PicScout partners with IMS to monitor stock image use in over 3,000 magazines
Herzeliya, Israel, Toronto Canada, 5 July 2005, PicScout Ltd announced today they have partnered with Inquiry Management Systems of Toronto, Ontario, Canada to expand their image tracking services and include monitoring of images used in magazines. The new partnership will enable PicScout to expand its online tracking services for the stock photography industry to the world of print. Today the stock photography industry relies on self-reporting and manual checks to find out how images are being used in print. It is estimated that the industry loses over one hundred million dollars each year due to inaccurate reporting. "We decided to work with IMS since they are the clear market leader in magazine ad tracking in the world. Their archive of 3,000 magazines in North American and Europe will enable our customers to gain much better control over future use of their images as well as gain insight to historical data about how their images were used over the past few years." Said Eyal Gura PicScout's CEO. Based on this partnership PicScout will be launching several services for tracking of images that are used in magazines. These services will automate manual work; improve the industries ability to control use of images and correct inconsistencies in billing.
Martin Hochstein, President of IMS stated, " We are excited by the opportunity to work with a company with the international reach and reputation of PicScout. "Our proprietary technology allows us to isolate advertising in magazines and electronically match each of the over 150,000 images we capture each month to our growing database of over 5 million images. This allows us to determine just where, when and how often each ad has run. This application is a perfect fit with PicScout's service and will contribute to the protection of the copyrights of all PicScout's clients."
The companies have been testing the services with several PicScout customers. "This service significantly expands the scope of PicScout's monitoring capabilities," said Haim Ariav of SuperStock, an early adopter of PicScout's image tracking services. "It will strengthen our compliance work flow, offering even more copyright protection to our clients and artists." The Image Tracker for Print Service is available in both North America and key European markets
About PicScout
PicScout is [www.picscout.com] a leading technology provider to the stock photography industry. The company offers solutions for image owners to control and protect their images in the information age. PicScout's image recognition solution enables the comparison of image databases to inpidual images, which are being used on commercial websites. Based on this technology, PicScout provides a number of services to the stock photography industry. These services enable stock photography agencies and photographers to better control their assets, enforce copyrights, develop new billing methods and increase their customer base. PicScout monitors over 3 million images for the world's most prestigious image libraries.
For more information please contact:
Ze'ev Rozov, VP Sales & Marketing, PicScout
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About Inquiry Management Systems
Established in 1979, Inquiry Management systems (IMS) [www.ims.ca] is a Canadian based database management company that collects, cleans, stores, processes, mines, and distributes data on behalf of its clients'. With offices in Toronto, Canada, New York and London, England, IMS presently serves over 1,000 clients in the not-for-profit, petrochemical, publishing, automotive, beer and leisure activities industries with a range of ASP applications and full service database products and services.
For more information please contact
Martin Hochstein, President of IMS
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