Martin Kallstrom of Narrative and Flo Meissner of EyeEm Discuss The Future of Cameras

[00:00:22] Speaker A: Very simply kicking off so the audience knows, and obviously there's a caveat here, I'm an investor in Martin's company. And I will not take it easy on him, okay? But I just make sure that's that caveat in the article that I've got to state. Flo, what's that?

[00:00:36] Speaker B: Me neither.

[00:00:37] Speaker A: You won't take it easy on him either. Good. So give the audience in 2 sentences what's Narrative and then what's EyeEm.

[00:00:45] Speaker C: Narrative is the developer of an effortless photographic memory. We build a wearable camera and an app that organizes a stream of photos from your day.

[00:00:55] Speaker B: Cool. So I am— we are— I'm sorry for my voice. I just arrived last night from Berlin. I'm dead, but nice to meet you guys. EyeEm is basically a global community, a mobile community of over 15 million photographers based in Berlin and a marketplace basically. So we license those photos out to publisher agencies, agencies, designers worldwide, and excited to be here.

[00:01:18] Speaker A: So we heard a little bit from Ron earlier about a professional photographer and what what goes into creating images and stories. Why do each of you think people make pictures?

[00:01:31] Speaker C: I think that people are comfortable knowing that something is preferred— preserved from the moment until later. It's for sharing. It's for your own sake. It's for remembering.

[00:01:44] Speaker B: Cool. So I think I have 2 theses on this. So basically, the first one goes back— I moved to New York in 2009, basically. to, well, quit my job and become a super cool photographer. As you can see, that didn't quite work out. But it had a point. I was working for a magazine in Dumbo, for a photo magazine, and on my second week, my whole equipment, my cameras, my lights, got stolen on the L train. So pretty bad. But I got a used iPhone 3G from

[00:02:09] Speaker B: a friend, and that was in 2009. Think about how crappy this device was. And I think what I did— you all remember, you all know the Guggenheim, the museum. And you all know Lego, and I got a present from a friend which was a Lego Guggenheim, and I took like every minute when I put a brick onto this Guggenheim thing, I took a photo of it and put it together on like one thing, and I tweeted it and said like a series of iPhone

[00:02:34] Speaker B: shots of the Guggenheim, hashtag architecture, hashtag fuck, I lost my camera, and—

[00:02:41] Speaker A: Or something.

[00:02:42] Speaker B: And within a second later, the Guggenheim retweeted me. And within a little, like, small creative project, I was reaching, like, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and got recognition for it. And I think people took photos 5 years ago for eyeballs. And what people now ask themselves is what happens beyond Instagram, beyond Twitter, Foursquare, or whatnot? What happens beyond the like? I think that's what I'm passionate about.

[00:03:07] Speaker A: So what happens beyond?

[00:03:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's basically, I mean, We should talk about like what cameras can pull off basically from a technological point of view, but it's certainly from a photographer's point of view, beautiful presentation just before us, it's about eyeballs, it's about reaching out. I mean, Instagram is the visual, our visual Facebook page. I mean, it's about reaching people.

[00:03:29] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:03:30] Speaker B: But what we will see is basically platforms who take care about education and who take care about distribution. And about licensing as well.

[00:03:39] Speaker A: So how are you different from Instagram?

[00:03:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I said like I think we're completely complementary to Instagram because Instagram is a social network and we are a media company. And we want to— basically there's tons of businesses in the world, like I don't know, think about the Photoshops, the Lightrooms, who take you from— who cater to the, well, more or less professional photographer, and they take you from 1 to 100 in terms of quality. And then you have Instagram. It's basically a commodity, but it's basically from a It's basically

[00:04:06] Speaker B: on a zero level in terms of, well, if you look at the big picture. And I think what we want to do is take you from 0 to 1 and give you the tools and the market and the platform to become pro.

[00:04:17] Speaker A: Isn't there a challenge? I mean, so if— how many cameras, let's say, what cameras do you use? Like, what's your modern camera bag? Because there's arguments that you can only have so many camera apps or camera tools. I mean, so why would— Why should somebody open up EyeEm versus Instagram and select that to make their pictures?

[00:04:37] Speaker B: Because you can make shitloads of money with it.

[00:04:39] Speaker A: So it's about making money?

[00:04:40] Speaker B: No, no, not only. It's also about quality. So think about your boring friends feed on Instagram with mugshots and the birthday cakes. It's your Facebook. I mean, let's face it. And I think what technology has to solve is surface quality images through— well, you said it— through First of all, creativity. Secondly, actually image recognition and tagging. And the third one is actually ranking. And

[00:05:06] Speaker B: I think what we want to build is the technology, and we call that iTAG. It's basically a technology to automatically categorize images. And iRank. iRank is basically, well, call it the equivalent to Google PageView. It understands if a photograph A is better than a photograph B and puts that into perspective in the likes of, well, computational aesthetics. And that is a fascinating field where we are just starting to think what's possible there.

[00:05:31] Speaker A: Okay. So, Martin, what do you think? I mean, so what's your camera bag? How does Narrative fit in your camera bag? And how do you choose when to take pictures?

[00:05:41] Speaker C: Yeah, so I'm a lifelong SLR camera user. And I really—

[00:05:46] Speaker A: We weren't letting you guys in except for Ron. How'd you get in?

[00:05:52] Speaker C: And so my camera bag, I have a few SLRs. I have a few lenses. I have 2 lenses, 2 of them that I never use. I never use that feature of an SLR to exchange the lens. I use one. But so that has all taken a step back to leave room for my mobile phone and my Narrative Clip now, when they have improved enough for me to use them instead of the SLR. And

[00:06:19] Speaker C: I think that form factors play a huge role in what camera you actually use. And the output of the image— images, like the quality of it, is also very important. But the best camera is the one that you have with you, as the classic saying goes. And that counts a lot to the advantage of mobile phones and wearable cameras.

[00:06:42] Speaker B: That's the point. It's the one that you have with you and not the 2 or the 3 or the 4.

[00:06:47] Speaker A: Well, so that's a great question. So I think that might evolve. I think that's a great comment. So do you agree or disagree with what Flo said, Martin?

[00:06:54] Speaker C: I think that it's a different thing what you have with you and what you have at home. I think that there's a big room for cameras, different form factors of cameras for different use cases. And the mobile phone is very complementary to a wearable camera. It's much better to have— if you are consciously taking a photo of something, it's much

[00:07:19] Speaker C: better to have a screen, a viewfinder, to see if the composition is right.

[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:07:23] Speaker C: And if the outcome is right.

[00:07:25] Speaker A: So that brings up an interesting point that you actually just made. So I would say, couldn't it also be it's the best camera is the one that you have in your hand, but you're going to have many other cameras that are hands-free. So it might be a Dropcam, a Cameocam security camera, a Narrative, or others. So it's kind of— that statement probably in my mind would have to evolve. I don't know what the right statement is. But it's— the

[00:07:50] Speaker A: decisive moment is used with whatever camera is in your hand.

[00:07:54] Speaker B: Okay, cool.

[00:07:55] Speaker A: The other moments, the serendipity moments of our lives, which adds to our memories, are captured by all the hands-free cameras, no?

[00:08:04] Speaker C: I think that's very important. Like, the big benefit of having a wearable camera is that you actually don't have it in your hands. It's something that you don't even think about. You capture photos, you can be an accidental storyteller just from the photos that you happen to capture from your day. And you can be fully present, you can be engaging with people, with your kids, family, or friends, or the people you meet.

[00:08:30] Speaker C: Like this, I'm capturing photos of my time up here on the stage. I would never sit and take photos of this with my mobile phone because I need my hands and my—

[00:08:40] Speaker A: Your eyes.

[00:08:40] Speaker C: my mind to be present with all of you.

[00:08:44] Speaker B: Okay, so Evan, you said one thing in your intro, which was basically that you said that camera phones and wearables are going to completely kill basically the SLR cameras. I have a completely different take on that. So basically what we— we shouldn't call it camera anymore. It's a communication device. And I don't know what it is. I don't know what it— we're not going to answer the question what what this communication device will be in 25 years. What

[00:09:10] Speaker B: I know is it's not about wearables or whatnots, it's about communication devices versus niche devices. And I believe SLRs, wearables—

[00:09:21] Speaker A: What about drone photography?

[00:09:23] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying, it's niche devices.

[00:09:25] Speaker A: I mean, it's just, it could be any device that's capturing a photo.

[00:09:27] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying, like basically the communication device, my go-to device, will Be in conflict and contrary to all the other cameras that are out there.

[00:09:37] Speaker A: Is that a— it's a communication device or it's a— what is it?

[00:09:42] Speaker B: That's a niche device in my opinion.

[00:09:44] Speaker A: It's a niche device? Have you heard the new term Delphi, which is a drone selfie? Okay, so now, I mean, that's a real thing out there if you guys see it. There's another thing coming. So I have a question and this is great. So there's all kinds of tools and cameras, this being one of them. And it's capturing photographs of us. But the question is, how do we benefit? Are they memories? How do we find them? I mean, so what are you guys— are both doing interesting things

[00:10:10] Speaker A: with—

[00:10:11] Speaker B: Are you going to stop that?

[00:10:13] Speaker A: He's going to stop that in a minute.

[00:10:14] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:10:16] Speaker A: Thank you very much. So just so everybody knows, that's Tony Nego from Intelligent UAS. He came to give a quick demo. Thank you, Tony. Just to mix it up a little bit. The question is, you capture thousands of images every day, but a lot of them might not be good. So how do you find the best ones?

[00:10:39] Speaker C: Yeah, so that's— there's a lot of truth in that, that when you capture photos like twice a minute, what happens is that you end up with a lot of junk photos. And maybe 3%, 4% is going to be useful to some extent, and the rest are going to be useful to trigger your own memories. They will not be beautiful enough for you to share. Still, you will get maybe 30 or 40 photos from your day that

[00:11:05] Speaker C: you can share on Instagram or Facebook. And to take 30 photos during a day would take a lot of effort if you did that consciously. But what we do is that we segment the day into clusters of photos that sort of fit together looking at the ambient color histograms of each photo. And then we split the day into moments, as we call them, and

[00:11:31] Speaker C: every moment gets a cover photo identified from an algorithm that computes like a technical image quality, like basically saturation of colors, contrast, details, if there are faces in the photo and so on. And so what you get in the Narrative app is actually a timeline of the COVID photos, and you can tap into one of them to navigate into the full stream of photos. And even there, there's a filtering going on where we hide about

[00:11:56] Speaker C: half of the photos. You don't have to look so much at walls and ceilings and floors, but rather can see the people you met during the day and see the variation of your day.

[00:12:09] Speaker A: On the same topic, Flo, I mean, you guys are working on processes as well to probably filter content. So tell us a little bit about what you're focusing on, where you see that going, because that is the crux that we've been talking about so far and all day. We're going to talk a lot about that from many different companies. Absolutely.

[00:12:26] Speaker B: So I believe that it's for the first— I mean, I'm not telling you secrets here— for the first time in history of photography, Data is generated at the sweet spot of connectivity and the device, and that opens up a new level of data layers. So what we can do is we have stuff on the device, like, I mean, along that simple stuff like location, we have time, we have the EXIF data, we know the device. But

[00:12:52] Speaker B: then that gets really exciting because we can tap into, well, the Open Knowledge Graph and tap into event APIs, weather APIs.

[00:12:59] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:13:00] Speaker B: And combine that data. If there is a football game, I don't know, somewhere, I mean, you don't have to tell me that there's a football game, that it's like playoffs, finals, or whatnot. I know that. I know the colors of the jerseys. I know the fans. I know that the grass is green. Well, then that comes to the third point, is hardcore computer vision, basically, and image recognition. Objects, faces, stuff like that. And I think the cool thing, and I'm making

[00:13:25] Speaker B: the point here, like, why Google, for instance, like can't do that is because Google is not able to build communities in a proper way. And I believe what communicators can do— sorry about that, but just being honest here— but what community brings to that is basically a semantic layer on top of that. And with every single photo added and text generated, that gets like super, super crazy. And it's

[00:13:52] Speaker B: basically a new layer of data that we haven't seen before. And that's why we, I think, are working on it, because it's possible for the first time.

[00:13:59] Speaker A: Okay. So I have tons of questions, but raise your hand if anybody else has questions, and we'll make it as interactive as we can. And you guys as well, if you've got questions for each other or myself. So it doesn't have to be a one-way street. I can't do all the work. But so when you think about the challenges of all these different devices that capture, and the biggest challenge is getting people to to understand which

[00:14:24] Speaker A: one they should use and when. So, I mean, when you guys are building your businesses, how are you trying to figure out how you can exponentially grow that user base?

[00:14:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's the point. I mean, in 10 or 20 years, the end user or the photographer or the communication device user won't think about that stuff. He does not have to think about, well, I need 5 cameras or 10 or wearables or Oculus or glasses. I don't need that stuff. Because my camera knows it. That's just one example. So think about sensors. Sensors are the brains of the camera. If my brain takes a camera of you guys here now, well,

[00:15:00] Speaker B: my brain knows that there's Evan and Martin on the back and the drone guy actually just left. Hopefully he did. So that's the point. And this— well, sensors are pretty big in SLRs, and if I look at my phone, they're like still pretty tiny. They can't compete with that. But in a couple of years, That stuff will be possible on my phone, and my phone will know.

[00:15:19] Speaker A: But that's a phone, so right now, unless the ecosystem changes—

[00:15:22] Speaker B: I'm just saying, or the communication device. I shouldn't use phone.

[00:15:25] Speaker A: Communication device. But unless the ecosystem changes drastically and we don't have an option of a suite of applications to choose from, like the older days when you got a phone and you could only use what they gave you, it was only their camera or only their capture processor. So in 5 years, do we think—

[00:15:42] Speaker B: You tell me in 5 years you are wearing a Google Glass?

[00:15:45] Speaker A: No, I have a Retina Cam.

[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah, but that's another— that's another point. A Retina Cam is like further out. It's like further out. Yeah, but we're talking about wearables, and wearables are just not gonna happen because it's a trend. It's a trend on the way to new technology. We've seen that several times in photography. Well, think about Polaroid or Instagram. It's just trends on the way to new technology.

[00:16:07] Speaker A: Polaroid wasn't a trend, but I think Martin should answer the question.

[00:16:10] Speaker C: Yeah, so I completely disagree that wearables would be a trend or—

[00:16:16] Speaker B: They will disappear.

[00:16:17] Speaker C: A fad, yeah. They will disappear just as blogs has disappeared and social media has disappeared. We don't talk about that. We did actually talk about that right now because for 40 journalists, social media is still a big thing.

[00:16:30] Speaker A: It hasn't disappeared, it's just the terms have changed.

[00:16:33] Speaker C: Yeah, it's sort of, it's everywhere. So it's nowhere. And the same thing will happen with wearables. And wearables are changing people's lives. When I came in here, Evan told me I get longer and longer every time he sees me. And that's because of my Fitbit. My posture improves because I'm out running around.

[00:16:57] Speaker A: I'm just getting older and shrinking.

[00:16:58] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

[00:16:59] Speaker A: You're still young.

[00:17:00] Speaker C: I'm growing. And Narrative allows me to experience my life from a whole new way. I appreciate that I have much more diversity. I see much more people in my life than I actually believed when I started— before I started using Narrative, because you forget so much about what you did. And just flicking through the past few days or the past week of photos allows you to see

[00:17:26] Speaker C: people that you met and remember them.

[00:17:28] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:17:28] Speaker C: and remember people that you actually forgot that you met. And a lot of people have that reaction, like, well, my life is so boring, I would never be able to use a lifelogging camera because that's— I have such a boring life. And when you start using it, you actually see much more variation, much more smiling faces than you actually remembered without it.

[00:17:49] Speaker A: So what the question is, some people that wear the Google Glass, it's obtrusive sometimes. And there's a term of glassholes derogatory. So the question is, is there a derogatory term that you've heard relating to Narrative as a different type of wearable camera?

[00:18:04] Speaker C: We made a very specific design choice when we started designing this for— like, it was 2 years ago. We made it so there's no on/off button on this camera. And that's because we want our users to get into the habit of actually taking the camera off if it's not appropriate or comfortable to take photos in a situation. So the user has to take it off and make it black

[00:18:29] Speaker C: and dark for the camera in order for it to shut off. And that's a whole different thing from Google Glass, because Google Glass is much more than a camera. So even if it's the camera that makes someone else uncomfortable, the wearer is going to say to you that, I use this— I don't use the camera right now. I don't care you're uncomfortable. I use it as a screen. I'm looking at Reddit when we're talking because that's

[00:18:54] Speaker C: much, much more enjoying. And that's what makes it like the perception of the user being a glass hole, if you will. With Narrative, it's built into the design that you take it off if you feel people are not comfortable. And the whole idea is to be able to engage with people. And if And the way you do that is making

[00:19:20] Speaker C: them uncomfortable, then of course you shouldn't let the enabler of that more direct or immediate communication come in the way of the relationships of people. So as soon as someone is uncomfortable, you very quickly develop a sense of that. You can see people glancing at the camera or feeling uncomfortable. You can just take it off, and the person can say, no, no, keep it on. just

[00:19:46] Speaker C: curious about it, if they didn't want that, or they can— I can leave it be.

[00:19:52] Speaker A: Flo, tell us a little bit about— you mentioned on the business side there's opportunities for your community to sell the images. So how are you managing that opportunity or empowering that opportunity for your community of photographers?

[00:20:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. So I think it's really exciting because you just said it, obviously, if you have a community of millions of photographers worldwide, the quality level is not equal. So you have to sort or surface, you still have to surface quality images and then tag those. Because if you want to work with brands, with, well, licensees, you have to make those searchable. So I always ask people

[00:20:31] Speaker B: who say like, yeah, well, that's gonna happen anyway, but if you were a super smart founder today, And you want to disrupt the, well, stock photography or content industry in 12 years. Yeah, what would you do? You build a super cool computer vision image recognition company, and you, well, would fail because you would have to sell it to Yahoo or Google or Apple before that, before you succeed. The second thing is you would want to build a community, but

[00:20:57] Speaker B: well, there's Instagram, there's us, and you would have a hard time basically finding your positioning in the market. And the last bit is basically, well, you build search, and search is equally hard. So it's really— sorry, you build a market, and building a market on top of existing platforms is also very hard because we wouldn't give you access to content. Or have you seen any successful stock photography site based

[00:21:22] Speaker B: on Instagram? No, because they can't access the photographers. They don't have the email addresses. So there will be a company in the next 12 months, or a little bit ahead of that, who will own that long tail of that content industry. And that will be able to build a community, have the search technology to make that content, well, searchable and surface quality stuff, and have the community who creates the content.

[00:21:47] Speaker A: But there's also many issues that you didn't mention on that side, which is there's rights, there's quality size, there's Permission, you know, in different countries, every country has a different permission legal process to what images can be sold or not and how can they be sold. So how are you processing that?

[00:22:03] Speaker B: So, I mean, that brings me to a simple point. Think about property releases. But let's face it, I mean, we know any, every building in the world that I'm not allowed to take a photo of. Yeah, well, we have long lap data. What can we do? We can cross-check it and And basically exclude the stuff from the search so it won't happen.

[00:22:22] Speaker A: Are you doing that now?

[00:22:24] Speaker B: Simple. It's technology. And well, the other thing is I believe all that licensing process is moving to mobile. Well, I don't need basically to go out and have— if I'm taking a photo of you even now and I want to sell it, I could take a photo of you and we are connected on Twitter or on Facebook and it will recognize. And I could send you a request on Facebook saying, hey, Do you want to earn $10, 10%

[00:22:49] Speaker B: of the money I make? Give me a license.

[00:22:54] Speaker A: Makes total sense, but is that how it's working now? So what actually functions now? Are you making those connections?

[00:22:59] Speaker B: That's the thing, we completely built the property licensing process for—

[00:23:04] Speaker A: Great. And are you doing the selling or have you partnered to do the selling?

[00:23:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so basically what we did, we are completely focused right now on building a marketplace. We already have beautiful clients like Lufthansa, Nike, Red Bull, some great magazines both in the US and South America and Europe. So it's our standalone marketplace that we are launching quite soon, and I'm equally excited about a standalone partnership that we've done with Getty Images. So we offer particularly

[00:23:33] Speaker B: good photographers on our site to actually license their images on Getty Images across their properties, and We do a very, very beautiful 50/50% rev share with our stuff. And that brings me to the point. Like, 5 years ago, I took a photo and put it on Twitter of the Guggenheim, and I thought it's cool to get props. Now I actually sell my photo that I took a week ago in San Francisco on Getty Images and make a couple hundred bucks with it. How cool is that?

[00:23:59] Speaker A: So talk a little— I mean, obviously today is about both kinds of visual content. So video, how does video play into what you guys are doing, or what do you think of the of how it fits into your vision?

[00:24:13] Speaker C: Yeah, so what Narrative is, is actually taking the future, our vision of the future of video, and making that future use case available today already. So video cameras, of course, if you buy a GoPro, it will be much bigger than the Narrative, but also have a much shorter battery life, 2 hours instead of 1.5 days.

[00:24:39] Speaker C: And that will improve a lot with time. Within 5 years from now, you will be able to capture your full day in video instead. And so Narrative exists on the spectrum of 1 photo every 30 seconds up to 30 frames per second. And we will evolve through that spectrum with time and allow the user to choose with time, where do they

[00:25:04] Speaker C: want to capture video on that spectrum? Do they want to prioritize a long battery life of maybe up to 2 weeks, or do they want to provide video for sharing and remembering instead of just photos? But it's still the same principles that apply, the same use cases, the same image algorithms, the same segmentation is needed,

[00:25:30] Speaker C: the same identification of the useful content, and so on. So video and photos are going to merge in the future into the same kind of content when the, when the volumes of photos get big enough for, for actually being very close to video.

[00:25:46] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:25:47] Speaker B: So I think, I mean, you have to think about the demand side, and I think the demand for crappy videos taken on mobile phones is not there yet. And the quality of—

[00:25:56] Speaker A: The demand for crappy videos or the demand for videos from—

[00:25:59] Speaker B: From crappy videos.

[00:26:02] Speaker A: That makes sense. Yeah.

[00:26:05] Speaker B: So, but I think obviously, I mean, it's about, I mean, content in general, video, sound. I mean, we will capture it on the go as we move on, and it's absolutely beautiful. And it's really about how can we— I think the beautiful about that time, about that instant, or connectivity is that we can reach people right away. And think about your brand, or I mean, also in the beautiful Ignite talk in the beginning, photojournalism

[00:26:30] Speaker B: is not dead at all. It's just about there's, well, a couple of more photojournalists out there. And well, communities like us connect the guys who need that content with all those guys right away. So one example, we did a beautiful story I could do it for anyone. Our writer is VIP of Turkey and Taksim Square, what happened in Istanbul last year. And we can— we know who's there, and we can reach those guys with a push notification

[00:26:55] Speaker B: and tell them, you know what, I mean, we need your images, we need your videos or your sounds of what's going on there, and we want to publish this and make a bit of money with that. And that's the difference, what wasn't possible some years ago.

[00:27:07] Speaker A: Great. Any questions from the audience? Yeah, the question right there. Shout out. Great question.

[00:27:12] Speaker C: Everybody's—

[00:27:12] Speaker A: how did you build the community was the question.

[00:27:15] Speaker B: So first of all, the basic rule of building communities is you just asked the wrong question. It's about joining communities. And I think very— I mean, it's my personal story. When I moved to New York and I lost my camera and stuff, I started hosting exhibitions. So I had mobile phone photo exhibitions in Berlin and New York, published a book with Ed Stubb, and got connected with a very nerdy community of

[00:27:40] Speaker B: photographers on Flickr and Twitter worldwide. And I think that was pre-Hipstamatic, pre-Instagram and whatnot, but it was already there. And everyone knew it wouldn't happen on Flickr. And well, my ambition was to build that place and organically grow it with a very, very simple promise that we kept in the first place, that we wouldn't mess with you as a photographer, neither your rights and your copyrights or your data.

[00:28:05] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:28:05] Speaker B: And that's a key principle, because if you want to be a social network and basically grant yourself a royalty-free license with every single photo you upload to that, well, you mess with the photography, with the photographer, and what photography and media is all about. So for us, the next step is we didn't invent the marketplace ourselves. It was from the community who wanted that, because likes are not enough. And I think that is kind of the honest way

[00:28:31] Speaker B: of building communities.

[00:28:32] Speaker A: You want to add anything, Martin, to that?

[00:28:35] Speaker C: I can add a question. You said before, Flo, that you're disruptive to the sort of stock media industry. In what way are you actually disruptive? Aren't you doing the same thing that iStockphoto already did a long time?

[00:28:53] Speaker B: No, not at all, because I mean, obviously it's 7 or 8 years ago when people like me could afford a digital SLR camera under $1,000 on the market and thought they'd become cool photographers, something happened. Well, yeah, there was a flood of amateur photographers getting in there and a flood of content. But what, well, the industry leaders built is, well, they just employed people who will look at all these images and tag those. And the crazy

[00:29:19] Speaker B: thing is now is everyone has a camera and everyone is a photographer or a photojournalist, and we get Massive amounts of photos and massive amounts of data. And what we can do is completely automate that whole process of the licensing, of the ranking, of the tagging. And the thing is, no one— they can't do it. That's as simple as that. So we are the only ones who can do it.

[00:29:41] Speaker A: I mean, but there's a big difference between a professional photographer and any photographer. I think anybody—

[00:29:46] Speaker B: That's not true because we—

[00:29:47] Speaker A: I disagree. So the professional photographer Frequently, or a good professional photographer can go in depth and I think cover an in-depth visual story or long-term stories better than a non-professional photographer. Anybody can capture a good to great image.

[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's not true because what you— what we're talking about, we're not talking about having 200,000 photographers or 150,000. We're having millions, tens of millions, maybe it's about hundreds of millions of photographers in our community. And the point is, we reach those guys instantly. And there's beautiful professional photographers among there. And we know them. And we can call them. We can talk to them. It's one funny example we did. I mean, you might know the German magazine called Der Spiegel.

[00:30:31] Speaker B: It's like the most famous German basically political magazine. So what we did with them, there's in Europe a funny law. It's about— and there were European elections last week. It's about the radius of a cucumber. And it's by law, actually, that the radius of the cucumber in every European country has to be the same. It's ridiculous, I know. But what these guys thought, like, how cool would it be if we just sent,

[00:30:56] Speaker B: like, photographers, like, to Paris, to Barcelona, to Prague, to Berlin, and have them photograph cucumbers? And they were like, that's not possible, it's too expensive. And what I told them, how much time do I have? I told them 24 hours.

[00:31:08] Speaker A: Fine.

[00:31:09] Speaker B: And check out the magazine. Basically, these guys went to supermarkets, bought cucumbers, and photographed the cucumbers in front of the Eiffel Tower or, yeah, well, the Prague Castle and stuff like that, or the Brandenburger Gate in Berlin. And in 24 hours, and I'm not talking about the price, but I mean, that's ridiculous and it works.

[00:31:28] Speaker A: Okay, but that's a different scenario. I get that. You can communicate and capture an image.

[00:31:31] Speaker B: The image is beautiful and professionally, they paid it. The photographers got money and it's a It's a high-quality magazine. It's, well, it's pretty awesome.

[00:31:38] Speaker A: Okay. No, it's an interesting topic, obviously. Any other questions in the audience? Yes, speak up. So the question is, where is the demand for selling the content on the platform?

[00:31:48] Speaker B: I'll tell you why. So what we're seeing, and I think everyone in this room agrees, there's a huge shift in the demand of what actually style of images is used. So if you talk to big agencies or brands out there, They stopped communicating about their consumers. They want their communities to talk and tell their own brand stories. And honestly, well, people just don't buy redundant,

[00:32:14] Speaker B: stocky, stocky, boring content on Shutterstock anymore. They want real photography, real images from real people from the real world. And there is no place where you can go to get those. You can't buy an image on Instagram, on Twitter, on Foursquare, or whatever. And that's the point. There needs to be a platform that creates a business model around content, user-generated content. And as far as I know, this has never existed before. And I think that's what I'm excited about and what

[00:32:39] Speaker B: we're trying to do.

[00:32:42] Speaker A: So really quickly, we're finishing up here. You're both serial entrepreneurs. You've had challenging times, the roller coaster. What's the one— in one sentence, there's a lot of entrepreneurs and researchers in the audience that are trying to build companies. What's the one sentence of advice that you would tell them to help them succeed?

[00:33:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say that you really need to build on something that you believe in and are passionate about, because the roller coaster that Evan refers to, when you go into the dips, the valleys where things are not so much fun, you need to have that passion to drive you forward to the next That was my point, but I'm adding another one.

[00:33:24] Speaker B: It's all about people. So, I mean, honestly, the people you get to hang out with, and you're gonna hang out with them for quite a while, so choose them wisely.

[00:33:33] Speaker A: Fantastic. Let's give a round of applause to these guys. Thank you very much.