The world's largest drone maker is quickly becoming one of China's most powerful homegrown companies. DJI announced today that it has raised another $75 million in venture capital funding, and recent talks with investors have reportedly pegged the value of the company at a whopping $10 billion.
Well-known lighting gear manufacturer Photoflex may live on after all. No, its original April 1st announcement that it was closing shop wasn't an ill-conceived April Fool's Joke or a bizarre marketing stunt -- the struggling company is reportedly working on a deal that will allow the brand to live on.
Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera module company that is trying to revolutionize the mobile photography industry with state-of-the-art cameras that are extremely small yet powerful enough to lead "the way to DSLR performance in slim handsets."
Sony became the largest shareholder in Olympus back in 2012 after investing $645 million in the company in exchange for a reported 11.5% of shares. It's not the largest anymore.
The company has just sold about half of its remaining shares in Olympus to the bank JPMorgan, reducing its stake from 10% to 5%.
Photoflex, a popular manufacturer of lighting gear and camera accessories, has unexpectedly announced that it will be closing its business that has been in operation for three decades.
Just two months after partnering with Polaroid for a rebranded version of its service, the pioneering photo-a-day website Blipfoto has now gone into liquidation.
Photographers often grumble about Getty Images taking too big a slice from each stock photo sale, but it turns out the company hasn't been lining its pockets with mountains of cash generated by its contributors -- in fact, it hasn't been doing so hot financially as of late.
Lytro has announced that it just raised $50 million to undergo a "strategic shift" in strategy. Instead of focusing on light field photography and refocusable 3D photos, the company plans to expand into the fields of video and virtual reality. A large number of jobs will be shed during this process.
Known most for their film emulation presets, mobile app, and creative network, Visual Supply Co. has taken the photography world by storm since their inception in March of 2011. Releasing VSCO Film, VSCO Keys, VSCO Cam, VSCO Grid, and their VSCO Journal, they’ve shown that they aren’t only a company looking to sell products – they’re a company striving to build an entire community by creating and establishing effective resources for photographers.
And as of today, there’s proof in the form of dollars that others believe in their endeavors. $40 million dollars worth of belief to be precise.
Italian photography company Ferrania is ready to start making film again, years after giving up its primary business as a lost cause.
Over the last year, almost every time we've heard the word "acquisition" it's been preceded by the word, or rather company, Shutterfly. That's because Shutterfly has been very busy buying up companies and galleries and, fortunately for users, putting them to work in real ways.
It was less than two weeks ago that the new Shutterfly Mobile app was announced, a result of its Penguin Digital acquisition. And now, in time to steal a little bit of thunder from all of the CES rumors, sources claim that the photo storage and sharing site is acquiring yet another start-up.
We live in a world that's teeming with digital photographs. More photos are now uploaded every two minutes than were created during the entire 1800s. Facebook is seeing thousands of photographs uploaded to its servers every second of the day, and Instagram was flooded with 10 storm-related photos per second during Hurricane Sandy.
With such a large quantity of photographs flooding the web, it's clear that visual data mining will be an in-demand market in the coming years as more and more people look to glean valuable images from the torrent of useless pixels. One of the companies trying to occupy this space is CrowdOptic, a San Francisco-based startup that's building some pretty interesting location-based photo curation technologies.
Back in October, we shared some photos taken inside a small Chinese studio lighting maker named NiceFoto. Now we have a look at what operations look like at a much larger manufacturer: Godox. It's reportedly the second largest studio lighting producer in all of China.
All good things come to an end. Bad ones do too. After denying rumors last month that it would soon be shutting down, the over-funded photo-sharing app Color has now announced that it will indeed be shuttering its service.
Yahoo made some management moves a couple of weeks ago, with VP Adam Cahan becoming head of the company's mobile endeavors and its photo-sharing service, Flickr. Cahan was previously the founder and CEO of IntoNow, a 12-week-old company that Yahoo acquired last year for $20 to $30 million.
Last week, Canon reported its latest quarter's financial results, which included some big double-digit drops in revenue and profit. Now it's Nikon's turn to show the world how it's finances are doing. The company reported its latest quarterly results yesterday, and the numbers are decent.
It seems like Kodak is having a hard time figuring out how to getting its finances back in the black. Kodak has announced its 3rd quarter financial results, and the numbers aren't pretty -- they're downright ugly, actually. Despite raking in $1 billion over the three-month period ending in September (down 19% from the same period last year), the company still posted a net loss of $312 million (up from a loss of $222M during the same period last year).
Canon released its quarterly financial results yesterday, and things aren't looking so rosy based on Q3 2012. Revenue has fallen 13% to $10.3 billion from the same period last year, and profit dropped 42% to $908 million.
ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".
The camera maker we know as Leica, officially known as Leica Camera AG, is now 100% privately owned. The main shareholder, Lisa Germany Holding GmbH, announced earlier this week that it had successfully bought out the 2.44% of stock still in the hands of third-party shareholders, paying a set price of €30.18 (~$39) for each of the shares.
The stock will also be removed from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange as a part of this plan, a move designed to save the company time and money -- the management will no longer need to worry about all the hassle that comes with being a publicly traded company.
It is commonly said that a picture is worth a thousand words. It seems that US smartphone users agree, for Instagram has now passed Twitter in active user count. The legions of Instagrammers aren't just checking their beloved social network more than their Tweeting counterparts -- their eyeballs are glued on it longer as well.
Good news, Flickr fans: new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is paying attention to your service, and is planning to …
Kodak has announced that it'll be shedding even more jobs in an effort to cut costs as it transitions into being a company solely focused on commercial printing and corporate services. Two weeks after announcing the sale of its photographic film business, the company is stating that another 1,000 pink slips will be issued by the end of this year as part of a $330 million cost cutting plan. This is on top of the 2,700 layoff notices already handed out this year, and the new round of cuts will reduce the company's headcount to 13,400, down from the 145,000 employees it had during its glory days.
For those of you who are interested in the business and technology side of things, here’s an interesting 45-minute …
Canon's president Tsuneji Uchida announced today that he will be stepping down to pave way for a younger management team as the company fell short of expectations for the second straight year. Canon's stock price dropped 19% last year while Nikon's grew 4%. The total number of Canon cameras sold dropped 4% last year, likely a result of both a shift away from consumer cameras and the shortages caused by Japan's earthquake and Thailand's flooding.
Kodak was warned by the New York Stock Exchange yesterday that its stock …
Olympus’ stock price has been recovering quite nicely after an internal probe found …
Instagram is holding onto its place as the darling of the mobile photo sharing world. After adding a whopping …
Olympus has been in the photography game since introducing its first camera back in 1936, but its future as …
Here are some developments in the ongoing Olympus scandal: investors and …
Olympus admitted today that its top executives used dubious acquisitions to sweep 20 years of massive losses under the …
After arriving late to the digital photography party, Kodak took another step away from the market yesterday by selling …
Jake Adelstein at the Japanese Subculture Research Center has written up an interesting …
Last Friday, we reported that Olympus had fired CEO Michael Woodford, claiming that he clashed with the …
Olympus fired CEO and President Michael Woodford today, causing the company’s stock price to take a 17% dive. The …
Thailand is experiencing the worst flooding it has seen in more than 50 …
Kodak’s stock plummeted again today, losing nearly 50% of its value and closing …
Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection -- both online and offline -- accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they're automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored in many different places to be available in one central location. Even photos emailed to your through Gmail can be picked up and back up by the service.
We reported yesterday that Kodak has taken defensive measures to prevent a hostile takeover for its extensive …
Facebook can't be too pleased with Google right now. In addition to releasing a Facebook competitor called Google+, the company has also beaten Facebook to the mobile photo sharing space with a new app called Pool Party. Like Google+, the app is currently invite-only, but if you can score an invite it's a free download for both iOS and Android. The app is based around collaborative group albums called "pools" that allow you to share pictures with friends and family in real-time.