Beginning with 1990s, multinational super-agencies dominated stock photography industry. Getty Images and Corbis are the leading corporations of the industry by bringing together new licensing models, digital media management tools and a comprehensive offering of creative and editorial imagery, microstock, footage and music. Therefore, it is more accurate to call it visual content industry instead of stock photography in the digital era. Both based in Seattle, Washington, Getty Images and Corbis distribute their products online and they have customers in more than 100 countries around the world; most of their sales come from outside the United States.

In order to have a better idea about the expansion of the industry, I will particularly examine the market leader Getty Images and its major acquisitions beginning with its foundation from 1995.

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Illustration by Matthew Hodson

The Economist (October 25^th – 31^st) published an interesting report on corporate IT and global cloud computing (look at “In this special report “on the right of the page for more). According to Ludwig Siegele, The Economist’s technology correspondent, nowadays it is easier for companies, especially start-ups, to try new applications since they can easily buy a server service and not to worry about space and installation. The report estimates that in four years, the number of servers will increase by 10 million worldwide. Siegele believes that many companies will move into the cloud as a way to save money, since the IT infra-structure is very expensive, and the server can be shared. However, he emphasizes that there will always be reasons to not move, such as regulatory and privacy issues.

Posted by Hanson Hosein:

I’m sitting in the boardroom with the top editorial staff of the Seattle Times. I was asked to “scare them” silly about the future of news.

“It is a different world,” Frank Blethen, the newspaper’s publisher, has just declared. And he says he’s ready to embrace it.

Even as the Times has been slow to embrace digital technology, despite its vaunted geographic location, I like their community-minded, independent approach to survival during this bloody media revolution (see the other Seattle’s newspaper vicious riposte today to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer declaration of the death of print media).

I’ve given this talk several times over the last 10 days: to the Dean of Medill Journalism School, to the Public Relations Society of America, and to our own MCDM constituents.

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posted by brian

Last night I decided to seek out one of my former bass teachers, Andrew Pouska, to discuss my recent purchase. Andrew is also the best bass teacher I ever had and I wanted to reconnect. After executing a simple Google search, I found this site he has created: www.studybass.com. WOW! Read more…

Game industry website next-gen.biz posted an interesting (and oh so timely & relevant) article last week examining the effect of social media on the industry. We’re seeing the beginnings of big name game developers like Bungie (Halo) or Lionhead (Fable) tap into the social networks in “an industrial application of fanboy fervor”.

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posted by rebekah

LiveNewsCameras.com, a Fox news experiment in new media, hosts live news feeds from broadcast news stations around the world. Users can sign in and participate in a live chat (responding to a news event, asking questions, etc). A moderator (seen via webcam) keeps an eye on the news feeds as well as the chat room. As events happen, she mentions the event and the associated news feed verbally, on chat, and on twitter.

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Posted by Rebekah Peterson

I just ran across the poll Do Web 2.0 solutions solve problems only the tech elite have? on Lifehacker.com asking readers if Web 2.0 serves only to solve the problems of the tech elite. The current results are: 31.7% say “yes,” 35.9% say “sometimes,” and 21.1% say “no.” I was surprised that 31.7% said “yes,” especially since Lifehacker’s core audience seems to be tech literate. It seems as if they would be more interested in participating in social media and would have an easier time citing the value of these platforms for their non-techy friends.

The comments from readers are also interesting, some voice similar points to what we have discussed in class and represent a spectrum of opinions, but most voice a philosophy of trickle-down technology: the “tech elite” test out the technology and then the general public adapts the social media that is successful and useful.

Some really interesting news today from the Web 2.0 Expo.

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/

“This is about making Yahoo! social in every dimension. Social is not a destination — it’s a dimension and it will infuse all aspects of a consumer’s experience on the Web.” ~Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh

What do YOU think this means? Is it defense? Hype? Revolution?

~Carie