StockPodium is online marketplace for
royalty free stock photos featuring advanced image search tools and possibility
to use visual similarity to find photos really fast.
The idea behind micro-stock photography - high quality image with low price tag
- was fueled by the digital photography revolution. It's easier than ever to contribute
and monetize your digital photo collections. The methods that people currently use
to search these vast image collections are predominantly keyword based. The quality
of these search results dependent highly on the quality and quantity of the tags
assigned to the pictures by the photographers, who often fail to tag their photos
appropriately on in the fashion that he buyer expects them to appear. This leads
to the buyer trying over with different keywords to get to the results.
StockPodium’s unique value proposition is the concept of visual similarity search.
This allows a user to use a picture as a search query and have Stockpodium look
for pictures similar to that one. The picture query can be either a photo uploaded
by the user or one found from a traditional keyword search. A user could for example
search for the word “party hat” and then use the picture of the hat from the results
to find more hats as opposed more pictures related to parties. This is offered through
an intuitive interface that is very similar to that of existing stock photo search
sites.
Imagga, the company that powers Stockpodium, has developed technology that applies
sophisticated combination of algorithms in order to analyze the pixel content of
each photo in our database index. Feature vectors are extracted which describe the
images in terms of color, objects, shape and composition. These vectors are used
later on in the search process to determine the level of similarity between images.
Other applications of these technologies include automatic assignment of keywords
to images based on their similarity with already tagged image which would significantly
aid the keywording efforts of the photographers and improve the overall quality
of keyword search.
Stockpodium appeals directly to creative and marketing agencies, publishing groups,
freelance designers, presenters, and bloggers - the customers already identified
as the core of the micro-stock market. The business model of StockPodium is combination
of affiliate, resale and sale business models, with the main revenue stream coming
from selling the pictures of our it’s contributors and the resale of images of several
leading micro-stock vendors.
The team
Georgi Kadrev (CEO) has long experience and passion regarding image analysis and
its applications. Winner of many national competitions in informatics and business
planning, he brings both his technical expertise and business vision in the process
of building great innovative company.
Hristo Georgiev (Marketing Director) together with Pavel Andreev (Creative Director)
co-founded Web Gravity, a web design company with various web awards. Hristo is
also a committed blogger and passionate web evangelist. Pavel has been actively
involved in numerous web projects during the last 8 years.
Dr Stavri Nikolov (Principal Technology Adviser) is a founder of Attentive Displays.
Dr Nikolov was a Senior Research Fellow in Image Processing at the University of
Bristol, UK and have published more than 65 papers.