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December 20, 2005

Firsts In Innovation

By Bahar Gidwani, CEO of Index Stock Imagery

Over the past fifteen years, the stock image industry has been transformed from a “mom and pop,” manual, low tech, artist-driven industry into a high-tech, marketing-driven, Web-dependent battleground. A driving force in this has been a long string of technical and marketing innovations.
Index Stock Imagery (www.indexstock.com) has been a leading source of these innovations—and one of the beneficiaries of the new and expanded image marketplace they have created. Index was either the first or one of the first companies to introduce more than 30 changes to its industry. This review of its history shows both how different things are today, and indicates how many more new things are probably coming, over the next fifteen years.

 1991. Index was one of the first agencies to implement bar coding of images. Prior to this, images were often labeled in ink, by hand.

 1992. First stock agency to start digitizing images (adopted JPEG as a standard and set the sizes currently used by most of the industry for its image thumbnails and previews).

 1992. One of the first agencies to buy smaller agencies and combine their artists and collections into a larger file.

 1993. First commercially available on-line stock image browser (TeleFocus).

 1994. First agency to convert all in-house image research to on-line approach.

 1995. First agency to release a CD version of a printed catalog.

 1995. First effort to reach lower end image users (Photos To Go—www.photostogo.com).

 1995. First e-commerce-enabled image licensing site (Photos To Go).

 1995. Introduced first ”royalty free” product from a major traditional agency via partnerships with PhotoDisc, Corel, and Digital Stock.

 1995. One of the first to resell through third parties. Signed partnerships to distribute images to the newspaper marketplace, school libraries, and in digital games.

 1996. One of the first to represent other agencies. Eventually agreed to represent images from more than 80 smaller agencies, in its digital system.

 1997. First agency to offer search filters. Allowed customers to easily separate images by orientation (horizontal vs vertical), model release status, and to look at only black and white images or illustrations.

 1997. First agency to offer free screen savers of its images, as a promotional device.

 1998. First agency to offer high resolution, 28MB size, imagedownloading of images to customers.

 1998. First agency to offer narrow search option on its Web site. Allowed customers to do Boolean logic without having to re-learn high school math.

 1999. First agency to sell advertising space on its sites.

 2000. First agency to purchase inbound advertising for its sites.

 2000. One of the first agencies to outsource scanning, overseas.

 2001. One of first agencies to accept digital camera files from artists, including RAW files.

 2001. First agency to offer “royalty free” and ”rights managed” images on the same search.

 2001. First photo subscription product from a major stock agency. For less than $100, a WebSpice (www.webspice.com) user got both 2 million pieces of clip art AND access to more than 40,000 thumbnail-sized images.

 2001. First agency to offer custom postcard production on a site.

 2002. First major agency to start offering image management services to large corporations.

 2002. First agency to offer custom brochure production tools on its site. With this tool, users could select the images, fonts, and write text for a two page to six page brochure, all on line. They could then have the printed and delivered directly to them.

 2003. Second major agency to publish an anonymous UDDI access method to its search engine to encourage the development of photo-based applications.

 http://webservices.indexstock.com//ImageSearch/2003/07/15/imagesearch.asmx

 2003. First agency to offer a Mac version of its site. With a single click, a Mac user can get a “chrome” version of the site that conforms to standard Mac look and feel.

 2003. Second major agency to offer a Web Services interface to its library. This interface allows anyone in the world to access Index’s library of images. Of course, the interface includes appropriate controls for protecting the library, including automatic watermarking of images, for anonymous users.

 2004. First agency to offer cell phone photo wallpapers on a site (see www.photostogo.com).

 2004. First high-resolution subscription from a major rights managed agency (Index Open—www.indexopen.com).

 2004. First US agency to implement PicScout image rights infringement search technology.

 2004. Second photo agency CEO blogger (www.dimdump.com).

 2005. First daily photo offering based on Web Services (Daily Photos To Go). Now, anyone who has a personal Web site or blog can spice it up with a high quality photo. Index’s Daily Photos To Go delivers a fresh new image each day via an easy-to-add Web Services-driven interface. There are already 30 different image topics available, and more on the way.

There are also a couple of things where Index is last, such as:

 Still no voice mail—you always talk to a human being!

 Still accepting physical images from artists. Even prints, if we have to!

 Still don’t own any images.

These are things that Index is proud of—especially the final point. Through all of the changes both in its industry and itself, Index has tried to remain focused on the needs of its artists. By doing so, it hopes to continue finding innovative ways to grow and improve its business, and to continue offering a diverse and exciting array of images, to its customers. It also hopes to keep having fun, finding new ways to market images and to change its industry.

Posted by Pat at December 20, 2005 07:17 PM

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