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.
It looks like Patrick Pichette, Google's new chief financial officer, will be rewarded for his new job with up to $2.125 million after the first year if he earns his full bonus.
Patrick Pichette
(Credit: Bell Canada)According to his employment offer letter, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pichette will receive a salary of $450,000 and an annual bonus up to one and half times that amount.
Pichette also gets a signing bonus of $500,000 and another cash bonus of $500,000 after 6 months at the search and advertising giant--though he must pay a prorated amount back if he decides to leave within a year. However, if Google terminates his job within the first 6 months, he'll get the cash bonus right away.
Stock options also are a part of the package. He'll get an option to 11,112 shares of Class A common stock, vesting over a four-year period. He'll also get 5,556 "Google stock units," vesting over a four-year period. At the end of that, the units convert to Google Class A shares.
He'll also get 910 Google stock units that will vest in 6 months and another 910 that vest in 12 months. They also convert into Class A shares.
Pichette, who had been president of operations at Bell Canada, starts at Google August 1 and will formally become CFO on August 12, Google said Wednesday.
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)The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two current and two former key executives of chipmaker Broadcom with backdating stock options.
The SEC announced Wednesday it had filed a federal complaint against Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Henry Samueli and general counsel David Dull, as well as former Chief Executive Officer Henry Nicholas and former Chief Financial Officer William Ruehle. The chipmaker later announced that Samueli and Dull had taken leaves of absence from their positions until the matter is resolved.
Samueli, who co-founded the company, also resigned as chairman of the board. The board appointed director John Major to serve as nonexecutive chairman.
Major said Broadcom would not comment on allegations, but pointed out that the charges were "half a decade to nearly a decade" old.
The SEC charges that, from 1998 to 2003, the four schemed to fraudulently backdate stock-option grants, failing to record billions of dollars of compensation expenses, and falsifying documents to further the fraud. As a result of the scheme, Broadcom restated its financial results in January 2007 and reported more than $2 billion in additional compensation expenses, the SEC said.
Ruehle and Dull each personally benefited from the backdating scheme by receiving and exercising backdated grants that were in-the-money by more than $100,000 for Ruehle and $1.8 million for Dull, the SEC said in a statement.
The move follows Broadcom's agreement last month to pay a civil penalty of $12 million to settle SEC charges that it fraudulently backdated stock options.
Ann Mather, a Google board member, could well find herself on the receiving end of a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit regarding stock option transactions made while she was chief financial officer at Pixar Animation Studios.
"On April 23, 2008, Ann was advised by the staff of the Los Angeles office of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it intends to recommend that the SEC initiate a civil proceeding against her, alleging violation of federal securities laws related to certain stock option transactions involving her former employer, Pixar Animation Studios," Google said in a regulatory filing Monday.
Mather was Pixar's CFO from 1999 to 2004. She's been on Google's board since November 2005.
She's also on the board of Zappos.com, Central European Media Enterprises Group, and Ariat International.
Update at 1:15 p.m. PDT April 18: Google ends trading day up 20 percent, capturing largest one-day gain
Update at 10 a.m. PDT April 18: Google's gains have now reached 21 percent.
Google's shares closed with a 20 percent gain Friday, marking the largest-ever one-day gain for the Internet giant.
Google's stock closed at $539.41 per share, up $89.87 from the previous day when Google reported after the market's close its first-quarter earnings and blew past analysts' estimates.
(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)
During intra-day trading Friday, Google's stock rose as high as $545.11 a share, climbing 21 percent, before edging back a bit.
The last time Google's shares had such a tremendous rocket ride was on October 22, 2004, when it jumped 15 percent in one day, according to analysts. The company's stock that day soared to $172.43 a share, up from $149.38 the previous day.
Driving that October jump was Google's first earnings report as a public company. Newly minted public companies are always especially concerned about their first earnings report because missing revenue and earnings numbers can put a company in the penalty box with investors for a very long time.
Investors had been concerned that Google would post weak results Thursday, given the doom-and-gloom forecasts from research companies that monitor paid-clicks and traffic.
ComScore, prior to Google's earnings release, put out figures that Google's paid-click growth in the U.S. grew a paltry 1.8 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period last year. That gave investors a scare, as they feared Google's growth was slowing.
Google, however, actually posted a 10 percent increase in paid-click growth in the U.S., and a 20 percent jump worldwide, in the first quarter, according to Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Collins Stewart.
ComScore's share price took an 8 percent hit in after-hours trading after Google reported its first quarter results, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. By morning trading on Friday, though, its stock regained most of its ground.
The folks at ComScore explained the discrepencies in a blog posting, noting they only count U.S. paid search clicks, while Google's figures include not only international figures but also "affiliate site ads."
Analysts, meanwhile, were busy this morning, pumping out their revised Google estimates.
Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup Global Markets, for example, upped Google's 2008 revenue estimates to nearly $16 billion, up from $15.6 billion. He also bumped up his earnings estimate to $16.80 per share, up from $16.17 a share.
Clayton Moran, an analyst with the Stanford Group, increased his earnings per share to $20.63 for 2008, up from his previous forecast of $19.50.
Despite Google's better-than-expected performance and Wall Street's increased estimates, analysts still issued words of caution.
"We continue to remain concerned at the rate of deceleration in paid clicks," Mahaney said in his research note. "(But) on the other hand, cost-per-click growth remained strong."
Moran also expressed concern over Google's growth rate.
"While last night's report provided relief that trends had not materially worsened, growth is slowing and margins are pressured," Moran said in his research note. "As such, we maintain a somewhat cautious view and a 'hold' rating."
Google's year-over-year growth in paid clicks rose 20 percent worldwide in the first quarter, but fell short of its 30 percent growth in the fourth quarter.
Sometimes I'm so uninspired I can't come up with a decent blog post to save my life. When that happens, I turn to what comforts me: numbers. Yes, I know how weird that sounds. What can I say, I'm a geek.
Anyway, I just got to wondering how investors in various technology companies fared over the long haul. I was just as interested in how technology companies performed versus companies with a more traditional business model. ... Read more
Both Red Hat and Oracle had excellent quarters, but Oracle's was apparently not "excellent" enough for Wall Street's tastes. Its shares and the market went south this week on fears that technology spending is in decline.
In addition, Wall Street apparently didn't notice that Red Hat actually raised its fiscal year 2009 guidance this week.
Consolidation is one way to improve earnings in a down market, but open source may well be a better way as The New York Times opined.
Oracle's total software revenue was up 21 percent, to $4.2 billion. Pretty good. Unfortunately, it was well under the 30 percent growth Wall Street was expecting.
More unfortunately, Oracle's third-quarter application license revenue only increased by 6.6 percent, to $451 million, which was well below the 30 percent growth ($553 million) that Wall Street expected.
As Sarah Friar explains in The Wall Street Journal,
...(C)ompanies typically buy such software when they are embarking on new projects and are likely to dial back such purchases in tough economic times.
But the same affliction isn't showing up in Red Hat's earnings. Red Hat's percentages were roughly the same. Red Hat's quarterly revenue rose by 27 percent over the fourth quarter and annual revenue in fiscal year 2008 was up more than 30 percent. Red Hat's numbers are much smaller compared with Oracle's, of course, but one thing that really stands out is its deferred revenue number, which was up 40 percent.
As I read that number, Red Hat is doing more longer-term deals. Basically, it's sitting on a growing mountain of cash that is just waiting for services to be performed before it can recognize that revenue. It means that Red Hat's future is demonstrably, tangibly bright.
Here are some salient facts from the Red Hat announcement:
Total revenue for the quarter was $141.5 million, an increase of 27 percent from the year-ago quarter and 5 percent from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $121.9 million, up 27 percent year over year and 5 percent sequentially. For the full year, total revenue was $523 million, an increase of 31 percent over fiscal 2007 revenue, and subscription revenue was $449.8 million, up 32 percent from the prior year.
Oracle is projecting 10 percent to 20 percent sequential quarterly growth. Red Hat, too, needs to find ways to super-charge its growth. But for the moment, I think it's enough for the company to be demonstrating a flight to value in recessionary times. Investors may bemoan the fact that it's harder to mint money with an open-source company, but this may simply be a new reality for the software industry.
We had a few decades of anomalous growth when there was a mismatch between the economics of production and consumption (i.e., write once, manufacture an infinite number of my products for roughly zero cost, but charge customers steep prices as if the economics of digital production didn't exist). Open source and the Web are going to bring things back into alignment.
For now, Oracle is a good bet in the stock market. If any company is going to weather the recessionary storm, I'm betting it will. But for those with a longer-term view on the software industry, it would be wise to bet on open source.
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.
Correction, 2:05 p.m. PST: This blog initially misstated Google's 52-week high. It is $747.
On his way to China last week, RSA's top executive, Art Coviello, stopped off in San Francisco for a meet-and-greet with customers in the financial sector. What with all the pyrotechnics on Wall Street, you'd think the banks would be cutting back spending on everything from encryption software--RSA's bread and butter--to thumb tacks.
Maybe that's happening and they're just not 'fessing up, but Coviello says he's not seeing evidence of a big pullback in technology spending.
Like most of you, I remember the near-death experience the tech business suffered through after the Internet bubble burst in 2000. Are we on the cusp of something similar? What with the subprime mess still a big black hole, Herb Greenberg and the rest of the CNBC crowd are hyperventilating with each new triple-digit loss that the worst awaits just over the horizon.
On the Nasdaq, meanwhile, the performance of the bellwether stocks this January has been simply miserable. Apple's plummeted from the $200 range to below $130 in a straight vertiginous drop. Google also has been crushed, down about $200 from its $747 52-week high. The market's been equally sour on the rest of the tech firmament. Nearly every company is being taken out to the woodshed and punished.
But at the risk of being portrayed as a clueless Pollyanna, I have to wonder whether things in tech land are as bad as the market mavens seem to suggest. In particular, I was astonished at the reaction to Intel's recent quarter. The Intel call was hardly the disaster one might assume considering the subsequent sell-off. In fact, management was relatively upbeat, albeit conservative, about the company's prospects. But against the backdrop of a jittery stock market, Wall Street was in a mood to sell first, and ask questions later.
Ditto for Apple. The company rang up banner sales but management issued cautious guidance on the conference call, and that led many to suspect the worst. The herd figured that if consumer spending slows down in a recession, there goes the market for high-priced Macs--let alone discretionary items like iPhones and iPods.
Not even a bang-up quarter from Microsoft was enough to reverse sentiment. I was looking hard for problems, but CEO Steve Ballmer has the monopoly that dare not speak its name executing nicely. Not that it mattered. Microsoft was just another technology company, and that's no advantage these days.
How long will the winter of tech's discontent continue? A colleague who understands these sorts of stock panics better than I do says it will last until it doesn't. Hardly profound, but that's more insightful than most of the drivel being spouted by the TV heads.
What's crazy is that the data to date--and I stress to date -don't suggest the tech business is on the edge of a precipice. But in this market, the mantra is, "who are you going to believe--me or your lying eyes?"
