| ||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
||
 GETTY AND CORBIS: THE WORLD OF ONLINE IMAGES - BACKGROUND PROFILE Since Mark Getty founded Getty Imagesin 1993, the Seattle company has bought 13 major companies, including Photodisc, Art.com, and most recently The Image Bank and Visual Communications Group—Getty’s largest competitor. Founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Corbis, Bellevue, Wash., has the second largest online photo collection. Its holdings include the Bettmann Archive and the recent acquisition of the leading French photo news company Sygma. While the companies say they provide a valuable service by offering customers access to more than 100 million digital images online, the photo industry is complaining about the consolidation of an industry once dominated by what the Americans call "mom-and-pop" shops, individually-owned small businesses. Jim Pickerell, who publishes the Selling Stock newsletter, estimates Corbis and Getty together represent $500 million in gross sales of an industry that grosses $1.25 to $1.4 billion a year. He questions, however, if Corbis and Getty’s move to transform the industry from an analogue system—where photos were delivered on transparencies—to a digital, Internet-based system is the way to go. "Getty and Corbis are focusing almost exclusively on the online environment and taking what had been analogue businesses and forcing them into [the] online environment at possibly too fast a speed," he said. "They may kill the goose that laid the golden egg in the process of driving it all digital." Getty acknowledges the hurdles it faces in moving analogue customers to its digital system. Bud Albers, Getty’s chief technology officer, said one of the biggest challenges in acquiring the companies and keeping their customers was maintaining the brand while integrating their photography collections into Getty’s online system. Getty purchased some companies, like The Image Bank, for its photographs. It bought Art.com and Photodisc for the technology, Albers said. Integrating the photos into Getty’s online system was the easy part, he said. Educating customers on the new online system takes longer. Aiming to wring more revenues out of its digital assets, in February Getty Images launched gettyworks.com, a dedicated web site for business professionals to use to help them create their own corporate materials and presentations. It is, the company claims, a comprehensive do-it-yourself Web site for creating a wide range of image-rich business communication materials, including reports, newsletters, stationery, Web sites, and Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentations. A recent Harris Interactive poll showed 82 percent of all business professionals surveyed, who use a computer at work and have access to the Internet, believed having professional-looking business materials could give them a competitive advantage. In addition, the same research showed 32 percent of the business people surveyed were spending an average of more than $100,000 a year on design. Further, large businesses were disproportionately spending more -- 50 percent of the large businesses surveyed indicated they spend more than $100,000 a year. In January, Microsoft-owned competitor Corbis announced a company-wide restructure to increase its focus on customer-oriented activities, accelerate the integration of its numerous acquisitions and increase productivity. These steps are aimed at enabling Corbis to create a profitable, all-digital business model while enhancing its position as the global leader in providing a comprehensive suite of photography and other digital content under a single brand. Key elements of the reorganization are a consolidation of redundant functions generated through acquisitions, reduction of analog support activities as new digital platforms are adopted, and the creation of shared services departments to provide a cohesive approach to supporting newly re-aligned market groups: Creative Professionals, Business Communicators and Consumers.A significant result of these changes was the immediate layoff of approximately six percent of Corbis’ 1,300 employees worldwide. Positions eliminated are spread across Corbis offices in New York, Bellevue, Los Angeles and London, and are primarily in marketing, technology and analog operations. (sources: various including Tech Web News and PR Newswire I-TOUCH’S MAGIC CLINCHES DEAL WITH MTN iTouch has clinched a deal with mobile phone network provider MTN which opens up the world of mobile magic to MTN subscribers, and should dramatically expand its leading position in this SA market sector. Previously only Vodacom cellphone users were able to download iTouch’s extensive mobile magic range of ringtones, operator logos, picture messages and group graphics. (source: Boot http://www.boot.co.za/news/apr01/itouch25.asp )
|
|
   
     |
|
|
This page last updated on January 28 2004.
|
|||
