Notable industry analyst Dan Heller has joined technology company PicScout as vice president of marketing.
Heller is best known for his photography blog, where he publishes exhaustive essays on subjects ranging from copyright law to running a business. After getting into photography in the mid-1990s as a hobby, Heller has been a professional travel photographer for a number of years. He has also owned his own software firm, consulted for a number of photo-industry companies and wrote four books on the business of photography. His stock photography Web site receives 15,000 visitors a day.
Now, “I've taken a real job with a real company,” he writes on his blog, sharing some of the reasons why. Interestingly, when commenting on why he aligned himself with PicScout, Heller says that other potential partners or employers were not “entrepreneurial enough to face the realistic challenges of the photo industry today. (Most still think it's the same old buyers, same old sellers, and the same old photographers.)”
Heller’s blog is likely to be a casualty, at least as far as the stock-photo industry is concerned. “I will unlikely be writing my long, deep, manifestos on what ails the photo industry. I will not be writing lengthy treatises, pontificating on the economics of stock imagery. As of now, this blog will be merely a personal sandbox.”
PicScout was founded in 2002 in Israel and currently maintains offices in San Francisco and Chicago. The company helps most leading stock photography agencies track uses of images in their collections. PicScout recently spun off off PicApp, an ad-supported image-licensing platform, and is currently developing an Image Registry product based on proprietary image-recognition technology.