Wednesday, April 11, 2007

5 lessons of Photobucket Fiasco

from GigaOM by Om Malik Photobucket, which started out as a plain-vanilla hosting service, cried wolf last night when it claimed that MySpace was blocking its videos. The truth came out this morning: because Photobucket is selling ads on videos that get shown on MySpace via widgets, MySpace is blocking them just like it would anyone else. It is clearly an emotional issue, as you can tell from the big debate that rages on the blogs. The fact is, Photobucket and MySpace are both for-profit entities, and this is less about emotion than it is about capitalism. Nevertheless, there are some lessons here for start-ups hoping to thrive in the new disaggregated web world. Don’t depend too much on one partner, especially one you don’t have a formal relationship with. Or as one smart commentator writes, “One line of code from that 3rd party literally puts these guys out of business.” If you are going to depend on one partner, don’t make waves. Stay under the radar. I am sure bragging in Fortune didn’t help Photobucket’s case. Don’t lose sight of your own mantra. Photobucket said all along it was just a service provider, and didn’t care about page views on its own site. How it was going to scale and build its revenues, based on that model, is a tough question Photobucket didn’t ask itself in the early days. Pay to play and ensure longevity. Remember, even Google had to pay MySpace, and you the start-up are not that special. Free is a tactic, not a business model, and has strings attached to it. Liz pointed out during a chat this morning that these are all truisms of the old media world that some optimists had thought wouldn’t apply to to the new new media world. Now, it seems the new theories of disaggregation are getting throughly trampled. I haven’t had a chance to ponder over that, but would like to throw this open to debate and get your thoughts on this. Are there other lessons to be learned from this fiasco? What does Photobucket do? Become a destination? Are destinations a better option for a start-up? Let the conversation begin!

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24-inch LED Backlit LCD Coming from Samsung

byJohn Martellaro, 4:40 PM EDT, April 11th, 2007 Samsung has announced a 24-inch (60 cm) LED backlit LCD display with 180 degree viewing and near perfect light uniformity, according to DailyTech. "As notebooks become thinner, the need for LED-backlit screens become more important as they take up far less space and requires less power," the author reported. "The same is true for desktop displays, but LED-backlit LCD panels are used primarily for a different reason here: uniformity and color gamut." The new displays boast a high contrast ratio and excellent color saturation. Samsung said that these displays will reach 111 percent of the NTSC standard while traditional LCDs commonly manage about 72 percent. The resolution will be 1920 x 1200 and the panel will have a true 180 degree viewing angle. In terms of availability, Samsung hasn't yet committed. However, the author noted that," the lag between Samsung panel announcements and monitor production can sometimes exceed six months." With the new 24-inch LCD monitor display, technology-demanding consumers, professional graphics designers and digital photographers will enjoy the same true-to-life colors that premium LCD TVs can provide, thanks to Samsung's proprietary LED backlight. The LED-backlit monitor panel has an industry-high color saturation level of 111% (of NTSC standard) compared to a saturation level of only 72% of NTSC for conventional monitors.The panel's 24-inch screen size is optimal for systems equipped with the Windows Vista operating system. While conventional thinking has been that Windows Vista works best with a 22-inch screen (the size of two A4 pieces of paper), 22 inches is not wide enough to support full-HD. In addition, industry experts now say that 24 inches provides a better Windows Vista fit to also include the Vista right side bar and margins.The advent of Windows Vista and the spread of HD technology have accelerated the demand for wide-screen monitors delivering true-color imagery. Meanwhile, a steadily increasing number of consumers are using their monitors to watch high quality video images. Samsung's new 24-inch LCD display with its vivid colors represents one of the most advanced monitor screens available today to meet market needs.The new monitor display also features Samsung's highly successful S-PVA (Super Patterned-ITO Vertical Alignment) technology that provides the widest viewing angle possible—180 degrees—at the highest contrast ratio for LCD monitors today (>1,000:1). It also supports WUXGA resolution (1,920x1,200 pixels), which is the computer equivalent to Full HD resolution.The new display's backlight does not use mercury and is therefore is environmentally-friendly.

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KFC ad agency strikes again with "Mosquito tone" commercial

from Engadget by Evan Blass Filed under:

Even though its food tastes like crap, you have to give poultry kingpin KFC credit for thinking outside the box when it comes to TV spots, using innovative commercials to lure unsuspecting folks into purchasing its disgusting slop. You probably remember the company's last high-profile ad which forced viewers to watch in slo-mo in order to get the password for a free sandwich, and now it's utilizing that supposedly "kids-only," high-pitched ringtone in an attempt to drum up interest in the new Boneless Variety Bucket. At some point during the ad for this family-friendly meal, the so-called "Mosquito" tone is played in the background, and the first 1,000 kids who correctly guess where the sound was placed get $10 in KFC gift certificates (just enough to cover the $9.99 Variety Bucket, but tax is coming out of their allowances). With such a small number of prizes in play, it would seem that the home of finger-lickin' good chicken learned its lesson from the DVR ad, meaning that all of the coupons will probably be gone by the time the contest answer is leaked onto the internet. Still, no matter how many people win or lose, KFC is getting a whole lot of free advertising out of this promotion, so watch the commercial or not, the Colonel always comes out on top.

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

NYTimes: Corbis - A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge

Lisa Kyle for The New York Times

Corbis, started by Bill Gates in 1989, owns millions of images, some of them kept underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania.

Published: April 10, 2007

In some sense, the iconic photograph of Rosa Parks recreating her quiet act of rebellion on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., belongs to every American. But as a practical matter, it belongs to Bill Gates.

Shoring Up an Archive
Arthur Sasse/Corbis

Marilyn Monroe during the filming of “The Seven Year Itch.”

Anyone wanting to use that image in a book or on a Web site must first license it from Corbis, a corporation founded and owned by Mr. Gates, who is better known for starting Microsoft. The photo is among the 11 million prints and negatives in the legendary Bettmann archive, which Corbis bought in 1995.

Since that first purchase, Corbis has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring image collections and other companies, hired more than 1,000 people and set up two dozen offices worldwide. Although Corbis says it brings in some $250 million a year in sales, it has yet to turn a profit.

Now the company is shuffling its top executives as it takes on new challenges, building up a business in rights management and plotting its response to the rise of low-cost online photo services that threaten to undermine its lucrative stock photo sales.

The company plans to announce Tuesday that Gary Shenk, the president, is being made chief executive as well. Mr. Shenk, 36, is an expert in rights licensing who has risen rapidly through the Corbis ranks since he was hired in 2003 from Universal Studios, where he started a small licensing unit.

Steve Davis, 49, the departing chief executive, will continue as a senior adviser after 10 years of running the company.

The move into rights clearance, which involves sorting out the questions of who owns what material and how much they should be paid for its use, is a departure from the original vision for the company.

Mr. Gates started Corbis in 1989 with the idea that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork — interspersing, say, Cecil Stoughton’s shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under the desk in the Oval Office with photos of their own families at play.

That is not how things have worked out. But meanwhile Corbis has built up a formidable stash of historical photos, including those in the Bettmann Archive. In 1999, Corbis acquired the licensing rights to the Sygma collection in France, and two years ago it did the same with a German stock image company called Zefa. It licenses those images for an average of about $250 apiece.

Corbis also owns digital reproduction rights for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.

In all, Corbis represents or owns the rights to more than 100 million images, including some of the most famous photographs ever — Arthur Sasse’s photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out and Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate. And Corbis handles the licensing of millions of other images on behalf of thousands of photographers.

The archival photos bring in about half of Corbis’s sales, but the company also has a stable of professional photographers who generate stock photos for advertising and media clients — images of children on playgrounds, people sitting in business meetings and men in khakis swinging golf clubs.

Over the past few years, Corbis has moved beyond newspaper and magazine clients to pursue advertising and graphic design agencies, as well as corporate marketing departments, which are turning increasingly to high-quality stock photography rather than doing their own expensive photo shoots.

Those customers are also buying from Corbis’s growing library of 30,000 short video clips — mostly generic scenes of, say, people shopping or running down the beach.

What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image.

Although the microstock business still represents a small fraction of the $2 billion market for stock photos, analysts say it is possible that low micropayment prices could take business away from the higher-priced images Corbis relies on for the bulk of its revenues.

“Think about how visual the world is,” said Barbara Coffey, a senior research analyst at Kaufman Brothers in New York who follows the stock photography market. “We have pictures on our cellphones. If I can get a reasonably clear picture and the rights are cleared and I pay $2 for it, then why would I pay Corbis $200?”

The rise of the microstock companies has been of particular concern to Corbis. For all its new lines of business, the company still gets some 88 percent of its revenues from image licenses, yet commands only about 11 percent of that market. Getty Images dominates the market with a 40 percent share.

Getty, which has grown quickly since its start in 1995 with the backing of its wealthy co-founder, Mark Getty, has a foothold in microstock thanks to iStockPhoto, which it bought last year for $50 million.

Mr. Shenk said Corbis would announce its plans for the microstock business sometime this quarter. As for the question of how a high-end company enters that business without cannibalizing its more expensive products, Mr. Shenk said the idea was to find a new kind of customer, people who would never envision buying pictures from a Corbis or Getty.

In that vein, Mr. Shenk said Corbis would make its service as easy to use as the iTunes store of Apple and hinted that Corbis would also be following the crowdsourcing model.

“More interesting and innovative things are happening on the pages of Flickr these days than on Corbis and Getty,” said Mr. Shenk, referring to the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo. “If we can use this type of opportunity to find the next great group of Corbis photographers, that also makes it a great opportunity for us.”

Corbis is also betting heavily on its Creative Resources division, which includes rights services and recorded 44 percent growth in revenue last year, to $30.1 million.

Mr. Shenk, who will take over from Mr. Davis at the end of June, is most likely the biggest reason for that growth. When Mr. Shenk left Universal for Corbis in 2003, he took five people and an impressive Rolodex with him. Now nearly 30 Corbis employees work in rights clearance, in offices in Los Angeles, New York, Europe and Asia.

Mr. Shenk, a Hollywood veteran who is an expert in what he calls “new ways to sell media,” said he believed Corbis was offering something unique in building a worldwide network of rights experts. The business of rights clearance, he said, is often a matter of knowing whom to call, and the idea is to make Corbis the first place that comes to mind when, say, an advertising agency is trying to clear the rights to use an image, video clip, or song.

Such was the case when the band U2 made its most recent video, for “Window in the Skies,” which braided together some 100 clips of old stars like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, synched to the new song’s music and lyrics. Corbis helped the band’s production company negotiate a thicket of publicity rights.

Roughly one-third of Corbis’s 1,100 employees are in downtown Seattle, in an old bank building well suited to the company’s hip self-image. The vast, open, two-story space has retained several enormous vaults that once held gold bars and now serve as photocopy and office supply rooms. Conference rooms are named after famous photographers, and copies of their work cover many of the walls.

The Corbis photographs themselves are not stored in Seattle, except digitally on the computers there. And those digital images constitute only a small fraction of Corbis’s holdings. Of the 50 million items in the Sygma collection, just 800,000 have been digitized.

The prints and negatives from Otto L. Bettmann’s archive, as well as those from a few smaller collections, are kept 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania. In February, Corbis announced that it would be storing the Sygma collection in a preservation facility near Paris.

As ventures go, Corbis represents a small investment for Mr. Gates. He pays for large expenditures, and the company uses its revenues to cover smaller projects within the firm.

Mr. Gates’s involvement in the company is minimal. He spends only two to three hours each month meeting with Corbis management. Yet it is clear that he makes the big decisions. He has no interest, for example, in treating the undigitized portions of the image collections like one of his charities by, say, donating them to a public entity.

Despite the hands-off approach, Mr. Gates is apparently never far from the minds of Corbis employees. Mr. Shenk is in the process of relocating to Seattle from Los Angeles, and his sparsely decorated office in Seattle is evidence of the commuter life he has been leading. The only work of art in evidence one recent afternoon was on Mr. Shenk’s whiteboard, where a colleague had drawn the unmistakable likeness of Mr. Gates, peering out from behind his glasses.

“Keep up the good work, Shenk,” Mr. Gates says. “Or I’ll kill you.”

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Monday, April 09, 2007

FlickrCash - 200,000+ results on Google

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