Could an initial public offering be on the way for the highly ambitious Glam Media? The Valley-based advertising and media company has hired a new chief financial officer, Stephen E. Recht, who was the CFO of photo-printing site Shutterfly when it went public in 2006.
Recht replaces Ernie Cicogna, a co-founder of Glam. Cicogna will remain with the company as executive vice president of Glam Partners and general manager of the Glam Publisher Network.
"(Glam) has perfected a unique media business model and established itself as the leader in vertical content networks online," Recht said in a release. "I'm looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to the company's continued upward trajectory."
That could mean a few things: on one hand, an initial public offering, but on the other hand, Glam could have recruited him simply because it needs to make more money. With an advertising recession looming and talk of dot-com doom spreading all over the Web, Glam could just be getting down to business. For obvious reasons, a financial crisis isn't the greatest time to go public; Glam is also rumored to have gone through a round of layoffs earlier this fall.
That said, Glam (and its colorful CEO, Samir Arora) is known for its audacity. The company first made its name as an ad network on fashion and celebrity gossip sites, before branching out into everything from eco-living to African-American lifestyle to the luxury market. It's raised an astonishing amount of venture capital, has stocked its executive ranks with veterans of both print publishing and Silicon Valley, and was at the center of a rumored billion-dollar buyout offer.
Depending on whom you talked to, that buyout offer was either a fake rumor started internally to drum up Glam's market value or a savvy pre-IPO move. And that's the bipolar perception of Glam in both the tech and advertising sectors: some think it's the future of the industry, whereas skeptics see it as a big, drawn-out case of pride before a fall.
But now it looks as if there's one ex-Shutterfly executive who's betting on the former.
Do we really need another outlet for photo sharing? Shutterfly thinks so.
The photo-printing service, best known for publishing custom calendars, albums, posters, and other photography-infused goods, announced on Wednesday the launch of "Shutterfly Gallery," a social network that is sort of like a Flickr for the scrapbooking set.
Shutterfly Gallery is the first major project launched since the publicly traded company acquired Nexo Systems, a Web site personalization start-up. Nexo's technology has provided the technology for the new social-networking arm of Shutterfly.
Shutterfly Gallery encourages "storytelling" (see, I told you it would appeal to scrapbook lovers) through the creation and sharing of online photo books that can be themed and customized with backgrounds, text, and tags. Members can also rate one another's albums (Ouch! "Scott and Nancy: The First 2 Months" has only two stars!), create profiles, and embed their photo books into Web sites or blogs.
"Our customers are inspiring and enthusiastic storytellers, and have asked for a way to share their stories with other customers and the general public," Jeffrey Housenbold, president and CEO of Shutterfly, said in a statement Wednesday. "Now we are providing them more ways to tell their stories."
Cat lovers, camera-happy vacationers, and proud parents of the world, rejoice!
Photoshop Express offers users a selection of different options from which to select as an easier alternative to adjustment sliders.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)MONTEREY, Calif.--Adobe Systems has committed to shipping a beta version of its online image-editing tool, Photoshop Express, this year, and said it will be complete in 2008.
"By late this year, we anticipate having a beta version," said John Loiacono, senior vice president for Adobe Creative Solutions, speaking at the 6sight digital imaging conference here. And next year, the online service will be "available to anyone," he said.
Loiacono showed Photoshop Express running on an Adobe server connected over the Internet, he said. But when the average person experiences the software, it likely will be through partners such as Shutterfly or Photobucket, he said.
Unsurprisingly, Loiacono left unmentioned Flickr, which said in October it will use Picnik's online photo-editing tools.
Photoshop Express is a profoundly important project, and Adobe's schedule indicates that its repercussions are near-term and not academic.
For Adobe, the project is the spearhead of a transformation from a seller of boxed software to a provider of services in an increasingly rich Internet experience. And for the industry overall, it signals that Internet technology is maturing enough that companies are willing risk extending the brand of respected PC software to the network.
Photoshop Express, as its name suggests, isn't a full-fledged version of Photoshop proper or even of its hobbyist-oriented sibling, Photoshop Elements. The intent is to reach a much larger audience than the company currently reaches with its higher-end boxed software products.
This sports car used to be red.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)
A look at Photoshop Express
Loiacono demonstrated several features of Photoshop Express, hampered only fleetingly by a couple Flash error messages. He selected photos to edit from a group, removed red-eye, cropped, adjusted color tones, used a healing brush to erase a skin blemish, and replaced the color of a red sports car with various other hues.
The demonstration showed the relatively limited set of features available in Photoshop Express. There were three top-level menu options: quick fix, tuning, and fun.
"Fun" options include replace color, which Loiacono showed to change a red sports car into blue, purple and green. Other options are huge, black-and-white, distort, sketch, and tint.
"Quick fix" options were crop and rotate, blemish removal, red-eye removal, auto correct, and sharpen. Tuning options were white balance, exposure, highlight, fill light, saturation, and soft focus.
Photoshop Express offers a blemish-fixing tool similar to full-fledged Photoshop's healing brush.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)If you want another look, my comrade Martin LaMonica--who had the online Photoshop scoop in February--last month posted a video of an earlier Photoshop Express demonstration.
Computational photography
Loiacono also offered a glimpse into what Adobe and others call computational photography--the achieving through the combination of photography and computers what can't be achieved with either alone.
With digital cameras, some computation already happens in cameras themselves, but Loiacono predicted more.
For example, today people can combine two photos that are exposed differently--one for a subject in the foreground illuminated by a flash and another with natural light in the background. Merging those two photos could happen earlier in the process so people don't have to futz with processing the photos afterward, he said.
"What we're moving to is an environment when your camera will be able to take two shots, process them in the camera, and give you the desirable output," Loiacono said.
He also demonstrated a video variation of stitching still images together into a single panorama. A video taken panning across a view of an African waterfall was converted into a wide panoramic pan of the same waterfall, with the water flowing across the full scene even though it was taken from different frames of the video.
He also showed a view of Adobe's light-field camera work, which processes multiple images taken simultaneously so the computer can effectively construct a three-dimensional model of the scene.
On our weekly Real Deal podcast today, Tom and I covered online photo sharing. It's not so much a comparison of the dozens of good photo sites we know of, but rather an overview of the issues for people confused about the whole space. Topics covered: Various services. How to pick a site. Privacy and copyrights. Online editing. And listener questions.
How to select a photo site, and why.
See also our Newbie's Guide to Flickr.
If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums.
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Here's a fun piece of Webware that made its official launch last week. It's called Graphita Live Studio, and it's a really fun and well-done Web-based photo editor. Unlike some of the other solutions I've looked at in the past, Graphita doesn't have any grand scheme to replace your favorite desktop photo-editing software. Instead, Live Studio provides users with a way to quickly deface, or "enhance" their photos with all sorts of rasterized stamps and a trouble-making doodling tool.
Deface your family photos with Graphita's toolbox full of stamps and caption bubbles.
(Credit: CNET Networks)To get started, users simply need to upload a photo from their hard drive. Users get their own canvas, complete with a floating tool box that can be repositioned. The toolbox has a variety of functions on it, including a doodling tool with a bevy of brushes, a captions creator with over a dozen types of caption bubbles, and a collection of objects, which are essentially stamps. The real fun is putting these elements together, which doesn't take much expertise or experience with photo-editing tools.
When you're done, there are several ways to share your work. You can e-mail it to friends, or keep it simple and save it to your desktop. There's also the option to send it out to 13 popular photo hosting services including Photobucket, Flickr, and Shutterfly, although for some reason the option to send to these sites was grayed out for me.
Graphita is a great deal of fun, and really well-done. If you're in the market to make friends or family look ridiculous, give it a spin.
Yahoo Photos will be shut down in 99 days for some users, but Yahoo released tools Wednesday to let members move their pictures to alternative sites.
Yahoo Photos members now can migrate their pictures elsewhere.
(Credit: Yahoo)In a blog posting Wednesday, Tim Anderson, the senior product manager of Yahoo Photos and Flickr, encouraged the Yahoo Photos users to move their photos to Yahoo's other photo site, Flickr. But the company also will let members move their photos to four other sites: Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket and Kodak Gallery.
Look at the options carefully before you switch. Some are offering perks such as free prints, and others don't support some Yahoo Photos features such as tags. And don't be in a rush: The site won't shut down until September 20, and international users likely will get even more leeway.
Conspicuously missing from the migration list is Picasa, the photo-sharing site run by Yahoo archrival Google.
The site was misbehaving on Wednesday evening. When I tried to move my photos, I got an error message: "Wait! There's a problem. We're sorry about this, but we couldn't start your migration for a very technical reason that you probably don't want to know."
Members also can buy archival CDs--which might not be a bad idea no matter in any event given that most folks are backup shirkers.
"We've watched photography gradually change from a tool for simply recording life events (seen enough baby/wedding/graduation/vacation photos, anyone?) to a social tool for sharing and connecting with others. That's why we believe it's time to shift our focus towards Flickr," Anderson said.
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