Yotophoto.com
Sector: online photo search (for Creative Commons, public domain and other free-to-use images)
Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Management: Mark Thomson. Previous startup was a brick and mortar + e-commerce “action sports” retail operation.
Funding: Private.
Secret Sauce: Currently indexing more than 250,000 Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL and other copyleft images. Images are generally protected by full copyright (all rights reserved) and not available for others to use. The company got its start indexing images from the English Wikipedia. Thomson said, “I should point out that our primary target market is not traditional print or online publishers but rather individual bloggers and webmasters. Blogging is exploding but most blogs are still purely text based. We’d like to help enable these ‘citizen-publishers’ to incorporate relevant visual media in their articles.” Yotophoto is a search engine for free-to-use images including. Yotophoto indexes free images from sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Stock.Xchng, the US government, and more. Advanced search options allow searching by license, image size and boolean keyword matching. Yotophoto also uses an advanced keyword stemming algorithm. The site has become popular with bloggers, educators, students, designers and digital artists and each one of these users sees Yotophoto differently. For example, students and teachers are often looking for photos of historical significance (mainly from the Wikipedia) while graphic artists tend to search out textures and clean high-res shots of a more artistic nature. Bloggers on the other hand, tend to vary their searches more widely depending on the topic du jour. Future plans include implementing tools to aid in the re-mixing, re-using and re-publishing of the images. All the while helping the user remain compliant with the the various license requirements (such as source attribution). Yotophoto currently indexes “well over a quarter-million images”.
Seen and Heard: The Philadelphia Inquirer write-up. Yotophoto was covered on episode 263 of G4TechTV’s ‘Call For Help’ program. Quote: “WOW, THIS IS GOOD…” – Leo Laporte Full transcript here. Also on SolutionWatch , ResearchBuzz, LockerGnome and an interview with Mark here.