Design and Photography Highlights

I ran into this company today and it seemed to solve a lot of issues that contributors run into when uploading photos on the internet in bulk. From the website, Stock Photo Express is software that makes it easy to manage your stock portfolio, associate IPTC/XMP data with your images, and batch upload them to selected microstock photo agencies.

Features of Stock Photo Express

• Write IPTC data (e.g., image title, description, keywords, copyright) into image files

• Account for the status of each image

• Copy and paste IPTC data from one image into another

• Multithread upload of your images to selected stock agencies

• Schedule uploads

• Add any microstock agency which supports FTP uploading

• Status accounting for each image

• Metadata search in your images

As we know at Cutcaster, this takes a lot of time and could be a great product to save you some time. Let us know what your experience is with software like this.

Stock Photo Express

We got some fantastic news this weekend. For the last month, we have been preparing for our presentation/pitch to InSITE. InSITE is an entrepreneurial mentorship program that brings together the best and brightest students from Columbia and NYU Business and Law schools to support New York entrepreneurs in the development of their businesses and pursuit of venture capital and angel investments. They select 5 NYC based startups to help each semester out of a large pool of candidates and we were selected as 1 of the 5. Gooo Cutcaster!!!

InSITE fellows meet with these companies over a three-month time period, providing consulting services that include:

* Overall Business Review
* Business Plan and Exec Summary Analysis
* Business Model Analysis
* Pitch/Presentation enhancement and Story Practice
* Management Review & Recommendations
* Strategic Analysis (timing, competition, and alternatives)
* Deal Analysis (including valuation potential)

We are really excited to be working with InSITE and Vikram, our team leader. It will be interesting to see these students take on the licensing world we are in and what business models are the best to pursue. We also get a chance to meet with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who have asked to set up a meeting between our two companies. At the end of the semester we get to pitch Cutcaster to a room full of Venture Capitalist and Angel Investors so it is very exciting. I can’t wait to have InSITE on board and have to thank Molly Siems (she made the introduction), Hugh Dornbush and Kyusik Chung, who all three are on the InSITE board and really helped us along throughout the process..

I’ll keep everyone updated on how it is going

Cutcaster offers royalty free images, stock photos, stock footage and stock photography for advertising, publishing or web design.

Last night, I was invited to a pretty cool screening of The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon starring in a role as a pedophile reentering society. Culture Catch presented another movie screening in their Film Salon Series. If you haven’t seen the movie or heard about it, it’s a powerful but I thought a bit slow at times. Bacon does a great job bringing this difficult role to the little screen. After the movie, Kevin spent about 30 minutes speaking about the role and how he got into character and dealt with playing the role. You can check out some of the footage over on Culture Catch.

I went to the screening with my friend, Sabine Anton, who is an internationally renowned film producer and news documentarian and was nice enough to invite me. She has worked in New York for the past 10 years for Europe’s largest Television network RTL and does some really great work now bringing peoples’ lives and biographies to life over at “Your Life on Film.” Check it out.

CNET is reporting that video sharing site Revver is trying to sell itself for $300-500k, a pretty crappy price given its total funding of $12.7M. As most of you know already, Revver is a video sharing site that shares advertising revenue with its content creators. It also appears that Revver is in over a million dollars of debt and over half its staff has left.

According to TechCrunch, the company has had no luck finding a buyer even at such a low offering price. Both LiveUniverse, a “network of entertainment Web sites”, and Microsoft’s Soapbox (i.e. MSN Video) have considered buying Revver but neither has bitten.

Is Revver about to dance its swan song? Say it ain’t so, Joe. It’s never nice to see other’s fail and we are sorry to hear about this but please let us know if anyone has any information.

Would you rather share your work with others or do you want to license it to them? What drives you more? Getting some notoriety or getting some money? How can you do both at the same time?