imprezzeo

Really pleased with this -  Imprezzeo and WoodWing Software announce partnership. Few better people to work with in the publishing market than these guys. Check them out at www.woodwing.com

So, what do we reckon of web 2.0? Peter and I had a great time, not least because it validated that Imprezzeo is doing something very special. No exaggeration to say that results were met with a mix of cynicism (this must be a fix), silence (the right type) and mouth-agape “now I get it”.

 

As for the show itself:

 

• Woeful wifi. Yes I know it was busy but hugely frustrating when you have meetings set where you can’t get web access 

• No great surprise that Twitter was this year’s facebook and Sarah Milstein’s presentation was a fascinating insight into how businesses can embrace it (I would normally say ‘harness it’ but that would of course spoil the Twitter vibe) 

• That said, check out an excellent piece by Wired UK’s Editor David Rowan in the Times a few days back

• Cloud computing rivalled social media marketing as the big story (yes I only went to a handful of sessions but that was my general sense)

• Tim O’Reilly’s keynote was great, not last as it’s main thrust was the intelligence of search going forward (ahem... c.f. Imprezzeo)

 

Also stopped off in Boston to among other things give this interview with Network World.

 

A great week.

Yesterday Getty Images went live selling a specially selected slice of Flickr content from professionals and hobby snappers alike. The Flickr Collection as its called contains content that satisfies the keen editorial eye of Getty’s experts, with apparently around 6000 or so images making the grade so far. Initial thoughts and questions:
 

1. Getty innovates again (they developed a model which others tried to replicate, they grasped the micro stock nettle with the iStockphoto acquisition etc.)

2. What though will be the reaction from their premium content contributors like Stone etc. that Getty has opened itself up to ‘amateurs’ (that said, some of it looks quite good to my untrained eye)

 

3. Flickr has billions of images. Where did the folks at get the time to pick the best 6000? This is probably a little sampler and Getty will hoover in more if this flies

 

4. Am I the only one who would have thought this collection would be royalty-free only – nearly a third is rights-managed

 

5. Smart move by Flickr to find another and potentially very lucrative revenue stream, and one with decent margin to boot

 

6. A very experienced photo desk editor once said to me that his newspaper’s taste in photos had changed, that “edgy” content was now good. Sample of one I know but I bet it will be harder to shift premium rights-managed content, even after this economic slowdown – this is virtually a concession by Getty that that will be so

 

7. Want to see a perfect example of the failings of image search via metadata? Look at the first image in the collection. To me it shouts out one obvious thing and the title itself, for those of us with rudimentary French is a bit of a giveaway too – SNOW! So search for snow within the flickr collection and there’s no sign of it, unlike the image two along. That’s because for some reason, the latter has the word ‘snow’ in the keywording, the former doesn’t

 

8. Click on the “more images like this” option in the second image, Mr Spaghetti pants. Why does Getty only offer similar images from within the Flickr collection? Isn’t that a bit like going into a department store to buy a pair of jeans and being offered other clothes from that same brand other than trying on other brand of jeans?

 

9. Also, when you get those similar results back, how does the 5th picture (accordion player) resemble the first? Intrinsically it doesn’t but half of it’s keyword tags do

 

10. There is actually another find similar images feature that appears after you click the thumbnail which is a little confusing and also, keyword-reliant

 

11. Is my maths wrong? Getty shows 60 images per page and 67 pages of results which makes 4020. Where are the other 2000 or so in the Flickr Collection

 

 

A leaked memo from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s SVP of R&D, Online Services re Project Kumo (c.f. my comments on technewsworld) yields some very interesting ‘facts’: “40 percent of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46 percent of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes. These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don’t find what they need from search today”. Setting aside the question of how an unanswered search is defined / quantified and if we accept the validity of the stats, it says that too many searches are abandoned, too many re-started and too much time wasted.

How much more problematic then the search for images which relies on text tagging to describe content that given it’s semantic richness is fundamentally unsuited to ‘description’. The hollow boast in search results that the engine has retrieved x million image search results in y milliseconds is to me more depressive than impressive. Surely it’s time for a different approach.

The more I and the Imprezzeo team ‘freestyle search’ image collections by clicking on examples of what we want, refining and traversing content to find what we want; the more we build features that allow you for example to highlight part of an image as the example upon which to base the search (only possible with an underlying visual search platform); the more we hone our engine to provide great results across a diverse range of content - the more we are convinced that the days of text-based-only image search are numbered. Shameless plug perhaps but reality, definitely.
 

So Sir James Crosby, erstwhile career banker and chief fox in charge of the UK banking hen house did the decent thing and skewered himself on his own Montblanc. While we have only heard one side of the story, my own brief experience in banking would tend to support his accuser. At LexisNexis, while the US operation already had a huge public record-based risk management arm, I encouraged the European operation to move into the compliance data and solutions market, specifically anti-money laundering / client acceptance. It was only really the prospect of a prison stretch (the Riggs Bank farrago saw to this) that motivated senior management at the banks to demand more assiduous checking of their clients – and the reality is fear can be very powerful purchase driver.

 

Had the same penalty been in place for lax banking risk management, would we be in this position today? The Basel II Accord and it’s recommendations on capital adequacy were much trumpeted in 2004 as the framework for effective risk management – and little has been heard of it since. So why did Basel fail us so spectacularly? My two cents is that too much was left in the hands of local regulators to a. ‘customise’ their model to suit the local market and b. to apply it according to their own timeframe – a classic fudge.