Yahoo's Flickr site has deepened its relationship with photo-licensing power Getty Images so photographers can nominate their own photos for inclusion in Getty's Flickr Collection.
Previously, Getty decided which images it believed were commercially viable, and since the program launched in July 2008, it has put together a collection of more than 60,000 commercial images. Now photographers, instead of just being able to indicate that they're willing to be contacted by Getty, can actively submit a portfolio of images.
"A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter, and technical skill," Andy Saunders, Getty's vice president of creative imagery, said in a statement. "If some or all of the photos--or other images from your photostream--are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via FlickrMail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images' initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process."
The partnership is an interesting confluence between the old-school world of stock photography and the nouveau era of digital photography and the Internet. With digital SLRs and the Internet, high-quality photos are easier to come by, leading to the arrival of several "microstock" companies that sell photos on a royalty-free and relatively inexpensive basis. It's hurt professional stock photographers, but it's provided extra income to any number of enthusiasts and amateurs.
Flickr never launched its own microstock site, despite an abundance of enthusiasts contributing photos, but the Getty partnership does mix a commercial ingredient into the Yahoo photo-sharing site's operations.
The easy availability of photos at Flickr and other sites can lead to copyright infringement troubles. On Tuesday, Toyota USA apologized for using Flickr photos without permission:
Toyota apologizes for pulling images from Flickr without photographer permission. Images from a handful of photographers appeared on a Toyota site for five days. We're working quickly to reach out to the individual photographers involved. Until then, the images have been removed, and corrections have been made to the process of pulling images from Flickr.
So it's clear that some Flickr photos have business value, whether for their professional quality or their everyman snapshot flavor.
Getty and Flickr won't disclose any details about their business relationship, but here's what Flickr has to say about how the finances work for photographers:
Flickr has a business relationship with Getty Images, though we've never publicly discussed the specifics of the deal. Regarding the photographers, Getty Images will be the exclusive distributor of select Flickr members' content, and in turn, Getty Images will facilitate the license of such photography and will pay the royalties directly to the members. This will be a direct relationship between Getty Images and each Flickr contributor.
Flickr photographers will be asked to sign a Getty Images contributor contract, if they agree to have their images licensed for commercial use, that will specify rates for rights-managed and royalty-free royalties, as applicable. Rates for royalty-free imagery are 20 percent; rates for rights-managed (images) are 30 percent. These are directly in line with royalty rates that (Getty's) existing contributors receive.
If you're a fan of comic books, you should also be a fan of the iPhone. Apple's smartphone is home to several neat comic-book apps designed specifically for those who want to enjoy harrowing stories of their favorite heroes in the Digital Age.
I've sifted through the many apps related to comic books and found a handful that you'll want to try out. Whether you're a DC Comics fan or you're partial to Marvel, I think you'll like what you find in these apps.
Get your comic on
Clickwheel Comic Reader if you plan to read comic books on your iPhone, the Clickwheel Comic Reader will be able to satisfy that desire.
When you start using Clickwheel Comic Reader, you'll be able to sift through comic books and find one you want to read. The app doesn't have many of the classics like those you would find from an app like Comics or iVerse Comics (see below), but it does have some comic books you might care about. Either way, the app displays all your favorite content in full color on your iPhone. And since it's free, it's probably worth trying out if you don't mind reading a relatively small collection of books.
If you want to read some comic books, Clickwheel might be your choice.
(Credit: Clickwheel)Comic Envi If you're more into comic strips than comic books, we have you covered too.
With the help of Comic Envi, you can check out some of your favorite comic strips. You can check out old, well-known comic strips, Web-only offerings, and more. You have the option of viewing them in a slideshow or by moving them with your fingers. You can also check out the daily updated strips or some of the titles in the archive. It's a neat utility, but beware that you will need to pay 99 cents to get it.
Check out Comic Strips with the help of Comic Envi.
(Credit: Comic Envi)
Getty Images' Flickr collection is now live.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Getty Images, one of the stock photography powerhouses, has switched on a program by which selected Flickr photographers can license their images to paying customers.
In earlier days of the microstock business, in which photographers license images over the Internet for relatively low prices through sites including Getty's iStockphoto, there was speculation Flickr might jump into the market. After all, there's plenty of good material, and it's often already tagged for easier categorization.
Instead, though, Flickr and Getty announced a partnership in which Getty taps Flickr photographers it believes have potential to sell their photos through Getty. Invitations started going out in January, and now the Getty's Flickr collection is live, Yahoo announced on its blog Tuesday.
One complication, though: many photographers at Flickr offer their images under Creative Commons licenses that permit copying and redistribution of the photos.
According to the Flickr help section on the Getty program, Yahoo switches Creative Commons-licensed photos to all rights reserved if they're submitted to Getty:
Can I sell my Creative Commons-licensed content?
There is a chance one of your Creative Commons-licensed photos may catch the eye of a perceptive Getty Images editor. You are welcome to upload these photos into the Flickr collection on Getty Images, but you are contractually obliged to reserve all rights to sale for your work sold via Getty Images. If you proceed with your submission, switching your license to All Rights Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically.
If you're not cool with that, that's totally cool. It just means that particular photo will need to stay out of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.
Ben Metcalfe launched a discussion of the Creative Commons issue, pointing out that Creative Commons licenses are perpetual.
In response, a Getty Images representative said, "We would never expect anyone to revoke a license. We know that your image is being used with your permission by those who licensed it through CC (Creative Commons), which is why we are placing CC images we choose in RF (royalty-free licensing) only. We couldn't place it in RM (rights-managed) because rights management would not be possible. We came to this so as not to exclude inviting CC images."
As expected, iStockphoto launched its audio clip licensing service, called iStockaudio, on Wednesday.
The move marks another expansion for a site that pioneered the "microstock" business of inexpensive, royalty-free image licensing over the Internet. The company, acquired by stock art power Getty Images in 2006, also offers video, Flash animations, and vector illustrations.
iStock Chief Executive Bruce Livingstone announced the availability of the audio licensing Wednesday in a blog posting. The company has been accumulating audio clips over the last year, and now 10,000 are available.
"You can use our iStock tracks as many times as you like, wherever you like," Livingstone said. "Our tracks include public performance, synchronization, and mechanical licenses."
That means there are constraints on audio contributors, though, who may not be members of various professional organizations.
"iStockphoto has used reasonable efforts to ensure that the suppliers of audio content are not members of any performing rights, mechanical rights or any other similar societies (such as SOCAN, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS, MCPS, SACEM, SDRM, JASLAC, GEMA, etc.) and that no performing rights or other royalties are required to be paid to any such organizations," according to the iStockaudio license agreement.
When a customer licenses an audio clip--the noise of smashing glass or a background melody, for example--the company shares a percentage of the revenue with the contributor of the clip. Licensing fees range from 2 credits for a basic, simple clip to 25 credits for a long, elaborate one; credit costs range from $18 for 12 to $1,900 for 2,000.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--iStockphoto, which helped pioneer the "microstock" market for inexpensive, royalty-free imagery, plans to launch an audio-licensing business Wednesday.
The Getty Images subsidiary already offers photography, illustrations, Flash animations, and video. iStockaudio was a natural extension--one the company's customers had sought, iStock Chief Executive Bruce Livingstone said in a speech here at the User-Generated Content Conference and Expo.
iStockphoto CEO and founder Bruce Livingstone
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)"We're introducing iStockaudio on Wednesday this week," Livingstone said. The company announced the iStockaudio plan last May, but the actual arrival was delayed by a suddenly necessary overhaul to the site's search system, he said.
Initially, the audio service--think background music or the sound of a shattering window--will be available through public beta testing. Interface changes are possible before the final launch, scheduled for the South by Southwest conference that begins March 13.
So far, there are about 10,000 audio clips at the site, Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson said in an interview. "There's a lot of pent-up demand," he added.
Disruptive
iStockphoto, and the microstock industry in general, is an example of what can be done to harness the power of large numbers of people. Many in the traditional stock art business have been displeased that a bunch of amateurs willing to see their work sold for less than $1 a pop are eroding their business. But the hard economic reality is that microstock companies have put images on the market from photographers who are good enough to sell a few images now and again, even if not good enough--or devoted enough--to quit their day jobs.
iStockphoto now has about 65,000 photographers contributing to the site. Because Getty Images went private last year, the company won't reveal its 2008 financial results. The results were better, though, than in 2007, when the company garnered $71 million in revenue and paid contributors more than $21 million for their work.
The company is, of course, a technological phenomenon. It uses the Internet not only to connect large numbers of buyers and sellers, but also to help them view and distribute digital photography. "When iStock really started to take off is when the Canon Rebel came out," making it "affordable to shoot really good digital," Livingstone said.
Getty Images, which has a more traditional rights-managed image-licensing business, has a program to try to recruit new photographers from Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, a partnership Livingstone helped set up.
Ups and downs
Thompson and Livingstone shared some of the ups and downs of their business' history at the conference. The lesson for companies such as iStockphoto that rely on user-generated content: pay close attention to what users and customers are asking for. They were asking for video, for example, and that now accounts for 10 percent of the subsidiary's revenue.
iStockphoto plans to launch its new audio clip-licensing site Wednesday.
(Credit: iStockphoto)The flip side is launching something people haven't asked for. Livingstone had the iStock Forumeter idea, for example. It let people label forum contributors as grouchy crabs, helpful superheroes, comedic clowns, and unconstructive trolls.
"The problem with this is, the community didn't ask for it, didn't want it, and it was too accurate," Livingstone said. "People didn't really want to know how they were seen in the forums. It was a flop. We got rid of it in about 30 days."
Another bad idea: the Buy Request program for setting up custom photography shoots. In the company's core business, "99.99 percent of our sales are done unassisted. This little brainchild was the exact opposite. We had to help customers 99.99 percent of the time. It just didn't work," Thompson said.
The company also has struggled to keep up with growth of its computing infrastructure.
"It's important to be wrong as often as you are right, as long as you learn from the mistakes," Livingstone said. And when things go wrong, it's important to tell your users you're sorry. "Sometimes, the community needs to hear you acknowledge that there was a problem and apologize for it."
Once, the site went down after a truck cut the fiber line to the company's headquarters in Calgary, Alberta. "We did manage to get a check out of the company that supplied the fiber optics. Instead of keeping it, we decided to disburse to the community--the people who would have sold photos. It wasn't a lot--maybe $45,000--but I think people really appreciated the gesture," Livingstone said.
Growth strains
"Mostly, we plan for a reasonable amount of growth. Too much bandwidth is costly, but not enough is a disaster, and we know," Thompson said. "Early in our life, we got a bit behind the curve, and it was tough to catch up."
The company pushes what the MySQL database software can do, but this year, it concluded that it just couldn't handle the site's search operation. So in what was something of an emergency, it rewrote it in the C programming language.
"Our search was failing. We had to put everything on hold, surgically extract search from our Web site, and put it back in," Livingstone said.
Now, though, instead of 30 overtaxed search servers, the company has a single machine handling the chore, with four backup machines to handle potential problems.
The company hopes that new software called Dexter, which lets customers license images directly without using the Web site, will offer further help. A Mac OS X version is in private testing with people who license many images now, and a version running on Adobe's AIR software foundation is under development.
Apparently, it wasn't as easy to launch a microstock site for lower-cost photography sales as Corbis thought it would be.
Corbis, one of the established powers in licensing stock photography, launched SnapVillage in 2007, arguing that the microstock market was still young. But on Thursday, Corbis announced that it will phase out SnapVillage by the end of the year.
Contributing photographers and illustrators, along with customers and existing imagery, will be moved to a new microstock part of Corbis' existing Veer property called Veer Marketplace. Veer, a stock art agency Corbis acquired in 2007, offers both royalty-free and rights-managed imagery.
"We recognize that as the market has rapidly evolved over the past two years, we need a bigger, better offering to achieve success in microstock," Corbis said in a blog post. "In the months ahead, we'll be inviting SnapVillage contributors and customers to Veer Marketplace. Once Veer Marketplace is launched and fully operational, it will become Corbis' only microstock brand."
SnapVillage competes with a host of microstock competitors that arrived on the market earlier. Those include iStockphoto, acquired by Getty Images; StockXpert, acquired by JupiterImages; Fotolia; Dreamstime; and ShutterStock.
When Scrabulous, a popular game on Facebook's developer platform, was shut down earlier on Tuesday because of copyright infringement issues with the manufacturer of the Scrabble board game, word game fans weren't totally left in the dark. After all, Electronic Arts (which handles the digital rights to Scrabble for the game's parent company, Hasbro) had recently created an official beta version of Scrabble for the platform.
Problem is, the servers that were hosting the "real" Scrabble app couldn't handle the load of new migrants, and the application crashed on Tuesday afternoon. Oops!
"We'll be back up shortly," an apologetic error message read. "We're working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!" The game is slated to exit the beta phase in the middle of next month, and some (my colleague Rafe Needleman among them) initially found it to be a better-quality game experience than Scrabulous had been.
But in the wake of a server crash, Facebook users weren't too pleased, as the message wall for the Scrabble application revealed. "Wow, does this suck," one Facebook user wrote. "Why can't you guys work out a licensing deal with the Scrabulous boys? Now we're back to square one and have to go through all of your debugging process."
Well, to be fair, rumor has it that Hasbro put out an acquisition offer for Scrabulous, only to have it rebuffed because its creators thought the amount offered was insufficient.
"Sucks, sucks, sucks," another Facebook user said. "Locks up at 30 percent loading. Sucks. Oh, did I mention it sucks? Get a grip, Hasbro."
Too bad "FAIL" will net you only seven points.
Next week game publisher Electronic Arts will unleash a cleverly packaged marketing device upon masses of hungry gamers awaiting the release of one of this holiday's biggest titles--Spore. The software is a "creature creator" letting players put together 3D characters with an interface nearly as simple to use as Nintendo's Mii maker seen on the Wii. The 300MB download will be available next Tuesday, though some diehard fans and "influencers" got their hands on it last night.
The upcoming game focuses on creating a species and taking it from the microbial stage of life all the way to multi-universe exploration and colonization--a mix somewhere between a science experiment and a game of Risk. The creature creator is the first step in showing potential users what they'll be getting their hands on in just three months time.
What may be more interesting though is how publisher EA has begun to integrate the Web into its latest titles--Spore included. For instance, in this new piece of software you can take pictures of your creation and send them to buddies via e-mail. You can also record video that can be uploaded straight to YouTube--like the clip I created and have posted below. Last year's Skate (also by EA) had similar features, although all of the content was hosted on EA's servers.
Others seem to have taken notice of this trend. Last month Sony integrated YouTube into its developer tools to allow PS3 developers to code in the option to record and upload clips to the popular video host without requiring gamers to leave the couch. Microsoft has also had its own system for letting gamers grab in-game screenshots and have them post it to special mini game sites that are linked up to the user's Live.com ID.
That's not to say EA is letting other companies house all that content though. The creature creator and eventual game will go hand in hand with Spore's official site which launched with limited functionality this past Monday. The company is touting the site as a way to build out your profile and discover other people's creations, but it's essentially a photo gallery full of in-game screen shots and creations people saved.
Sporemail is pictures of your creature captured in-game which can be sent to friends and viewed on Spore.com. Some shots double as character models you can pull into your software and re-tool to make your own.
(Credit: CNET Networks)These photos have an additional use too--you'll be able to drag and drop what you see from other members into your own software be able to play with that same creature. Users will also be able to send creations to third parties to put into things like online comic books, or to print out into a 3D mold. The company is expecting this to lead to people making small changes to their in-game characters, or browsing through other people's creations while away from their home machine. These changes will sync up with their in-game characters the next time they play.
Each user-created creature is also a piece of something larger called SporePedia. Not unlike Wikipedia it's completely sourced and managed by players. They'll be able to upload their creations to the SporePedia with descriptions and bits of game data which will completely searchable both in-game and from the Web. EA is hoping it will provide a way for novice gamers to very quickly discover new creatures created by others, or simply archive what they've made without having to worry about saving it to local storage.
Also thrown into the site are widgets people can put on their blog or social-networking profile that showcase their latest creature creations and an RSS-powered news feed of what your friends have created. The site is currently the only way to view in-game screenshots, which are hosted with ratings, comments, and a tracking system that assigns special badges to popular or featured content.
In the end the creature creator is a far cry from the experience gamers will be getting in September. It's a very svelte game demo that's been packed with Web elements and the start of one of the stronger first-party community sites I've seen.
I really would not be surprised to see more games take advantage of the Web in the coming years, not just for the marketing potential, but for the extra sticking power. March Madness and fantasy sports suck up absurd amounts of time from office workers because the Web has become a gateway to some of the things we do on our off-work hours. There's not much keeping future games from doing the same if they begin to build up what players are able to do while away from their fancy hardware.
Related:
EA unveils 'Spore' tribal phase images, video
'Spore Creature Creator' to see light of day in June
Bomomo is a wonderful Flash-based art application that runs in your Firefox or Safari browser. Instead of giving you some simple MS Paint-like tools like a paintbrush, bucket, and eraser, everything in Bomomo is dynamic and moving, leading to some kaleidoscopic creations that you can either e-mail to friends or squirrel away to your hard drive. I spent about 15 minutes layering effects on top of one another, and while the results aren't nearly as professional looking as SXSW Interactive winner Viscosity (review), if you know what you're doing you can create some really gorgeous abstract creations.
What makes the tool particularly interesting is that each of the 18 drawing tools are tied to your mouse in a different way. Some tools will follow it around, while others do their best to escape your pointer--creating some genuinely gorgeous effects. Some also take advantage of where your pointer is, either changing in size or color based on what part of the screen you're on. It's also just plain fun.
[via Google Blogoscoped]
Create wonderfully distracting art the simple way with Bomomo.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Pixel art has held a special place in the the world of Web 2.0. Most recently it reared its head at Adobe Systems' Engage event earlier this year, where attendees received a poster with pixel art characters using various Adobe products. The poster was professionally designed, but that doesn't mean you've got to go out and buy some special software or take digital art classes to have some fun making your own.
Enter Cubescape, a simple app that gives you some easy-to-use tools to create 3D pixel art on a large canvas. You can drop blocks down one at a time, on top of one another, and even explode them. The app tracks your progress and lets you or others play it back to see what you did, much like some of the fantastic tutorials that come with PhotoShop to show you how people create their digital masterpieces.
See also: Smashing Magazine's roundup of cool pixel art.
[via Delicious]
Create your own tiny and old-school digital masterpieces with Cubescape.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
