We need your advice! Upload Process

Hey Guys,

We would love your input as we design and build out our bulk uploader.

Can you take a look at these designs and let us know what you think?

http://design.pwsdev.com/cutcaster/upload-page/
http://design.pwsdev.com/cutcaster/upload-page-describe/
http://design.pwsdev.com/cutcaster/upload-page-submit/
http://design.pwsdev.com/cutcaster/upload-page-submit-edit-media-details/
http://design.pwsdev.com/cutcaster/upload-page-submit-completed/

I'd love to hear any and all feedback because we are going this to make the process easier and for you guys ;-)

Thanks

How cool is this? World Wide Telescope

This is going to be great.

There are some pretty nerdy looking kids in the video of the kids react to the WWTelescope. I think one of them looks like Bill Gates from 2nd grade but The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. Think Google Maps and being able to drag around your local maps but now think of it in terms of the universe and the sky. This will help provide context for the universe and open up anyones imagination who looks at it.

Robert Scoble wrote about it over on his blog and gave us the heads up.

Some other things.

1. It’s dedicated to Jim Gray, the Microsoft Researcher who sailed out of San Francisco Bay about a year ago never to be heard from again. He started this project with a paper back in 2002.
2. It runs only on Windows. It’s coded in C#/.NET, you’ll meet the developer in our video and you’ll hear more about that then.
3. It’s free, but only in a private alpha right now. I’m not sure when it’ll be released to the public.
4. There are terabytes of data, all seamlessly integrated for the first time here.

This is really going to be an inspirational tool for children and adults. I can't wait to take a look at it in the Spring of 2008.

Getty Images gets bought by Hellman & Friedman

2.4 BILLION. That's B for billion and 2.4 as in 2.4 billion. That is a hefty sum to pay for this woolley, slow moving mamouth, rich in content though. Getty Images Inc got snapped up today by private equity shop Hellman & Friedman affiliates for $34 per share in cash, in a deal it said was worth $2.4 billion, including the assumption of debt. That is a nice premium to the $1.5 billion everyone thought was the asking price only a month or so back and a premium of 55 percent over their closing price in January. Seems like H&F might have overpaid a bit and I'd love to know how they came up with that valuation but I know that Getty wasn't going to sell themselves for the 1.5 or 1.6 billion, which was the amount dangled in front of their eyes a month back. They have until the second quarter of this year to close the deal which I expect will.

What does this mean for the industry? Well there are going to be some big changes over at Getty which has been in a sink hole the last few years. Everything will still run through the giant image and footage company but I wonder if Jonathan Klein's job will be safe. I doubt it. How much of their workforce will be cut? Probably more than should be but they always have a place at Cutcaster ;-) What changes will be made in strategy and how will the company now report those changes to the people under contract with them? Will H&F be able to turn Getty around and alleviate the uproar photographers under contract with them have been creating?

More to come later ;-) but a fun way to start off the week. If you have any thoughts on the deal lets start a discussion below.

And the winner is...

So this past week Toshiba announced it would discontinue the HD DVD, opening the door for Blu-Ray to become the new high def DVD standard. What a lot of people have been talking about however, and what this CNET article we found through Techmeme does a good job of analyzing, is how online digital video downloads are going to be the true wave of the future. With the advent of Apple TV, cable and satellite video-on-demand services, who is going to go through a costly update of an entire DVD library?

Online Video Advertising...

According to this Techcrunch article, Google AdSense is rolling out a video-based ad placement service. Apparently, "Google is finally opening up the advertising program to any publisher in the U.S. that serves one million or more video streams per month." That's a fairly big threshold to reach so clearly only top-rated streaming sites will be able to participate in the program.

Funny, but one of these sites is Google's very own YouTube, which means the 70 million videos available may begin to feature what are arguably minimally intrusive text/video banners (see the article for some screenshots). It will be interesting to see how this very rapid transformation of the YouTube viewing experience will be taken by its loyal user base. If it's successfully incorporated (which would make it instantly mainstream), then that could mean significant additional revenues for any number of video content sites (including Cutcaster) that find traditional site banners either too annoying or too tacky.

Seeing Machines

I found this over at Robert Scobles blog and thought it was interesting for using in video search, possibly detecting copyrighted content and who is developing the best technology to categorize video online.

Gavin Longhurst, Vice President of Business Development for BigWorld Technology, showed off his new face detection software, called “Seeing Machines,” yesterday at the Stanford University Metaverse Summit, which Robert got to attend. They are preparing to show this technology off at the Game Developer Conference which is in San Francisco next week and we will give you an update when they do.

Get your Photos at Cutcaster - Adobe shutting down its Stock Photo Site

As of April 1, 2008, the Adobe® Stock Photos royalty-free image service will be discontinued. We made this decision in order to focus our efforts in other areas, and we want to share this news with you and let you know how it affects you.

Over the next few months we will be making changes to Adobe Stock Photos. On March 4, 2008, search functionality will be disabled. You will be able to purchase images through our service until March 31, 2008.

So from now on that means you have to get your photos at Cutcaster ;-) or take them yourself.

Anyone know the real reason why they are shutting their doors on stock?

Cutcaster over at Sphred

Take a look and give us a vote after you sign up when you get a chance. Thanks Sphred.

Happy Valentine's Day

I hope everyone is having a great Valentine's day.

Here are some great Videos uploaded by Julien for Valentine's Day.

Here.

And again.

And one last time ;-)

Is 7 bucks what your photo is worth?

Is $7 The Magic Number For Microstock?

February 13, 2008

By Daryl Lang

As Corbis prepares to launch the first ad campaign for its micropayment site SnapVillage this month, the site is in the unique position to answer a vexing question: What's the right price for a royalty-free microstock image?

SnapVillage, unique among microstock sites, lets photographers assign their photos one of five prices ($1, $5, $10, $25 or $50). The hope is that photographers will monitor their sales and settle on the prices that generate the most revenue. (SnapVillage does not charge different prices depending on file size.)

Early figures at SnapVillage suggest the sweet spot is $7.

That's the average price of an individual SnapVillage image so far, according to Adam Brotman, senior vice president of SnapVillage.

Read the rest at PDN.

Let's see how this average sweet spot works out for SnapVillage. I appreciate them sharing the data with the community. Cutcaster will do the same for the betterment of licensing content online and finding the correct market price so both seller and buyers are happy.

I also asked Daryl about the footage market which he responded with this, "I tend to pay more attention to photos than video, since our readership is mostly photographers, but I’m glad to know about your site. I think Shutterstock recently lowered its prices for footage, and I think Getty did the same thing. It’s a really unsettled market right now, kind of where micropayment photos were 3-4 years ago." It's definitely a fragmented and highly segmented market ;-)

Thanks Daryl