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Posts Tagged ‘london-on-july’

Yay! Toshiba is officially unveiling their Windows Mobile Snapdragon-powered TG01 in London on July 9th. Yeah, I’m about as impressed as you are

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Toshiba launching the TG01 next week in London

We have now opened voting in The Europas, the tech innovation awards from TechCrunch Europe honouring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We’ll hold the awards ceremony in London on July 9 for 300 people: you can get a ticket here. There is more information about the awards here.

You can now vote for the nominated companies and personalities from the industry. You can only vote once for one entrant, so make it count. Your vote will be counted towards nominating the five finalists in each category. Voting will close on Wednesday June 2, next week. Thanks to Polldaddy for this voting mechanism. Now go vote!

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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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So far this year TechCrunch has run roundtable meetup events for startups in Barcelona , Paris , Prague and coming up we’ll be in Stockholm on May 27, Berlin on June 10 and throwing a huge summer party in London on July 9 (come meet The Travelling Geeks ). But next week will be TechCrunch Europe’s first day-long conference in London and it’s shaping up to be pretty cool. Over 200 people are already coming and there are only a handful of tickets left.

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Are You A Real Geek ‘n Rolla? Find Out. London. April 21.

San Francisco-based hi5 , which operates the third largest social networking service in the world, is announcing a partnership with PlaySpan today in an effort to get more revenue out of its 60+ million members.

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In Quest For Real Revenue From Virtual Goods, hi5 Teams Up With PlaySpan

If you’ve been using the recently released Google Earth 5.0 to check out what the oceans look like from beneath the water surface (tip: use the flight simulator to fly underwater), you’ll be happy to know that the company has extended that capability to the “Third Coast” of the U.S., meaning the five Great Lakes of North America (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario) that form the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet (roughly 22% of it according to Wikipedia ). Through a cooperative effort with the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Google Earth now incorporates detailed bathymetry for the five Great Lakes. Users will be able to explore features such as the canyons and shoals in eastern Lake Superior, the Lake Michigan mid-lake reef complex, and the old river channel, now underwater, that once connected Lakes Michigan and Huron at the Straits of Mackinac.

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Dive Into The Five Great Lakes With Google Earth

ExtraHop Networks has completed a $5.1 million Series A round of funding, led by the Madrona Venture Group, with participation from angel investors including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. ExtraHop’s delivery assurance system helps enterprises manage applications and provides visibility for applications

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App Management System ExtraHop Scores $5.1 Million In Series A Funding

Continuing its quest to bridge the world’s of broadcast television and the Web, Syndicaster is adding several online distribution options for local TV stations, including the ability to publish video clips to YouTube, AOL (via Brightcove), Yahoo and other sites. Syndicaster is an online editing and video-clip management service that allows TV stations to any broadcast news clip and repurpose it for the Web by publishing it to their own Websites or through its sister service ClipSyndicate (both Syndicaster and ClipSyndicate are divisions of Critical Media )

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Syndicaster Adds AOL, Brightcove, And YouTube Distribution For Local TV News Clips

Backblaze , a cloud-based backup solution for Windows machines that we likened to the online equivalent of Time Machine when it first got onto our radar, is today releasing the public beta of its product for Macs after it debuted a private beta version last December. Backblaze, available in 11 languages, costs $5 a month or $50 a year for unlimited online storage for backing up your hard drive, with a 15-day free trial available

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Backblaze’s Online Backup Solution For Macs Hits Public Beta Stage