Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.
The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.
Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.
Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special link to the Getty page where they can purchase a license to use the shot.
In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.
Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty's standard rates. As part of the deal, the only transaction is being shared directly between the photographer and Getty, meaning Yahoo will not be getting a share of that fee. According to Yahoo's rep, "Getty and Flickr have a separate business relationship."
The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It's long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.
Update: Changes have been made to this article since it first posted regarding the link to the Getty purchase pages on Flickr as well as the nature of the business partnership between Getty Images and Yahoo.
Adobe Systems' popular portable document format, or PDF as it's more well-known, has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard as of Wednesday morning.
Adobe has been the key developer and patent holder of the technology, and on Wednesday passed over the entire specification of version 1.7 to the Geneva-based ISO. This comes just a year and a half after Adobe made plans to open up by giving the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which was to lay the groundwork for ISO certification.
The ISO has issued a press release about the new standard (named "ISO 32000-1:2008"), along with a quote from Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about the move expanding the PDF universe. "As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years," Lynch said. It's nearly verbatim with what he said back in the AIIM hand-off, but holds true to what typically happens when any file format is ISO certified. They'll typically become more attractive to governments and large corporate customers.
As for consumers, the PDF format has been a hit or miss affair on the Web. PDFs are well-known for taking a long time to open in browsers with Adobe's own Reader software. Others like Apple have come in and integrated PDF reading into its Safari browser, while users of Firefox have sought third-party solutions like Foxit to speed up the process. Likewise, PDF search results on Google have had an "open as HTML" option for some time now, letting users forgo formatting for speed.
Other recent file formats that received ISO certification include Microsoft's Office Open XML format, which passed a vote for approval back in April.
One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.
A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that's getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully keep your service running a lot smoother, no matter how many folks are using it. ReadWriteWeb is calling it a "Grand Central Station for the social Web."
In a perfect world, services that used this system could open up their APIs a little to encompass more activity, leading to faster third-party tools that take advantage of that data. Users would also be getting faster notifications and conceivably less downtime due to overload.
Sounds great for everyone, right?
Unfortunately, all of this will not be available from the get-go. Gnip is starting out by offering a notification service only, with polling, transformation, and identification coming later. Notifications are one of the main overloaders though, especially for services like Twitter that have had to throttle the amount of times any external service can ping it for data. There are also concerns about what happens if everyone starts relying on Gnip to pipe data to third-party tools, and the tool goes down--leading to something similar to when Amazon's S3 has had blips, taking out entire businesses for hours at a time.
Gnip was founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the co-founders of the now Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.
Gnip bridges the data divide by offloading all the pings off your servers and onto theirs.
(Credit: Gnip)
If you've had bold ambitions of becoming a day trader, Google Finance is now one step closer to getting you there.
Tuesday morning the New York Stock Exchange partnered with Google and CNBC to provide real-time stock quotes that will show up on Google's finance site.
This means that whatever symbols you're looking at on Google Finance will be updated without delay, and the changes can be seen both on the page and at the top of the tab it's open in on your browser. You can also get it in widget form, either in iGoogle or on your phone with Google's mobile-alerts service.
Earlier this month, Google, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC partnered with Nasdaq to get real-time quotes from that composite index. Like NYSE, quotes from that index were delayed up to 15 minutes, rendering the service less of an asset to time-sensitive trades.
It should be noted that most serious day traders use proprietary subscription-based brokerage and charting tools that integrate with buying and selling services. Many would likely consider Google's current offerings not quite up to snuff in comparison, although the addition of real-time quotes may make it easier for consumers to view rapid fluctuations on potentially volatile stocks that the slower systems would not have illustrated.
Now you can view NYSE stocks in real time through Google Finance and other partnered sites.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
While the Nintendo Wii has garnered attention from consumers and media alike for its innovative motion-based controls, Linden Lab is experimenting with a new way to interact with its Second Life virtual world with nothing more than a Webcam. Codenamed Segalen, the technology makes use of 3D Webcams, such as the ones from 3DVsystems, to track user's body gestures to let them navigate and edit within the environment.
In a YouTube video (embedded below), Second Life creator Mitch Kapor and Kapor Enterprises Inc. employee Philippe Bossut demonstrate the basics of moving around the 3D virtual world without the use of a keyboard or mouse--the traditional interface for most games. They mention that they took some cues from the way people use the Segway personal transport device to map out people's gestures and posture into a 3D world. The technology can also track facial gestures and match them onscreen in real time.
On Bossut's blog he notes that the project has only been in "real" development for a little more than three weeks. Second Life users looking to get their hands on it will have to wait, however, the 3D cameras in use for the project are still not readily available to consumers.
Similar efforts to use Webcams for gaming include the XBOX 360 and its Live Vision camera as well as the Playstation's EyeToy series, although neither had the 3D hardware capability that will give Kapor's Handsfree 3D its extra dimension of spacial control.
I'm in the middle of a hunt for a new place to live, and have been using a variety of tools to keep an eye on local openings. The best offense against the horde of competitors seems to be finding those small, obscure listings, as well as utilizing as many sources as possible.
A new service called Rentbits, created by some former Google employees, is officially launching this morning and is joining a crowded group of other search verticals that help people solve this problem.The tool grabs sources from all over the Web with its crawling technology. In most cases I found the results came from ApartmentHunterz.com, but mixed in with those were listings from Sublet.com and CityCribs.com. A lot of it depends on which city you're looking in, as the service includes some local listing sites. Craigslist however, is nowhere to be found, which is unfortunate.
Also missing is an advanced search. You can set how many rooms you're looking for and how much you want to pay, but there's no way to add things you're looking to be included like hardwood floors, a dishwasher, or laundry room. If these amenities are listed, they'll be included as part of the search results, but some way to weed out places that don't have some of these amenities would be useful.
Despite the handy metasearching qualities of Rentbits, I continue to be impressed by another search vertical called HousingMaps. It's a very simple mashup that uses Craigslist data and keyword search, and combines that with Google Maps. However, the key in any of these services is to mix a great list of sources with a highly customizable search tool--something that Rentbits doesn't quite have yet.
Rentbits lets you search though local housing listings from all over the Web, although only a handful of listing suppliers are included in the crawler right now.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Yahoo-owned photo community Flickr has launched a new program today called Flickr for Good. The site will be a place for nonprofits or other photojournalists to pool together their photography. In order to get the ball rolling Flickr has teamed up with non-profit organizer TechSoup to donate 10,000 one-year Flickr Pro memberships (which normally cost $25 a pop) to nonprofits and public libraries to let them upload as many shots as they want to the popular photo hosting community.
Each nonprofit can grab up to five memberships to distribute among its staff. Details on how the groups are supposed to use their Flickr memberships are a little nebulous, but in its blog post about the new site Flickr pointed to several high profile organizations like YWCA and Camera Rwanda have been using the photo host to create photo exposés.
If you're a nonprofit looking to get in on the action, you can do so on TechSoup's sign-up page.
Update: I should note the memberships are not entirely free. Participants must pay $6 for two one-year accounts or $15 for five one-accounts. The fees are administrative, and go towards running TechSoup. In comparison, purchasing either of the accounts from Flickr directly would cost $50 or $150 respectively.
Flickr Good will be a place for nonprofits and other organizations to show off their humanitarian efforts.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Lately it seems that Friday is the new day for Yahoo news around here. Apple's got Tuesday mornings locked, and Microsoft prefers 3 a.m., so the Web giant seems to have decided to go for the day when everyone's half-checked out of the office. Earlier today we looked at the new face of Yahoo Video, and about the same time Valleywag got the scoop on a new Yahoo service called "Buzz" that's set to launch later this month.
So what is it? It's a buzz tracker for news items picked not only by user voting (like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, et al), but also for items people are searching for both on Yahoo and on the company's publisher network. According to Valleywag, the service is opening up small, about 100 or so publishers until the Summer (that is if Microsoft doesn't kill it off if the acquisition goes through) before making it available to all the sites.
We contacted Yahoo for more information on the service. Yahoo spokeswoman Kelley Podboy told us:
Yahoo! Buzz is part of a new initiative we are testing to surface interesting content from around the Web. We will be sharing more details of the initiative in the coming weeks. Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo! And we continue to test various products and services to gain valuable feedback and insights from our users.
According to Valleywag, the release date is set for February 26th, which falls on a Tuesday. There are also screenshots of the service in action here and here.
It should be noted Yahoo has maintained the buzz.yahoo.com domain since late 2005 when it started "The Buzz Blog" a companion to Yahoo's Buzz Index which is a daily tracker the likes of Google's Yearly Zeitgeist. The service helped track hot searches like music on the Billboard Charts. The new system would simply combine this with user voting and sourcing searches from smaller sites.
Adobe Creative Suite users will soon have to turn to other Web-based or local stock photography services to get their stock photo fix.
Adobe on Monday quietly announced the end of its stock photography service. The Stock Photos service has been a part of the popular Creative Suite since the introduction of Adobe Bridge in version 2. The cutoff date is March 31st, giving users a little less than two more months to use the service to acquire legal shots to use in design work.
According to Adobe's FAQ on the matter, the company is getting out of the stock photography business to "concentrate its efforts in other areas." The service acted as a go-between to other stock photography services without a markup. It's easily comparable to iTunes for stock photography, as it offered users a one-stop shop with live previews that could easily be put into Adobe's various design applications right after purchase.
Since the front end for the photo service is part of the Creative Suite software, Adobe's created a special uninstaller that gets rid of it in Bridge. Current users of Bridge are greeted to the below message, telling them how many days are left before the service cutoff, along with links to Adobe's customer service center.
To curb any latecomers, Adobe is also cutting off the search function of the stock photo tab on March 4, which will keep new users from even being able to get to the photos that are for sale.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
In the past several years, the rise of Web services that offer stock photography has been speedy. With Bridge, it appeared that Adobe was taking notice and making it easier to parse through them.
However, between this and Adobe's foray into publishing to other stock services, killing off the intermediary (Stock Photos on Bridge) to save some hours to work on future products makes good business sense.
In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.
About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.
AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.
Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.
AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.
Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.
Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.
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