Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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eHub Interviews Fotolia

Thanks to Fotolia for this email interview posted February 6, 2006.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Fotolia: Fotolia is a social market place for digital stock Images. We aim to provide the tools to democratize the legal use of stock images while allowing photographers of all levels to begin or diversify their revenue streams.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Fotolia: Every day there is a dramatic increase in the needs of legal and affordable images with more and more web sites, prints and presentations every day.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Fotolia: We have a full time international team of engineers, marketing staff, and image editors who work around the clock starting the day in Europe and ending the day in the western United States.  All the team is working full time on the project.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Fotolia: Our team is comprised of more than ten people. Everyone having previous internet experience and most of our team have advanced knowledge in photography or design.  A list of management may be found at the following link.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Fotolia: The fotolia websites expresses how we see a web service should be, very simple and sober as Google or eHub for example and at the same time colourful (look at the homepage).

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Fotolia: Fotolia is basically a search engine for images. We developed a very powerful and multilingual search engine with color recognition and similarity function.

We use a lot of new applications to increase user interface in the site:

Ajax: we use Ajax where it must be used with parsimony ( to suggest keywords to user during a search, for the zoom function on photo thumbnail)

RSS : we believe a lot in RSS and we use RSS where email would have used (to be alerted for new photos relative to a tag, to be alerted for news messages and new comments..)

Tag: We created a tag cloud for the photos most searched by users and photos most present in Fotolia. The differences between the two tag clouds reflect the disparity between supply and demand.

eHub: Wat are the most requested features from your users/community?

Fotolia: Our users want to interact as much as possible in a transparent way.  That’s why we have such tools as alert systems and tag clouds. It’s the live interaction between the supply and the demand that makes Fotolia a great site, and a real marketplace.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Fotolia: We are 100% web based platform and thus our users are all over the world. We have a large population of users in Europe and North America.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

Fotolia: In 6 months, we wish to be among the top 5 largest legal image database in the world and in 2 years the largest.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Fotolia: Our challenge is to convince people and companies that they can now afford to buy pictures and don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for a single image.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Fotolia: Brand recognition

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Fotolia: Our business model is very simple. We are a market place, clients buy images from photographers/designers, and we get a commission on every transaction.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Fotolia: We can not really disclose this information but you can take a loot at the alexa rank (considering that we have many domains..), Our numbers have grown by 100% every 2 months.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Fotolia: To enable everyone with 1 great image to start making money in the world overnight , and to enable every designer or webmaster or art director in the world to find the right image for their project ( web, print or for presentation) for as low as 1 USD and thus fight against the piracy of images and their illegal use.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Fotolia: The future web will enable everyone to monetize their talents depending only on their skills and not on their location, languages or connections.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Fotolia: I use Google not only the search engine a lot. I use Technorati, wikipedia, delicious, Typepad (Blog platform from Six Apart) as well as Digg alot!

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Fotolia: I get exactly the number of remaining hours in my day when I am not working. The team on average gets about 7 to 8 hours most nights.

Thanks to Fotolia for this email interview posted February 6, 2006.

Visit Fotolia
Originally added to eHub on Dec 19, 05

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eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan