 50 million Tweets, or on average how many Tweets a day comes from each user. I’d love to see the distribution of Tweets across heavy, medium, and light users.

How many of those 50 million Tweets come from the top 10 percent of users? It seems to me that even though I follow more than 300 people on Twitter, I hear from the same 20 to 30 blabbermouths every day.

Fotolia is today releasing a new add-in ribbon for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2007 that gives users instant access to the company’s vast library of images and vectors from within the popular applications, eliminating the need to leave them.

Once the ribbon is downloaded from the Fotolia website and installed, users can search stock photos for the projects that they’re working on straight from the top menu of their applications, so they don’t need to go away from their documents to obtain appropriate stock imagery.

Before purchasing an item from the company’s library, which it says presently counts over 7-million royalty-free high-resolution files, users can hover over search results within the doc to see a preview of images. Double-click, and the item gets placed in the doc for you to see if it matches what you were trying to visualize. Users can then opt to buy images in any of the available sizes and licenses straight from Fotolia. Once the image is downloaded into the user’s document, users are free to use the Fotolia file with no limit on time, copies or geographical placements.

Fotolia has been supplying imagery to Microsoft Office Online customers for a few years now, but this really ties the knot.

It’s a great idea, and I concur with Microsoft’s Office.com Group Manager Rob Ashby, who commented that the addition of Fotolia can be a significant productivity win for customers. I guess it also makes sense for the company to endorse this and similar add-ons because they’re bound to keep users inside its software applications as much as possible, but the benefits for users are clear too. It’s also yet another sign that the line between desktop and web software is blurring.

Again, this product is quite brilliant, and I’m sure other stock photography players will be following suit soon.

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As the most popular video site on the planet, YouTube has a lot of content to present to users at any given time (the site says that 20 hours of footage are uploaded every minute). That poses a challenge to premium content owners and other content creators looking to attract attention, which is why YouTube also offers a premium ‘Promoted Videos’ feature that lets you pay to expose your video to other users. And today, it’s making it easier to launch a Promoted Video campaign: users will now be able to manage their Promoted Videos directly from the AdWords platform.

AdWords is Google’s bread-and-butter ad platform that plenty of brands and businesses already use to place their ads outside of YouTube, so this will help streamline the purchase process. It’s not all about convenience either — advertisers will also be able to use AdWords campaign tools, which are more robust than what YouTube offers.

YouTube is also announcing that it’s extending Promoted Videos to Canada, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The news comes soon after a number of other significant improvements to the Promoted Videos program, which has seen a 500% increase in clicks since the beginning of the year. In August, YouTube began integrating ads for Promoted Video directly into the site’s ‘Watch’ page (before that they would appear in search results, but not where users actually viewed content). And earlier this month the site began allowing the sponsored videos to appear in AdSense units across the web, where they compete in standard ad auctions. All of this is part of YouTube’s push to monetize the site, and to make it more appealing to its growing list of premium content providers.

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The microstock photography business is growing out of nothing. The leader in the market, iStockphoto, is projecting $200 million in revenues this year. When iStockphoto was bought by Getty Images three years ago for $50 million, its revenues were about $23 million, according to COO Kelly Thompson. In 2007, revenues were $72 million, and the company never disclosed 2008 revenues. Thompson says iStockPhoto has been profitable since before the acquisition and now represents a “significant chunk” of . (Getty Images is owned by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman and does not break out revenues formally via audited statements).

The demand for affordable images for use on Websites and in print is catching on and iStockphoto is the main beneficiary. It sells a photo, illustration, or video every second, and pays out $1.2 million a week to the photographers and artists who upload images to the site. There are nearly 80,000 artists in total represented on the site and 5 million images. “Definitely the print side is declining and we are seeing lots of Web usage,” reports Thompson.

But iStockphoto is not without competitors. Rival Fotolia is trying to catch up and recently received a recently launched a completely free stock image service called PhotoXpress (which competes against Getty-owned Stock.xchng). Fotolia also has about 6 million images and roughly 90,000 contributors.

The battle, though, is now going to be around quality and price. iStockphoto is trying to go upmarket by exposing some of its top photographers to Getty clients. And today it just launched its Vetta Collection, which is comprised of about 35,000 higher-quality photos which are more produced than the typical stock image (the space farmer image above is one from Vetta). The Vetta images start at around $20 each, compared to regular images, which start at about $1.

Thompson says it is all part of iStock’s strategy to move customers up the chain to buy more expensive images:

Almost every industry has a free component, everyone gives away free samples. That is what we are doing. Even when it is free, it needs a license around it. Once people get used to using images like that, they move up to buying more expensive images. Even the traffic from iStock to Getty is more than we originally expected.

Image search is another area where the iStock needs to win. People need to find the images they want before they can buy them. iStock relies on photographers and artists to tag and title their own photos, but they don’t always do such a great job. After all, they tend to be more visually-oriented. So instead, iStock has been collecting data on which images people hover over and click on after they do a keyword search, and those now are ranked higher in results starting today. By August, the results will be fine-tuned by language and country of origin as well. But if you want to search only for Vetta images, you have to do that in advanced search right now (by tomorrow, you should be able to do it directly on the Vetta portion of the site).

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I was out for my evening constitutional last night, enjoying the sight of “For Sale” signs on homes throughout my neighborhood, when I spied with my little eye something new and novel. I’ve seen URLs on For Sale signs a couple of times, and always thought that that was a fine way to attract eyeballs to your property. Let’s face it: trawling though MLS listings sucks, so going directly to a property’s URL is a time saver! What I saw last night, though, was even better: a URL specifically geared for mobile phones. “Mobile users, go to prtmobile.com/1908.

Microstock photography site Fotolia has taken its first outside round of investment since it was founded in 2005 and it is a doozy. The company isn’t talking about it, but an exceptionally good source with knowledge of the deal confirms that private equity firm TA Associates has invested between $50 million and $100 million in Fotolia. In comparison, rival iStockPhoto was acquired for $50 million by Getty Images three years ago. There are some rumors going around in venture circles that Fotolia got sold outright for $150 million. Our source, however, emphasizes that the company was not sold. Instead, after competitive bidding from more traditional venture firms, TA Associates came in with a massive injection of capital.

Up until now, Fotolia has been self-funded by French entrepreneurs Oleg Tscheltzoff, Thibaud Elziere, and some silent partners. The company is officially headquartered in New York City, but everyone still works from home. The company has been on a roll lately. It reached one million registered users and five million images for sale in February, introduced microstock video in April, hired an iStockPhoto co-founder in May, and just yesterday launched a royalty-free photo site called PhotoXpress.

Fotolia is smaller than iStockPhoto, but it has been going through a recent spurt of growth, while iStockPhoto seems to be stagnating. For example, unique visitors to Fotolia have tripled in the last twelve months to 3.4 million worldwide, according to comScore. Meanwhile, iStockphoto’s uniques are down 14 percent to 5.9 million (see chart below).

Fotolia is being pretty aggressive in undercutting iStockPhoto’s already low microstock prices, and the new PhotoXpress site is even more disruptive. Forget about selling images and illustrations for $1 to $10 a pop. It offers 10 free images a day. It is hard to see how this translates into huge revenues for Fotolia, but obviously it has big ambitions. Now it has the cash to really shake up the market.

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Mike Massimino, an astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis, is going to have to do some explaining to the Twitter community when he lands today at Kennedy Space Center. Turns out Massimino wasn’t really tweeting from space on the @Astro_Mike account.

It was actually a NASA employee doing the micro-updating for him, and not even in real-time: Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston. That means it often takes hours for updates to appear on the Twitter account, since e-mails are transmitted from the shuttle only a few times a day.

Not to blow my own horn here, but I figured everyone kinda knew it wasn’t actually Massimino tweeting from space. Isn’t it obvious that astronauts probably have better things to do than browsing the Twitter website every so often to fill in fans on what they’re doing? Granted, you could argue the same about everyone else on Twitter, but it’s still kinda of naive to think that astronauts have always-on Internet connectivity in orbit.

Either way, Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel burst at least 340K people’s bubbles today.

Update: Massimino actually revealed this himself some time ago. Guess that particular micro-message got lost in the real-time stream somewhere.

(Via The Next Web)

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