No Deal(s)......for now

We've reached an impasse regarding any merger or acquisition deal(s) of which I spoke about in my last blog post.

So, with those discussions behind us, it is back to business as usual at CI. We are driving full steam ahead adding our editorial video application, news ticker and expanded assignment board features.

It's been amazing to see all of the inspiring images crossing through our editing queue in the past several months. Keep em' coming, we are closing in on over 8000 approved images uploaded within the past month!

In the mean time, keep those cameras at the ready.

Called Out

I just got called out by one of our most prolific celebrity photographers, HughE Dillon for not updating our blog in over a month. When your right your right HughE. You can check out some of HughE great works here. HughE always seems to find himself around the celebrity action!

What have we been up to since we closed our partnership deal with Fotolog? One bit of news is as we announced our partnership deal with Fotolog, they announced they were being acquired by a French concern for a "large amount". Congrats to Adam, Rachel, Andrew and the rest of the folks at Fotolog! well deserved.

We have also finalized a deal with a "major distribution platform" to further our reach in maximizing your images when submitted to CI. We'll have the press release out on this in the coming weeks.
I can tell you, this platform is being used by the likes of Reuters, Getty AFP and other large media agencies looking to syndicate their quality content across many media outlets, so we are jazzed to have this deal signed.

Another bit of very, very interesting news is we've been approached about being acquired ourselves. We were approached about a month ago initially. Before we had time to mull this offer, we were approached by another media concern to act as the UGC platform to power all of their media properties from a user generated content perspective. Exciting times to be sure. So what we're going to do is take a deep breath, gather the troops and talk through the possibilities, strengths and weaknesses of each pending offer. Being part of a larger concern brings great possibilities......being part of a larger concern brings about great concern. More news to come on that in the coming weeks.

We'll keep every one posted on our on going progress regarding events, partners, acquisition discussions and added features.

In the mean time keep your camera at the ready!

Fight or Flight

We had our fourth NY Citizen Journalism meetup and the sparks flew.

It seems Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, took a very dim view of having his thoughts on UGC challenged. So much so he decided to "leave" the meetup.

John Eischeid who was in attendance took the liberty of chronicling in his blog the chain of events that led to Andrew deciding to flee the meeting.
You never know what will happen at one of our meetups. We now have over 100 members, all with very passionate views on the state of UGC at work in the main stream. We encourage any one in the tri-state area interested in the UGC industry to join and attend our next meeting.

OK. What have we been up to of late? This past month of July has been a whirl wind of activity.

Here are a few of the key partnerships we put the finishing touches on:

The first partnership is with Ground Report where photographers can seamlessly upload images to the Citizen Image platform for marketing and sale. You can read all about this deal here.
We'd like to thank Rachel for all of her hard work in driving this deal home.

Secondly, we have signed a distribution agreement with Mochila. This allows us to broaden our market by opting in our images for sale via the Mochila marketplace. We went live two days ago. We are very much looking forward to working closely with the Mochila team.

And thirdly, we have signed a large content distribution deal with Fotolog. Fotolog represents 287 million images with over 10 million active photographers. With this executed agreement, Fotolog photographers will now be able to opt in their images for marketing and sale via the Citizen Image platform. In addition, and this is the really exciting part of this deal. All Fotolog photographers will be able to respond to our Assignment Board requests which we will posting on Fotolog's Fotohunt section. This feature enables our image buyers to post an assignment and have almost immediate fulfillment of their image requests. This is powerful!

We have a number of deals we are looking to put the finishing touches on with the likes of cell phone handset manufacturers, social media sites and photography sharing sites. We hope to have a number of these deals signed soon. In the mean time if you would like to partner with us drop us a line here.

In the mean time it's back to the salt mines!

Corbis' Microstock Offering

Corbis came out with their microstock offering this week. Is this offering to little to late? Did they build a better mouse trap? Should they have bought an existing company instead of spending seven months re-inventing the wheel? In my mind they seem to be a date late and a dollar short.

I was reading Thomas Hawks blog this morning. I think he sums up very well UGC offerings such as Citizen Image and Zooomr vs the large "image" players of the world. Is an image of a sunflower on Getty really worth $300 when an image of a sunflower for sale at Citizen Image is $20-$60. We'll let you the readers and art buyers decide.

I mentioned a few weeks ago we've been working on putting the final touches on a few key partnerships.

We are pleased to announce to all Citizen Image photographers, that you will now be able to seamlessly import all of your images from Google Picasa to Citizen Image for sale! You'll no longer have to upload your images to both platforms. Log on to your CI account, go to your home page and you will see a Google Picasa tab. Click on the tab and follow the instructions.

We are also working on a number of deals involving thirty image sharing and social networking sites which will allow their users to opt in content for sale via the Citizen Image platform. We're confident that by this time next week we will have add'l key announcements, so stay tuned.

Don't forget to check out our assignment board. There are a few plum assignments from national magazines that need your great shots for use on their covers.

Citizen Image, Empowering the new mass media.

What's with the CEO at Zooomr?

Just reading Valleywag. It seems our man at Zooomr was raging drunk(2 bottles of wine) yesterday on a discussion board with some of the members of flickr?! What up with that? I guess Zooomr is being accused of stealing and replicating flickr code. Stealing code and Zooomrs's site is still not working right, yeeesh. They'll figure it out.........moving on.

Two weeks ago we had the pleasure of meeting Alan Meckler at a little coffee shop on the upper east side. It was quite illuminating to speak with an icon in the image business and get his take on the state of the state regarding UGC, RF, RM, images and 2.0 in genreral. We also discussed living through 1.0 and some of the wacky start-ups that were getting funded and are no longer with us, ah good times.

Some of our upcoming announcements in the coming weeks will revolve around Picasa, Ground Report, and our good friends over at a "large" photo sharing site. Keep your eyes peeled for these upcoming announcements!!

And for petes sake keep those cameras at the ready to capture the next UGC editorial image!!!

Citizen Image, empowering the new mass media.

Citizen Image UGC Wire Service

Another great week here at CI albeit a short one.

We have signed a number of great partnerships over the past nine months and are on track to sell more newsworthy images this quarter than in any of our past Q's.

We are jazzed by the forward momentum and the on going adoption by tradional media outlets in embracing/purchasing timely UGC editorial images.

With that said, we are entering a pivotal moment in our eveloution. Our goal and focus long term has always been to develop the first UGC wire service. This morning we took a GIANT step forward in executing on this idea!

I can't give to much detail on our meetings over the past weeks, but this morning all of our past efforts culminated in an audience with fifteen of the largest media players in one room.

Suffice to say, It is my hope in the coming two weeks we will have an important annoucement to make regarding our UGC Wire Service efforts.

Again, we thank all of our contributors for their on going support, recommendations, and fantastic images. We stand in awe of your photographic talents and ability to capture news events as they happen long before local media has time to arrive. Keep up the great work!

Meetup on Citizen Journalism

Forgot to mention we had a good write up in Killer Startups

On Wednesday we had our 2nd Citizen Journalism meetup. There were a number of no shows due to the crazy storm we had in NYC, never the less we had a lively debate, discussion and outcome from the members who attended.

The moderators this week were Mike Myers from Nowpublic, Jason Breed from Neighborhood America. and Pancho Bernasconi from Getty Images. Plenty of lively debate revolved around our topics which covered editorial bias, monetization of content, and business strategy around UGC. I want to thank every one for their active participation. We look forward to a larger turn out for our June Meetup.