Month: August 2005

Next Gen TiVo’s to support CableCard | PVRblog PVRBlog posts about a job description at TiVo promising the applicant will gain experience in open standards such as CableCARD.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Go figure. Filter a bunch of hot women from Flickr and post them to your blog and guess what? Traffic shows up. Nick Starr blogged today that he was asked to reconfigure his blog by Flickr after the bandwidth issues started to just get too high. So he received an email from Yahoo! today and has reconfigured his blog to only host 30 photos at a time on his main page in order to address the situation.

Ok. So PubSub headlines are coming back into NewsGator today for the first time in about three weeks. Damn I love PubSub but damn I hate it when the headlines aren’t there. Hopefully this fix will be permanent this time not like the last one which went away in a day. Thanks Bob Wyman and Greg Reinacker!

The Windows Media Center Show – The Windows Media Center Show #21 – Rob Enderle On this weeks show Ian has Rob Enderle Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group talking about the TV industry, the Movie industry, the music industry, Vista, extenders and of course a little on Media Center.

USATODAY.com – Microsoft to offer two Xbox 360 options: “Video gamers pining for Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 game system will have two different options to choose from, a fully-equipped $399.99 package that includes a 20 Gigabyte hard drive and a stripped-down $299.99 version.”

Blogger Buzz: Word Up Scoble was alluding to this yesterday and now it’s news. I’ll have to try it. For many of my posts I’ll simply write them in word and cut and paste over into blogger to publish. Hopefully this makes it even easier.

FlickrLicio.us – Babes of Flickr ? Babes On Flickr Well it’s usually sex that ends up bumping into succesful online businesses at some point and I’d expect Flickr to be no exception. Found this blog today called Babes on Flickr. Some pretty nice… er photography.

Recently I sold my first photograph. It was a photo of the Grand Lake movie theater in Oakland. I sold a one year license of the photograph to Choice Hotels. They used it in a national television commercial for this television commercial that they are running now to Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Since I don’t watch commercials (PVR and all) I’ve still yet to see it but the fact that they found my photograph through a Google image search rather than a stock photography house has recently made me wonder.

Why couldn’t Flickr displace the world’s largest photo licensing company Getty Images or Bill Gates’ stock photography competitor Corbis? Have you seen some of the photography up at Flickr lately? It is stunning. Although primarily taken and posted by amateurs, the top shots on the site are every bit as brilliant as anything I’ve seen from the pros.

So why not bring the business of stock photography to the amateur photographer? While Corbis and Getty focus more on the professional photographer I believe that there is a growing army of weekend warriors with digital cameras that stand to offer up an alternative distribution source for the licensing of images. It would seem to me that this would also have the effect of driving more and more top quality photographers to Flickr as they might see it as a place to drive revenue.

Flickr could analyze the way that Corbis and Getty charge for licenses and then offer a comparable (or even cheaper) fee schedule for marketers, advertisers, etc. Flickr could put together a fee sharing arrangement that would take the place of a traditional agent and then let their search do the rest. Flickr could allow those interested in purchasing image licenses (or anyone really) the ability to search by tags and through an advanced search restrict the search to only photos that users have voluntarily submitted for consideration. With the recent enhancements to Flickr’s image search with their “interestingness” thing, you can now search photos and then have them ranked and returned to you by relevancy. Try searching for some terms at Flickr and then sorting by interestingness — the results are impressive for supposed amateurs. Here’s bridge (ok, so I’m biased because a few of mine show up). Or check out sunset. Or try blue. Or even try something crazy like crazy. You get the idea.

The world of Corbis and Getty Images is largely unknown and unavailable to the average amateur photographer. Through Yahoo! Flickr will continue to mass popularize photo sharing. As their/our image library becomes larger and larger and their photo rank technology gets better and better they could very easily become the single best place for marketers and advertisers to find compelling images. What AdSense has been for Google, Flickrsense could ultimately be for Yahoo! images.

Model and location releases would be issues that would need to somehow be addressed and I’m sure there is much more about the stock photography business that I am unaware of but it sure does seem like an interesting way to begin offering competition to the likes of Getty Images and Corbis.

Although a small little thing like Flickr perhaps never could displace the mighty giants of Corbis and Getty Images, even if they acquired the smallest fraction of business in this multi billion dollar market it could be huge.

Of course, if Microsoft was smart they would create/buy a Flickr of their own and coordinate this through Gates’ already established Corbis. But then again, if Microsoft was smart, they would have bought Flickr before Yahoo! scooped them up.