Tim Hinchliffe has reported on the
Sociable blog that Swedish stock image startup Pickit has announces its entry into the US market by establishing an office in Redmond, Washington to be closer to Microsoft.
Readers will recall that
Pickit (known back in 2015 as PicHit) was featured in the Microsoft Build 2015 conference. At that time they were offering a service through Office 365 that would help bloggers get “almost free,” images for their Powerpoint presentations. (PicHit called it a “freemium model,”) (Also see
this story.
Pickit Co-CEO Mathias Bjorkholm has described his company’s offerings as enabling non-professional users to find free and legally-cleared images.
Bjorkholm said, “A couple of years ago we discovered that we (the industry) actually have a ‘Napster situation’ when it comes to images.”
A “Napster Situation” refers to a situation where people find privately created property on the Internet that does not belong to them. Then they proceed to make use of that property without obtaining permission, or properly compensating, the creator for his/her work.
He continued, “We have an industry based on Getty, Shutterstock — the big dogs you are probably familiar with, that are targeting the professional photo users in a very good way.” (By a “very good way” he means that when everything is working properly users understand the copyright laws, and recognize that they need to compensate creators if and when they want to use their work.)
But, Bjorkholm points out, “On the other side we actually have about 85% of all photos stolen… by people like me! — non-professional photo users. We see this situation as Napster-like because of how nonprofessional photo users get their images.”
Pickit will now be able to work even closer with Microsoft. According to Hinchliffe, Pickits aim is to, “
help prevent companies from being sued by photographers for using unlicensed imagery (because) … many people don’t know where to go for legally-cleared photos.”
Pickit was designed to make it easy to find good photos for projects and presentations by centralizing stock images and crowdsourced photos in a single place. The company’s addition of the new office will allow for a greater expansion into in the US market, ultimately giving customers better options for stock photography services.