July 10, 2008 by pmelcher.

As per a press release of today : “Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq: OTEX; TSX: OTC), a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software, has acquired eMotion LLC from Corbis Corporation of Seattle, Washington. Open Text purchased the division for approximately US $5 million, net of cash and assets, effective July 2, 2008.eMotion is a provider of hosted business applications for managing digital media assets and marketing content. eMotion is headquartered in Seattle and has an office in Rockville, Maryland.

Corbis acquired eMotion, Inc. of San Francisco, California for an undisclosed amount in July 2005.

Corbis is a visual media provider for the creative community, licensing the widest array of award-winning contemporary, historical and entertainment photography as well as extensive collections of acclaimed illustration and footage.

Waterloo, Ontario based Open Text is a leading provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software solutions. It offers a wide range of ECM products that help its customers ensure compliance with industry regulations and internal policies, controlling information flows, and helping solve other content-intensive business challenges. Open Text currently employs approximately 2,700 people worldwide.”

end of press release.

credit Techfinance.com

In 2005, Scott Wilson, CEO, eMotion said : “Corbis and eMotion’s services are a natural complement,”

Mmm. I guess not. At least not long term.

“Our clients are increasingly seeking ways to manage the still and moving imagery they use in their creative projects,” said Mark Sherman, about the deal, senior vice president of assignment & representation and emerging businesses at Corbis, at the time.

I  believe he got fired since.

One year later Business Week Magazine added ( 2006):
“A year ago, finishing off a year when revenue rose 20%, Corbis’ leaders confidently predicted that they would turn the company profitable. That didn’t happen. Instead, organic revenue growth slowed to 4%, though overall growth topped 34%. The total take was $228 million, thanks to the company’s mergers and acquisitions spree. (Getty Images grew 17.9% to $733.7 million, mostly organically, and pulled in $150 million in profits.)”
Ouch !!

the  same article continues:
“Corbis’ acquisition spree was partly aimed at placing bets in emerging markets. For instance, last July the company bought eMotion, a provider of hosted digital-asset management software. Yet image licensing remains a dominant part of its business. To boost profit potential, Corbis is beefing up its own collections and the custom-photography service, which involves assigning photographers to capture images. “end of Business Week Magazine quote.
You remember that guy from Star Wars Episode I ?  The Rasta guy with the tongue sticking out after being caught in the electric field of  Anakin’s pod racer ( do i sound like a geek right now?) ?

Well, whatever his name is, that is the Corbis management right now: tongue sticking out saying : blabadabaaaadabadaaaaa. Bladaabadaaaaaaaaaa.aaaaaaaaa.

Corbis ex- CEO, Steve Davis said, according to the Corbis press release, at the time: “In 2005 we doubled our global footprint ( How the hell do you double a footprint ? With bigger feet ?)  and rounded out our content and service offering. As a result we are the only company in the industry with the ability to provide comprehensive solutions—great content, the rights to use it, and the ability to manage it.”

And  I should add, big feet …

Shouldn’t someone have smelled E-Motion footprint at the time,because, apparently, it smelled bad. Certainly, not the sweet smell of success.

By the way, how much is a “footprint” going for these days ? 1 dollar a footprint ? what the hell is a footprint in photography ?

Gaaaaaaaaary ? any idea ? where is Gary anyways?

There he is (or was):

British Journal of Photography july 4th 2007, reports ( almost exactly a year ago):

“Days after taking on his role, Corbis’ new CEO has slashed 160 staff in 17 offices worldwide.

Gary Shenk took over from Steve Davis on Monday (02 July 2007), but the decision to cull 15% of the company’s workforce was announced late last week. The job losses are as a result of a three-month strategic review, led by Shenk and his management team, which is driven by the ambition to pull Corbis into profitability for the first time.”

and probably out of the “footprint” business.

the article continues :

“Corbis is also to sell its Digital Asset Management (DAM) division, which currently manages media libraries for large corporations. The service, which was officially launched only last summer (BJP, 16 August 2006), came about after the acquisition of eMotion in 2005. Like the Assignment Division, it has been performing well, says Perlet, and has won 25 new customers in the last 12-18 months.”

I guess ( actually, I know) Corbis hates, just painfully and  physically hates, anything that performs well.

E-Motion:

Bought in 2005,

analyzed in 2006,

destroyed in 2007,

sold in 2008.

Welcome to the club, dude.

Corbis  does it, again

Posted in Canada, technology, commercial stock, multimedia, No sense, corbis, transaction, finance, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

June 10, 2008 by pmelcher.

We are getting there..slowly.  It is not an easy road, but we are getting closer.  In the last year or so, we have seen more and more image search companies come out and expose themselves. Even the even mightiest, and certainly the worst, Google Image is thinking about changing its algorithm.

The holy grail is, of course, the end of the keyword based search ( aaaargh !). The first baby step we are currently seeing only focuses on face recognition. For two main reasons :

- A face is always a face, a triangle between two eyes and a mouth, and rather easy for a computer to recognize.

- Between celebrities and relatives, when you deal with image search, the majority of people are looking for either friends, relatives, themselves or more pix of celebrities . There is a huge market.

So here goes many worldwide software engineers claiming image search nirvana. At least when looking for people. I have tested a few, recently, all in Beta and none quite there yet.

TinEye: In a league of it own right now as it does much more than just face recognition image search. Probably the most advanced of all,  its limitation is its extreme accuracy. Looking for an image and it will find that image, nothing less, nothing more. Every altered version of it. Great for many, many usages, but a bit limited for those just seeking a similar or inspiration.

Very far away are :

- Polar Rose. Swedish based, it has been full of promises for many years but with disappointing result up to now. Also starting in the face recognition, its algorithm just became clear to me when it recently invited me to Beta test its Plug in. I was expecting a TineEye sort of plug in, but instead, they put me to work. What is up with that ? .

The plug in works like this : every time you are on a web page, it scans every image for a face. It then puts a square around the face and asks you to put the name. As you enter the name, it starts suggesting options. It was always right on the money. At first, I was really impressed, as in ” How does it know ?”. And briefly later on, I recognized the trick. It scan any available text around the image, looks for two words next to each other starting with a capital letter and assumes that should be the name of the person in the pic. All I have to do is confirm. Thus, Polar Rose is currently no more than an elaborate and free version of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Putting the community to work. While there nothing wrong, in principal, with this approach, with all these website these days that ask for my free input, I am close to putting full 24 hours days of work, for free.

Their chances of success, using that approach, is minimal. I, for one, will not become a slave to the machine.

- Picollator : Russian by birth, this new image search also looks for faces. You can even upload a sketch and it will try to match it. I tried with this image :

surprisingly got no result.  So I went for the TinEye favorite, the Mona Lisa:

.

I got this :

Some matching results, some very weird ones.

Face recognition and matching can be a very useful tool for the news and celebrity world as photographers and editors could quickly edit film with proper name spelling by scanning the web for matching results. Especially for those B to D celebrities. It is, at this stage, still very sketchy and not quite ready for the big time.

It is also a good indication of how far we still are from a computer recognizing, properly, everything in an image. Right now, we are only scratching the matching part and even that, has it flaws.

It is also very important to know that all these sites are in Beta, meaning far from claiming 100 % accuracy and should not be dismissed until officially proven ineffective. You can try all of them, for yourself :

Tineye

Polar Rose

Picallotaor

Posted in Canada, technology, idee, celebrity, keyword, web 2.0 | Print | 1 Comment »

May 9, 2008 by pmelcher.

First, I have to admit I have always been a big fan of everything that comes out of the Ideeplex in Toronto. These guys have the best image tracking system I have ever seen, PixId, already used by the top photo agencies in the world to save countless hours in their billing process. They have a visual search that is incomparable and might just be the secret weapon of the Alamy armada. They also have a color search that is the most proficient out there . You can see and play with all of them in their lab section. These guys are doing for photography what Einstein did for physics, making it progress by leaps and bounds. If you are not using one of Idee’s services these days, you  have a big problem.

So when Idee announced the beta version of their image search earlier this week, called TinEye, I could not wait to play with it. Premise is simple: Take an image that you either upload or find on a website and ask Tineye to  seek any place it is published. That would seem simple enough, but Tineye will also find that image, wether its been cropped, resized, re colored, twisted, bended, you name it. Even with major (and we are talking major) alteration, Tineye will find it. Alterations that would make a human eye miss it. Impressive. very impressive.

That image:

brought up this image, among many others:

Because it is still in Beta, the results are not impressive in numbers. They have only indexed half a billion images and are in the process of indexing the rest. Hey, Google was not built in one day either. If you live near Toronto, you probably can see the smoke coming out of the Ideeplex. It’s those server crunching data under the watchful eyes of master genius CTO Paul Bloore. Or could it be from CEO Leila Boujnane head, fuming with impatience because it is not finished yet ?

I played with many different types of images, using the cool Firefox plug in that lets you perform a search without leaving the site you are visiting.Hard to stop and I know I will continue to use it intensively.

So what it is good for ? Well, for one, speaking of Orphan Work, this image search engine that could will find all usage of an image, including, very certainly, the owner of the image.  It is going to much, much harder to claim that an image is orphan with this guy. But it can do much more. Think of all those micro and midstock  photographers who would love to see where their images have been used. Same with those CC happy Flickr members. Pro photographers will be able to keep a watchful eye over their agencies, as well as agencies can keep a watchful eye for unauthorized usage (Picscout, beware ).

There are many other potential for this free image search which suddenly puts google image into the medieval ages. And it will be a pleasure to watch and grow and mature. There is no doubt this will be one of the biggest success of the internet in recent years. Because people are fed up of searching for images with text. It just doesn’t make any sense. This is just the beginning of the end of keywording, the fall of the controlled vocabulary despotism.

Tineye returns exact matches, for the time being, and that is  maybe its most important shortcoming. It will return the same exact image and not similar. But knowing these guys, that will not last long, and the option to return images that look like the image you are using shouldn’t be that far.

If you have a chance, jump on this as soon as you can. They are taking suggestions and I am sure would love to hear your. It is time to make history . ( oh no, I sound like Obama now…)

Either way, these guys have a reputation: If it is not perfect, its not finished. So, do not expect them to open Tineye to the public before every little crumb of image is properly indexed.

Posted in idee, Canada, technology, copyright, license, editorial, web 2.0, Search, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

April 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

 Ever since I wrote the piece “orphan work is good for you”, I have been slammed with emails which all pretty much revolved around the same issue : Orphan work bill is a open door for Copyright Infringement and the legalization of free usage.

First and foremost, I keep on refering my readers to a very concise and readable link created by the Copyright Office . In no way do they propose or would facilitate free usage. It is not their intend. It is also quite admirable that they have, and will continue to hold hearings  to listen to all and everyones concerns.

But the most important, to me, is to see that Canada has had a Orphan Work bill in effect since 2005. Quite effective, it requires the potential user of an Orphan image, after proving its good faith in researching the copyright owner,  to be granted a license by the Copyright office. It has happened  only 19 since  then. Granted, Canada is not as big as the United States, but 19 is almost not worth a second look.

Furthermore, the Canadian law leaves 5 years after the license has been granted for the owner to retrieve his/her license. It is still early to see if this provision has ever been used by anyone.

The copyright office, and any all serious image licensor know very well that technology can be a very serious ally in copyright protection. Regardless of any petition and whining, the bill WILL pass.

As said before, It will be a great  incentive for everyone to respect metadata more seriously  and for the photo industry to finally grow up.

Posted in idee, Canada, focus, technology, copyright, license, web 2.0, keyword, IPTC, law | Print | No Comments »

March 7, 2008 by pmelcher.

Make a pinhole camera: Corbis, the company we love to pick on, has posted a really nice paper project for your week end. Called the ReadyCam, It is a set of instructions that let you build your own cool pinhole camera. Someone at Corbis marketing has brains. Try it here: ( click on any image)

Give yourself a face lift: Toronto ( again, the Canadians!!) based company ModiFace, Inc. just launched a website where you can make appropriate adjustments to see how you would look after plastic surgery on your face.

Founded in 2007 by University of Toronto professor Parham Aarabi, ModiFace Inc. utilizes advanced computer vision and image processing algorithms to visualize different facial operations including plastic surgery, facial aesthetic treatments and hairstyle changes. ModiFace’s patent-pending technologies empower consumers to redefine their images by automatically visualizing face enhancements, treatments and modifications.

You can redo you face, for free, here: liftmagic

Posted in technology, lens, Canada, multimedia, prosumer, corbis | Print | No Comments »

January 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

“By posting user content to any part of the site, you automatically grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence … to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such user content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise. … Facebook does not assert any ownership over your user content.”

 CBC.CA, the Canadian news website, has a great story about Facebook. I a nutshell, it explains, with a recent example, that any image that you upload to you Facebook account can be used without your authorization, for free, anywhere . And unlike the tricky option of Creative Commons, Facebook does NOT grant you a choice. It is all or nothing.

Which is fine if you are posting a mugshot of yourself so your buddies can see you griming face. But what happens if you upload, on your profile, an image of Britney Spears you lifted from Wireimage that you found on the People.com website ? or like Fotolia, you create a profile on Facebook, suddenly allowing Facebook to license your images for free. Well, according to the EULA, it can now be distributed freely around the world . Not good.

CBC.CA example shows images used for news purpose and the Canadian law that allows for such “fair use”.  It is understandable that a site such as Facebook, or Flickr, cannot worry about licensing rights on everything that is posted on their site. It would be an impossible task. But to take full licensing rights by default is a bit extreme, no ?

So photographers and photo agencies beware : Before you create a member page on one of these web 2.0 social site, please read the EULA correctly.

Posted in license, Search, copyright, Canada, technology, keyword, web 2.0, news, law, transaction, flickr, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

December 18, 2007 by pmelcher.

From Canada, again. Seems like every thing good or innovative in photography these days is coming from Canada (istockphoto, Veer, Idee, Zymmetrical, ….) . The TV channel and website CBC ( Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ) has posted an interview of uber-humanitarian and extremely talented photographer Marcus Bleadsale.

You can, and you should ( it’s an order ),  view it here:

Marcus, for those who might not know, is the new member of the VII photo agency and recipient of many, many awards. However, as much as he appreciates the attention of his peers,  he would much rather people do something about the situation he photographs. In a way, he would love being out of a job.

I had written an entry about Marcus a while back.

Via Mediastorm’s blog ( another site you have to visit)

Posted in idee, magazine, Canada, mediastorm, multimedia, editorial, photojournalism, news | Print | No Comments »