one, two, three..any one else ?

October 3, 2008 by pmelcher.

One idea, three companies. On the trail of the aggressive Gumgum and the smart Picapp, comes Fotoglif. The Canada base start up offers the same time of service as the two others, while it is not clear how. It is free to register, free to post. Somewhere in the equation, there are ads which are supposed to be shared 50/50 with the creator of the image. Or the agency. Since I do not see ads on the image below, I presume its the ads on their website. Nevertheless, Getty, Reuters and Splashnews have already submitted their images and more are to come.

Once again, like Picapp or the deceiving GumGum, it is nothing more than a technology platform aggregating images they do not own or create for the sake of  worldwide bloggers. Not sure who needs that. Agencies can certainly create the same technology internally ( surprised that Getty hasn’t already launched it) and bloggers couldn’t care less if they steal or not, as most of them use the “fair use” to get away with plainly stealing.

Finally, licensing images is a dying industry in its current form. It doesn’t make much sense for third party companies to concentrate on such a limited and cumbersome  model and picking up little scrap of pennies. It is going to soon obvious that there is no room for technology companies to wiggle in, not in between the agencies and their clients at least.

Fotoglif should soon come out with a press release which should help us know more about their plan .

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