What is StockPodium?

StockPodium is a stock images marketplace, that makes searching for stock images easy and fast by using intuitive filters and advanced visual similarity technology.

Creative thinking visualizes ideas in images. In our daily life we often use visual similarity to describe what we like or dislike and to identify people, places and events. Our goal is to shorten the time and the efforts for finding quality stock images with clear copy rights and on good price. The model is popular as microstock image agencies, that operate via the web – iStockPhoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime to mention some.

One of the biggest advantages of StockPodium is that it allows images to be searched not only by key words but also using technology called visual similarity – image recognition technology that discovers similarity in color and shape. We think this is very handy way to search for images as photographers that sale images as well as image buyers have difficult time key-wording images that sometimes have abstract content. There are several ways to use the visual search: uploading a picture from your computer, submitting url or simply using one of the image results in a native key word search query. Further more, we offer advanced filter options to narrow and refine search results (color matching, image format, licensed usage, etc.) The users has available a vast collection of quality images and power tools to pick the right picture in a more intelligent and timely fashion.

Visual similarity search dramatically improves user experience and saves time. You do not have to browse through hundreds of pages of search results. It’s simply a matter of a couple clicks to find proper images using the visual similarity tools.

StockPodium’s second advantage is aggregation – in our search results we combine images from the leading microstock agencies:Dreamstime, Fotolia, 123RF, StockXpert and FeaturePics. This dramatically saves time for our users as they are not supposed to visit all this websites to find the best mach picture.

The mixture of visual search tools, aggregated content and friendly UI makes StockPodum attractive to adopted and used by our primary target – small and middle size creative agencies, bloggers, freelancers and news agencies

The digital photography phenomenon changed the stock image market irreversibly. Stock images used to be expensive. Image agencies were too selective on choosing photo contributors. The old model is now gone enabling you to receive great quality picture for less. It’s easier than ever to contribute and monetize your digital photo collections. We want to take advantage of that new move and bring it one step further by rethinking the way people search for stock images.

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The team behind StockPodium

Well, it’s time to introduce ourselves, what we do and what we are best at.

Georgi Kadrev is offically entitled CEO but we like to call him our image guru. Georgi has long lasting expertise and passion regarding image analysis and its applications. His first big pet project, Easy Morphing, was dedicated to image transformations and morphing, winning many national student awards between 2001 and 2003.

In August 2008 Georgi officially founded Imagga Bulgaria aiming to popularize the use of visual similarity. With Imagga he managed to take part in international initiatives related to innovation and entrepreneurship. He was a finalist in NovaTECH, Istanbul ‘08, a finalist in Mini-Seedcamp, London ‘09, and an attendant in Global Entrepreneurship Competition, Barcelona ‘09.

Georgi brings both his technical expertise and business vision in the process of building the great innovative company that StockPodium is meant to be.

Hristo Georgiev is the Marketing Director and social master. Chris (that’s how he loves to be called) together with Pavel Andreev co-founded Web Gravity, a web design and development company with various web awards in Bulgaria. Some of those awards include: Golden Umbrella Festival, Albena 2007, and BG Site, Sofia 2008. For this year edition of BG Site web competition Chris has been invited to be part of the jury. Chris is also a committed blogger and passionate web evangelist.

The role of Chris in Stock Podium includes permanent idea generation, maniacal attention to details, and of course, business development and evangelizing the great result of our collective efforts.

Pavel Andreev is Creative Director and art magician. If you like the design and the UI of our project, Pavel is to blame. Pavel has been actively involved in numerous web projects during the last 8 years. He is co-founder and currently works as Creative director of Web Gravity. Pavel has advanced knowledge in graphic design and video editing. His passion is to design websites that maintain a balance of usability and effective content presentation. As a Creative director he is responsible for some award winning web projects. He is always looking for new and exciting projects to integrate his visual concepts.

Pavel is responsible for all visual ideas and the flawless user experience of Stock Podium.

We think that’s a pretty good introduction of ourselves. We will be sharing some more personal likes and dislikes in the future posts. May be some more pictures of us as well.

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Some exciting news

We are starting our blog and that’s pretty exciting. We will be using it to announce news about our product development, share our experience and ask for some feedback.

StockPodium is about to change, and all of you will see that change very soon. We have some great news to share so stay tuned and subscribe for our RSS feed.

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