imprezzeo

Over the past ten days I’ve had the opportunity to attend industry events in New York and Amsterdam. The PACA (Photo Archive Council of America) conference in New York is one of the major annual events for stock photo agencies and IFRA in Amsterdam is a huge annual exhibition of technology for newspaper and magazine publishers.

PACA is not a big event as measured by attendance - probably 400 delegates or so, but they are the movers and shakers in their industry and they came from all over the world to network and assess the state of business as the global economy continues to wobble on its axis. The stock photo business isn’t likely to be described as a high growth. In fact, some reports say this $2 billion industry may shrink over the next couple of years. There was a fair amount of chatter about how difficult it is to gain online exposure to buyers, typically advertising agencies, designers, and publishers, as there are so many buying choices available these days. There was also much discussion about the perceived consolidation of the industry, with Getty Images and Corbis being the two big boys out to further assert their dominance.

However, I also met many delegates who were optimistic about their businesses and looking forward to introducing new products and services. They were keen to embrace new technologies that will allow them to implement their business plans. And, of course, there were plenty of tech vendors on hand (like us) eager to help them do so. It struck me that, as in other mature industries these days, there is always opportunity for those who embrace change. It’s the companies that spend most of their creative and financial energies trying to protect their franchises that are bound to end up with the short of the stick.

IFRA was a much different sort of affair. Held in the giant RAI exhibition centre and dominated by massive multi-million Euro exhibits of the big technology vendors, there were thousands of visitors. However, attendance was off sharply compared with the past couple of years. Interestingly though, most of the companies that I met with (to discuss partnering deals with Imprezzeo) seemed very pleased with their investment in the exhibition. They told me that, although attendance was down significantly, they didn’t feel they had wasted their money as the quality of the meetings they had was higher and the buyers, despite the economy, were eager to hear about new technology that would allow them to compete.

The big publishing companies who attend IFRA are no doubt fighting for their survival. Nevertheless, they can still reach into their piggy banks to invest in technology that they think will allow them to compete in the new media environment. Mostly this seems to mean products that will allow them to cut internal operational costs, such as Imprezzeo’s Image Search suite, or products that will enable them to publish in a multi-channel mode in real time across print, internet, audio and video.

There is a real revolution underway for old line news organisations, and IFRA provided an interesting peek at the armoury of new weapons at their disposal.

Welcome to Imprezzeo, a new image-based search company. We started this blog to give you an insight into the thoughts of the executives behind the company, and as an outlet for your feedback. My colleagues, Kurt Dressel, our VP of Sales, and Peter Chin, our CTO, will also be contributing in this space, where we will talk not only about our company and technology (as wonderful as they are), but about image search and digital photo markets in general, and other topics that touch on our reason for being here.

So what is our reason for being here?

The 'about' section of the site leads with the phrase "we use text to find text, why not images to find images" and that pretty much explains why we are here. Not using images for the sake of it but because they are more suited to the task of finding 'more like this' than text alone. What better way to search for an image than to provide an example of what you are looking for?

Imagine the art director looking for a particular image for a campaign, a picture desk editor seeking one for a publication or a parent searching for an illustration for a party invitation. Each has a picture in their mind's eye but how do they go about accurately articulating what they are after. More often than not they put a simple search term into whichever source they use and settle in for an afternoon sat in front of a computer screen, wading through page after page of results. Far better we think to search using an example, either from an initial result set, an uploaded picture or indeed your own illustration. That way, the user gets what they want quicker and the search service gets a satisfied user. I expect to revisit this simple yet apparently elusive duality in more detail in future posts.

This is not to say that Imprezzeo's agenda is to eradicate text tagging completely – there is a place for them, for example in describing an emotion in an image. Anger might 'look' very different in images tagged as such. But there is a very real risk that as the corpus of digital images grows and tagging, the currency of pick-up, becomes 'richer' (for that read 'over-tagged'), the search experience deteriorates. I caught up with photo industry analyst Dan Heller while in NYC recently and he suggests that "keyword pollution" as he calls it is directly linked to user exasperation and abandoned search sessions.

Likewise, our message to those in the business of serving up photos, for commercial gain or otherwise, is; check your search logs and the percentage of searches that result in a transaction / download (whatever constitutes a successful search outcome). And what would be the financial impact if you managed to increase that percentage by a few points, bearing in mind there is negligible variable cost here? Check also the search terms used in those abandoned sessions and assess the likelihood of you having that content, and now consider the depressing probability that you had that content the user wanted, its just that they weren't able to find it, or weren't prepared to waste time trying to find it.

Successful retailers obsess about maximizing sales from footfall. Perhaps photo search sites need to be similarly fixated on how they use leading edge technology to improve their user's search experience to then benefit from the upside that site loyalty generates.

Anyway, more on subjects like that to follow. Besides this blog, we have also joined Twitter and will be engaging with the community in many other places as well. Please stay tuned for more links and projects, and we will see you on many of your blogs and groups!

Now, I would like to turn this blog over to you. What are your thoughts on image search as it stands today and what would you like to see from image search technology?

Dinner with some of the guys in NYC	Dermot and Dan with new hardware, post PhotoPlus Expo