There's a new photo sharing app in town called Reactions. That news isn't particularly unique or exciting in itself, but the developer behind the app is rather noteworthy: it's legendary hacker George Hotz (AKA "geohot").
Over the last couple of years, smartphone photography has gained a lot of credibility. Many stock photography agencies, however, have managed to keep their "no smartphones allowed" signs proudly on display even as all of this was happening.
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.
If you were planning to install 500px's popular photo sharing app on your iPhone or iPad today, you're out of luck. The app was abruptly yanked from the iTunes App Store earlier today over the fact that users can search for photos showing artistic nudity.
A couple of days ago, there were murmurings on the web that Instagram experienced a sharp drop in usage numbers following its ill-handled Terms of Service change. The story was based on findings by analytics firm AppStats, which claimed that Instagram's Daily Active User count had fallen from over 15 million to around 5 million in the span of about one month.
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.
Instagram's new terms of service -- the ones that caused all kinds of trouble for parent company Facebook before being re-modified -- finally go into effect this coming Saturday.
As rumors predicted earlier this month, Canon has launched the first of a series of Image Square showrooms in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. These "Experience Centers" are brick-and-mortar locations where customers can try out the latest and greatest Canon products in a friendly and helpful environment.
Back in 2009, Popular Photography announced the winning photos of its latest Reader’s Photos Contest. Two of the winners (shown above) had some photographers scratching their heads, due to the fact that they're "Photoshop jobs" rather than non-manipulated stills.
If how innovative a company is were determined solely by the number of patents received, then Canon is one of the most innovative companies in the world. For an eighth consecutive year, Canon ranked first among all Japanese companies in terms of patents issued by the United States government.
Samsung camera lovers received some good news via Dropbox today. According to Dropbox's head of mobile business development Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, future Samsung smart cameras are going to come packing Dropbox and 50GB of free storage for 2 years.
Jessosps, one of the last of the UK's national photography retailers, may be entering into administration by the end of the day, according to recent reports. The major retailer managed to narrowly avoid administration in 2009 after an unpopular deal with HSBC, in which the bank "forgave" some 34M pounds of debt in exchange for a near %50 stake in the company.
There's a few ways to handle a problem, one of the more popular of which is to eliminate the source entirely. That's what Facebook has decided to do about the little AppData hiccup last week that cost the company nearly 2% in the stock market. They simply pulled user count data out of Instagram's Developer API entirely -- problem solved.
The war between brick and mortar stores and online retailers ended a long time ago -- online retailers won. "Showrooming" was born and the B&M store became no more than a place to try before you went home to buy online. Worst case scenario you needed something right away that you would then return once your online order arrived. It's not pretty, but that's the reality of it.
National Geographic has announced the winners of its 2012 Photo Contest, which received over 22,000 entries from photographers around the world. The photograph above, captured by Ashley Vincent and titled "The Explosion!," was chosen as the Grand Prize winner and the top image in the "Nature" category.
We've known for a while that Kodak is jumping out of the digital camera game, focusing its attention on printing and, thus, ending an era. But, as it turns out, we haven't seen the last of the Kodak digital camera -- it just won't be made by Kodak anymore.
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.
A week ago we shared some reports that Toshiba was developing a re-focusable smartphone camera, but it looks like its sights are set on bigger fish than just Lytro's market. While the photo world was focusing on the tiny re-focusing camera, Toshiba officially announced a new line of high performance CF cards that should blow the competition away and, the company hopes, secure one third of the CF market by 2015.
Given the digital age, you'd think that companies would shy away from brick-and-mortar stores. But the lo-fi movement has been good to the instant photography giant, and so in addition to releasing a mirrorless camera later this year, Polaroid has decided to open up a chain of retail stores called "Fotobars." The hope is that people will come to these stores and print the photos that have been lost somewhere in the zeros and ones of their digital devices.
Since 2007, Jen Bekman's 20x200 has become one of the leaders in the affordable art arena. Her business has printed and sold more than 200,000 collectible prints by more than 200 artists. ArtInfo writes that the affordable-yet-collectible photography market appears to be heating up: …
All over the Internet today, reports have spread like wildfire that the Instagram Policy Backlash has cost the picture sharing service as many of 25% of their active users. All of these initial reports stemmed from data collected by app metrics firm AppData, an analytics firm that keeps track of daily, weekly and monthly active users for any given app -- and the company's most recent readouts on Instagram showed a decline of nearly 25% in daily active users (from 16 million to 12.5 million).
After Instagram backpedaled and removed some of the more controversial language in their new privacy policy agreement, it seemed the worst was over for the Facebook-owned company. The service has surely taken a hit, but when you have over 100M users, you can probably withstand quite a few. But in the words of Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till it's over," and if Instagram user Lucy Funes and San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk have anything to say about it: it ain't over. Those two …
Well, if you thought the drawn-out drama of the notorious Olympus accounting scandal was over -- we definitely did -- you were wrong. It seems that white collar criminals not included in the original seven people arrested in the case shouldn't take the yacht out of the marina just yet (or maybe they should), because, as former bank executive Chan Ming Fon learned yesterday, the FBI is still looking for you.
'Tis the season of mergers, acquisitions, and investments. At around the same time Adobe announced its acquisition of Behance yesterday, Taiwanese gadget manufacturer Foxconn (officially known as Hon Hai Precision) announced that it has snatched up 8.88% of GoPro for $200 million. The deal values the California-based action-camera maker at a whopping $2.25 billion.
Instagram has had its share of ups and downs during its 2 short years of life, but we think we can safely say that this past week has been the lowest of lows for the popular-but-beleaguered photo sharing service. After hastily pushing out major edits to its terms of service in preparation for money-making plans, users complained, the media pounced, and Instagram backtracked, saying it would revise the terms to appease its users.
A major event occurred today in the creative industry landscape: Adobe has acquired Behance, a juggernaut portfolio-sharing service used by many photographers to showcase their work.
Scoopshot is trying to transform the way companies purchase photos and the way freelance photographers find work. In August, we reported that the startup had launched an app that allows smartphone users to easily sell their photos from their phone. Since then, the company has paid out more than $300,000 to participating photographers, and reports that over 60 of its users have earned more than $1,000 by selling their phone photos (one user has earned more than $23,000) …
In the world of cloud data storage, Dropbox is one of the 800lb gorillas fighting for your files. In recent days, it has been making big moves to become more of a player in photo storage and sharing. After all, everyone needs a safe place to keep their digital images, right? …
One chapter in the saga of Kodak's escape from bankruptcy has come to an end. The company announced today that it has completed the sale of its valuable imaging patents for $525 million to a group of Silicon Valley companies. The deal involves more than 1,100 patents related to the capturing, manipulating, and sharing of digital photographs.
If you had any doubts regarding how much of a part of our culture Instagram has become, just take a peek at the public outcry that erupted after Instagram announced changes to its policies yesterday. The controversial edits were reported in media outlets around the world, and legions of die-hard Instagram fans took to social media channels to protest them.
Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) charts are a very commonly used tool in the photo industry for measuring and describing how sharp a particular lens is. However, it's a system that is largely enigmatic to those outside the realm of optic experts and camera gearheads.
Earlier this month, Facebook stated that it's working on strategies for monetizing Instagram. Now we're starting to see the gears in the money-making machine warming up.
Now that filtered smartphone photos have taken over the photo sharing world, many people -- especially investors -- are wondering: what's next? One possible answer may be temporary photo sharing.
Here's a slightly-oldie but a very-goodie: New York University photography professor Fred Ritchin gave this keynote address last year at the "What's Next?" event put on by Foam. He shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of digital photography and how it impacts the world around us.
Film photography has been taking a lot of hits in the business world, but while major manufacturers continue to discontinue film production, one small company is doing the exact opposite. Revolog -- a small online shop founded by photography school graduates Hanna Pribitzer and Michael Krebs in 2010 -- has been finding success by selling handmade specialty film.
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.
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.
In yet another business move no doubt influenced by the rise of the all-mighty smartphone camera, a "source familiar with the plan" has told Reuters that Panasonic aims to sell camera and battery manufacturer Sanyo to a Japanese equity fund by the end of March.
The Economist has published an article on photographic film's "transition from the mass market to the artisanal," writing that the future is bleak for film as we know it: …
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 …
Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.
Every few months, it seems, a fine art photograph is sold at auction for an astronomical price and then takes its place among the world's most expensive photos. The price tags are large, but pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollar shelled out for the world's priciest paintings.
After bidding farewell to the Super Wide and Silver editions of its Zeiss Ikon 35mm rangefinder earlier this year, Cosina is officially saying goodbye to the last of the Zeiss Ikons, relegating the whole line to the history books. The news, which began as a rumor based on this tweet by one of Cosina's retailers, has since been confirmed by The Phoblographer with the company itself.
Yesterday we shared some news courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that Kodak had received a generous bid for its patent patent portfolio of over $500M. This was good news for Kodak, seeing as $500M was the mark the company had to hit in order to receive $830M in exit financing that would play a crucial role in helping Kodak dig its way out of bankruptcy.
Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin published an interesting thought to his blog yesterday that is very relevant to aspiring photographers. He writes, …
Over the last year, no news has been good news for Eastman Kodak. The company's slow and painful climb out of bankruptcy has involved everything from corporate greed to lost patent wars and sub-par auction outcomes. But just a few weeks ago a flickering light emerged at the end of the tunnel for Kodak in the form of $793M in conditional financing.
Once upon a time there was an industry largely dominated by two companies. Their domination, over some 30 years, was so nearly complete that they became understandably a bit arrogant. After all, their products were the biggest, the best, and by far the most popular.
Earlier today, Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom took to the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about where his service is headed. He revealed that Instagram is planning to stay independent of Facebook for the foreseeable future and that the service is slowly cutting ties with its rival, Twitter.
We reported in the middle of last month that Eye-Fi was planning to launch a new cloud-based photo sharing service with the name Circ. That day has arrived: the wireless SD card maker has officially launched the service into private beta. Unlike other cloud services, which cap storage space for free accounts -- 5GB is a popular limit -- Circ doesn't. Rather than limit free accounts by storage, Circ is based on the number of devices used. A free account lets you sync 2 devices, while a $50/year …
If you want more feedback about your photography portfolio than what your friends, peers, parents, and keyboard critics provide -- and you're willing to drop some money on a professional review -- you should check out Eyeist, a new disruptive service that's trying to bring high-quality portfolio reviews to the masses.
