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.