2009 March | Design and Photography Highlights

Photographer Makeover with Jack Hollingsworth

Mar 192009

Jack Hollingsworth is putting together a ‘photographer makeover’ for any interested shooters down in Austin, Texas, on April 29-May 3. I’m sorry that I won’t be there but the five day jam-packed sessions will include all things web 2.0, as it relates to pro shooters. multimedia. digital cinema. social web. personal branding. recession marketing. Plus you get to hang out with Jack which is worth the price of admission alone.

I don’t have the address to Jacks’s blogsite, I think that link could be it but maybe Jack can add it in below, but his blog will be live and contain more juicy info within the next 7-10 days. He can only accommodate 60 folks so check it out soon if you are interested. If you’re a pro shooter and hungry to learn how to use web 2.0 tools, techniques and technologies to redefine and reinvent your brand and business it will be worth it to learn more about this event.

Email Jack at jack@jackhollingsworth.com.
www.jackhollingsworth.com
CONTACT:
512-320-0803/tel
512-320-0804/fax

Introducing two new ways to buy images and vectors at Cutcaster

Cutcaster How To, Cutcaster Payment Options 3 Responses »

Mar 112009

Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco March 11th, 2009

Cutcaster, the world’s first untapped source of user generated images and vectors that can be securely licensed through it’s dynamic marketplace, announced the release of two new ways to purchase photos and vector illustrations. Cutcaster Corporate Accounts and Cutcaster Credits will empower buyers, reward them with deep discounts and make licensing royalty free images and vectors organized and cost effective. These new payment options are in addition to the micropayment pay-as-you-go purchasing system and content bidding model that Cutcaster currently uses.

“Accounting departments and mangers can take a deep breath as they no longer need to keep track of multiple accounts, the piles of invoices on their desks or getting their private credit card reimbursed by their company later,” explains John Griffin, founder of Cutcaster. “The new Cutcaster Corporate Account and the Cutcaster Credit packages provide total flexibility and control over media buying. Our goal is to provide the highest level of customer service and offer solutions that meet the media buying industry’s needs.”

The new corporate accounts enable Account Admins to track purchases, download high resolution comps, create unlimited sub-accounts, purchase credits for their account and pass them to the sub-accounts, organize their licenses and manage their account with customizable reporting tools. The corporate accounts can be customized to you’re your changing needs and corporate structure. Cutcaster Credits can be purchased by any registered user and will be sold at a discount. For as little as $45, one can purchase 50 to 5000 credits and when paying, 1 credit will equal $1 on the site. Subscribers can access the same royalty-free content as the ”pay-as-you-go” customers but now have the flexibility to purchase content with credits as well as the option to receive an invoice.

“Cutcaster is providing customers two more ways to buy from the largest untapped source of user generated content on the web,” Griffin said, who launched Cutcaster last year and has been growing the image and vector library by around 15,000 new files a week. “We offer a secure way to purchase and license new content that didn’t exist before in the shallow pool of stock out there. Our larger clients kept telling us that they liked the quality and new selection we were providing in the marketplace over others in the industry, but they needed alternative payment models to provide the most flexible and cost effective licensing experience. These new packages offer a perfect solution for our largest publishing, advertising and graphic design customers.”

To learn more follow this link, http://www.cutcaster.com/buy-stock-images-vectors

Businesses can apply at www.cutcaster.com/corporate/RegisterCorporate

About Cutcaster
Cutcaster has tapped into a new and unique source of photo and vector illustrations that can be purchased for any kind of publishing, web design project, printing brochures, advertising, annual reports or electronic usage on websites and presentations. We have created the first model that adds structure to support licensing user-generated photography and vectors when you don’t have the budget to create it yourself. Sellers can set their prices or those new to the world of licensing can use the Cutcaster Algorithm to find the fair market price. We have been described as the “Nasdaq of digital media” or even “the answer to Flickr” for licensing images and vector illustrations. Our licenses are one time royalty free, extended use licenses and cost anywhere from 5 to 20 dollars on average for a high resolution file.

Growth and Marketing Updates- Our road to success!

Cutcaster Updates 2 Responses »

Mar 102009

Phewwwww. The last two weeks saw a lot of changes at Cutcaster, some of which you see on the front-end and some of which are behind the scenes or still need to be released. I did want to pass along a quick update to see where what we have done and where we are headed. This is only a partial list.

Corporate accounts and Cutcaster Credits are going to be rolled out in the next day or so and I will have a blog post about the two new ways to purchase images tomorrow. This will definitely help increase sales even more. Buyers told us that they love the quality of your work over our competitors but needed more ways to purchase the content then just the pay-as-you-go or bidding model that we have right now. This is a really exciting step for us, I believe. Invoicing and accounting for this is a huge undertakinggg..but we are going to nail it.

We are looking to get any feedback you have on our lightboxes so we can improve them. If there is a competitor site that you think does them particularly well or there are little tweaks we could implement, please let us know.

We renamed the downloaded comp files on the site to “[Cutcaster]-(TITLE)-(MEDIA_ID)” so that it was easier for people to remember where they downloaded the comp and be able to come back to find it.

In terms of the site’s speed, I am still working on decreasing the load time of the homepage and would love to hear any programmers or computer hacks thoughts for how we can speed it up. I think I may have to take some of the graphics and scripts off the homepage so it loads faster. Maybe just have the main flash player and the three spotlight areas minus the other graphics. Those graphics are weighing down the page. Any ideas for how we should make this look or improve the speed of the loading time?

We added back the roll over preview when you are searching for images. This will give the user a simple way to view the thumbnail at a slightly larger file size without the need to click through to the Media Details Page. One issues is I think it could be slowing down the search slightly, which I am looking into and will let you know. The JPEG preview image size could be taking too much time to load the page when looking at 100 images at one time in a search result.

We cleaned up some bugs in the upload area so things should run smoother when uploading via FTP or HTTP. In addition, we made it more user friendly and seamless to add your data. We always want to improve so let us know what you like and don’t like. Also I added some text to each of the different upload tabs, ie. describe, submit, pending etc., so you now have answers to many of your questions.

Still working on what to do in terms of offering extended licensing and how we want to set it up.

We have been cranking on a new email system that is going to really help our marketing efforts and our communication with buyers. On that note….

As far as marketing is concerned, we are aggressively reaching out and expanding our buyers list. We are hitting the phones everyday to build more relationships and tell more people about Cutcaster. I make about 6-8 phone calls a day alone. It’s a grueling and long process but I see it paying dividends. Also these new corporate accounts and credits, which we are just rolling out will offer buyers another two ways to purchase content from us. In addition, we have been dropping press releases, sending out email blasts to publishers, advertisers and graphic designers, joined two affiliate networks, created coupons and discount codes for buyers to use, expanded our referral program (sign up if you haven’t already through your studio page), optimized our site and blog even more, buying keywords on major search engines, started advertising in publications that are best for reaching out demographic, conducted interviews and are getting articles written about us, going to trade shows for buyers, doing in office meetings/demos with potential customers and reaching out to form new business partnerships with sites or businesses that could offer our services to their users.

There is a bunch more happening behind the scenes that would bore you but I hope this sheds light onto what we have been doing to keep ourselves busy and moving successfully forward. If you ever want to talk to me personally my email is john AT cutcaster DOT com or my cell is 215-688-2751. I am free to help at any time

I’m still getting used to San Francisco and working from out here. I do miss NYC but love it here already. I have been working out of our office in the Presidio,

Hope this finds you well and I will have an update on the corporate accounts and credits tomorrow.