Over the past three years, Foodspotting has made a name for itself by using user-generated pictures to help you find the tastiest dish in the vicinity. And even though we’ve seen an anti-photo movement in upscale restaurants recently, the app clearly still has a lot to offer. We say clearly because reservation company OpenTable just agreed to buy the company for $10M in cash. Read more…

When Kodak announced that it had reached a brand licensing deal with JK Imaging, hardly anybody questioned the move. It meant that Kodak-branded cameras were not a thing of the past — there’s even an upcoming Micro Four Thirds offering — and after all, Kodak probably has standards when making deals like this.

Interestingly, that’s exactly what Kodak said. The company’s corporate affairs spokesperson Krista Gleason was clear that the company has “guidelines and standards in place to protect the brand that each of [its] licensees must follow.” But nevertheless, there is surprisingly little information out there about JK Imaging Ltd itself. Read more…

Art.com is “the world’s largest online specialty retailer of high-end wall art.” Zenfolio offers “online photography presentation and sales solutions for professional photographers and enthusiasts.” Knowing that, Zenfolio’s acquisition by Art.com announced earlier seems like a match made in sales heaven. Read more…

If you haven’t heard of the photo sharing app Snapchat yet then you probably will soon. The app — which blew up earlier this year and is about to secure a boatload of venture capital — is built around an incredibly simple concept: you don’t always want to share photos on a permanent basis.

With Snapchat you can share a photo with a friend just like you would with any other sharing app, but instead of that person now having your photo forever, the photo comes with a “self-destruct” time limit à la Mission Impossible.
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Ever since Facebook acquired Instagram for a ridiculous sum of money earlier this year, people have been expecting the social media goliath to ruin it in one way or another. That’s because while the small team behind Instagram may have been happy with just the fame part of fame and fortune, a company like Facebook is used to getting both.

Admittedly, so far the downsides of the acquisition have been few and far between. Instagram is growing like gangbusters and it seems Facebook is trying to stay hands off when it comes to its handling of the service. Really the only downside has been the removal of Twitter integration. But, of course, the meddling has to start sometime, and according to Business Insider that moment isn’t far off.
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Over the last couple of months, a political skirmish between Japan and China over the ownership of a set of islands has caused anti-Japanese protests all across China, affecting many of the Japanese manufacturing facilities. Some companies — most notably Panasonic and Canon — were forced to shut down operations and evacuate their premises as a result of the violent protests. Things got so bad that Chinese photographers had to camouflage their Japanese-brand cameras with red tape and Chinese flags.

Despite the political atmosphere in the world’s most populous nation, Canon has China squarely in its sights as it plans its next moves for international expansion.
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Last October Ricoh sealed the deal with Pentax, buying out the company for a sizeable $124-million. Since then we haven’t seen any major changes as Pentax has gone about its business as usual. That, however, isn’t going to be the case for much longer. According to the President of Pentax Imaging Ricoh, Noboru Akabane, there is a major change on the way: Pentax will be dropping compact, fixed lens camera development all-together, leaving all of that to Ricoh. Read more…

Ever since their financial scandal, Olympus has been looking to bring on a big name investor to help get them out of trouble. Earlier this month that investor seemed to be Panasonic, but when that fell through everybody looked to the remaining three possible investors — Sony, Fujifilm and Terumo — to see if anybody was going to make the leap. According to Japanese business daily Nikkei, that investor is Sony. Read more…

Due in large part to the massive accounting scandal that Olympus found itself in at the end of last year, the company hasn’t been doing that great financially. And now, according to Reuters, Panasonic is preparing to jump to Olympus’ aid by providing approximately 50 billion yen (635 million dollars) in capital. The move will benefit both parties, as Panasonic, who are struggling with sub-par TV sales, will become top shareholder in the company and hopefully add a new stream of revenue to their portfolio.

Even though, at this point, nothing has been confirmed by either company, Olympus has already reaped benefits from the rumored deal. According to Bloomberg, once the news broke, Olympus’ stock rose as much as 3.5 percent and began trading at the highest value the company has seen since March 30th.

(via Photo Rumors via Reuters)

Divvyshot, a Y Combinator funded service that launched publicly last month, has been acquired by Facebook. Divvyshot’s 3 employees will begin applying their know-how to Facebook Photos and the service will be shut down within 6 weeks, leaving its 40,000 users to find somewhere else to share photographs.

The service was based around the idea that photographs can be better shared between friends and family by allowing people to easily contribute to a pool of photographs based around people, places, and events. For example, a group of friends on vacation could contribute photographs to the same collection, which is called an “event”.

There’s already similar ideas of collaboration built into Facebook (i.e. viewing all photographs tagged with a certain person), but it looks like Facebook wants to take the idea even further.