Ulla Engeström

A four-field matrix on image-tagging services

Image tagging is becoming widely popular. It was listed as one of the hottest startup spaces in 2011, and with a good reason. Alongside video, images are the most engaging media online through which news, music, travel, fashion, interiors, etc. is consumed. So far, millions of views have not directly converted into new customers, increased traffic or better engagement. With in-image tags, this is about to change. Interactive tags are the same for images as hyperlinks are for text.

Image tagging is not a new phenomenon, and probably most of us have tried adding notes to their photo albums on Flickr or Facebook. One of the early innovators in this space was Creg Elin, who created an open-source standard for image annotation called Fotonotes. The best-known derivation of FotoNotes is Flickr's note feature.

Services that offer image tagging differ in at least two aspects: whether tagging is offered as an additional feature within an image hosting service or if it is offered as an independent tagging service. Another differentiator is the purpose / function of the tags: whether they are mostly explanatory, (revealing details of the image) or they are commercial (showing advertisement). In the matrix below I have compared companies along these two dimensions.

IMAGE NOTES WITHIN A SERVICE

In the upper right corner we have explanatory tagging as within a service.  A user can designate an area of the image and add a note to it. These notes may or may not contain hyperlinks. Facebook transformed image annotation into a social game: if you associate a tag with another person within the service, they receive a message. A recently published patent description anticipates Facebook is moving from purely social tagging towards exploring its commercial variations. A quote from FB’s patent application:

”The method includes selecting a digital media and selecting region within the digital media. The method may further include associating a person or entity with the selected region and sending a notification of the association the person or entity or a different person or entity. The method may further include sending advertising with the notification.”

User story: share details of photos with the people who follow you in order to make image viewing more fun

COMMERCIAL TAGS WITHIN A SERVICE

In the lower left corner we have users or service providers who can add commercial notes and links in images for the purpose of generating traffic to points of sale or improving brand interaction time. Facebook recently made another bold move in this space by making it possible to tag images with Facebook Pages. Commercial tagging is most likely to work best within services where people are already in the mood of finding inspiration and great offers, and where for this reason showing advertisement feels more like a service and less like an irritation, example of this being a Google-backed fashion portal called ShopStyle.

User story: find new products in hopefully more fun than irritating ways to build brand visibility and online sales

 EXPLANATORY TAGGING ANYWHERE ON THE WEB

In the upper right corner people can add notes to their images, identify objects and link entities and publish them anywhere on the web. Tags can be ”plain” or ”smart”, containing functional elements such as a music or video player, follow option or a shop. The nature of the tags can be explanatory and their primary purpose is to entertain and engage the viewer. Companies in this space: ThingLink and Stipple.

User story:  transform images into a media platform and offer a rich image viewing experience.

COMMERCIAL TAGGING ANYWHERE ON THE WEB

Companies in this category aim to monetize images by offering (more or less relevant or correct) advertisement on them. Pixazza/Google, GumGum, and ImageSpaceMedia serve banner-ads that pop up on the image. The business potential of this category is huge, but the risk is low performance that people get increasingly intolerant towards disruptive banner advertisement that spoils the image viewing experience.  Users who simply hate these services use blowser extensions like AdBlock Plus that guarantee “annoyance free browsing”.

User story: Find latest offers and get ideas what to buy when browsing images.

East London in April

The Sound of Image

Last October, I was driving towards Sebastopol to attend Foo Camp with my old friend, Eric Wahlforss. We were chatting about life and various miscellaneous ideas, when I happened to ask whether SoundCloud had unique permanent URLs for its tracks.

It seemed a little outside our focus at first, perhaps, but still something that would be fun to explore. I mean, images being the platform for serving all kinds of content, why not serve sound on images?

Images and sounds make a natural and powerful combination. Both online and offline, they create inspiration and context for consumption. We make decisions about what to buy, where to go and who to see, based on images. Music inspires fashion designers to create collections, and visual stories inspire those who make music.

Every image has a story. With ThingLink and SoundCloud, you can tell it.

Read more: ThingLink fills images with sound To copy the image with tags, choose 'embed image' and copy-paste the code snippet into the HTML field of your blog post.

Images as platforms and objects as channels

For the past five years, I've been exploring social and business models around objects. Objects - the people, places and things in our lives - each have stories. Things around us can tell us many things from informational and historical standpoints.  And the hundreds of billions of online images offer an exciting new platform for discovery.

In 2006, I got fascinated about the idea of being able to "right-click" everyday objects, which would reveal their true nature -- how old are they, who made them, and who takes care of them. I sat down with Adam Greenfield, formerly Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services, to explore the provenance of objects.

In 2008 I founded a company, Thinglink, to develop tools for social connection around objects and long-tail markets. By that point it was clear that objects are, in fact, becoming points of navigation.

Now in 2011, objects are clickable. The first stage of this "object navigation" is interactive images. In-image tagging technology is being used to link objects in your images to anywhere on the Internet.  The second stage of object navigation focuses on physical objects as channels for information. With the emergence of object navigation, the ways we use the Internet will radically change for the better.

 

Talking about images, here is my five cents:

1. An image can directly serve the objects it shows

Every image tells more than a thousand words. The most common question asked is, "What's in Your Photo?"  What is this object? Where can I get it? Who else knows about or likes this?  Images can answer these questions and more.  They can become a new navigational surface for search.

 2. An image can serve advertising, commerce, information sharing, social connection, and shopping

According to Forrester, by 2014, 53% of total retail sales (online and offline) will be affected by the Web, as consumers increasingly use the Internet to research products before purchasing. Consumer purchasing decisions are being made based on images and user preference and ratings: Should I read this article? Should I reserve a room at this hotel? Should I meet this guy?

We make decisions based  on images. Search is becoming image-based. And in-image interaction tools developed by Thinglink are enabling image-based advertising, commerce, information sharing, social connection and shopping.

3. Images entertain and drive traffic

Advertising is, at its best, art photography or photographic art. Image ads constitute half of the content of major fashion magazines with the best photographers shooting the best models wearing clothes and accessories from major brands. What if all these image advertisement became interactive with links to retailers? Images would become the new point-of-sale.

4. A good image is the least irritating advertisement.

Online banners ads are quickly losing their effectiveness. There is way too much inventory, ads looks the same and prices are falling.  Thinglink aims to recreate banner ads with interactive links, better call to action links and user preference data that provides increasing value to marketers.

5.  New vocabulary: Image Inventory and Image Interest Factor

Publishers need to start asking: Do your images serve your business goals? How much of your image inventory drives traffic to points of sale? Does your image inventory enable robust user interaction? How much of your image inventory drives reader retention?

In sum, images are being transformed by in-image links to relevant information for advertising, commerce, entertainment, and social connection. With photos constituting perhaps 20 per cent of web real estate, the hundreds of billion of photos online offer rich opportunities for in-image links to engaging user experiences that will revolutionize and transform image interaction. That's an incredible opportunity that we are very excited about sharing.

 

Greetings from WEF Summer Davos: investing in the long tail builds sustainable growth

It’s 10 am in the morning and Ed Chan, the CEO of Walmart China, is straightening his tie on the stage of the newly built Congress centre in Tianjin. There are 95 men in black and five women in the room, waiting for Mr Zein Mahmoud Abdalla, the CEO of Pepsi Europe, to kick off a World Economic Forum panel discussion on the “emerging new consumer”. Mr Chan looks slightly uncomfortable in his chair. Beside him sits Mr Feng Dongming, the CEO of Markor Investment Group from China, and Mr Chander Prakash Gurnani, the CEO of Mahindra Satyam, from India. The overall theme of the conference is – sustainability.

Big multinational companies are on their toes, and for good reason. Up until now they have been able to control the supply of goods and services on the global market. Customer behaviour and the structure of the global market is, however, changing at a fast rate.  One sign of this is the steady growth in annual online sales. Furthermore, an increasing number of customers both on the developed and the emerging markets wants to know exactly what they are buying.

“We have noticed this, and so we need to pay more attention to the transparency of our supplier networks”, says Mr Ed Chan from Walmart.

There is, however, more to this. People want to be good. Let’s imagine a small market survey that asks people “who would you like to give your money to?” Options: “A: a handful of big multinational companies” or “B: a number of smaller local companies”.  A wild guess is that 40 per cent of us have never thought about it and could not tell, 25 per cent could not care less, 5 per cent would say A because of their stock portfolio, but perhaps 30 per cent would rather choose option B.

Also, let’s imagine that this Christmas, those 30 per cent would shift from buying their presents from big brands to buying from smaller local brands. From a macro-economical point of view, the consequences would be considerable. Thirty per cent of the total Christmas sales is lots of money. It means lots of losses for brands like GAP, NIKE and Pepsi, and lots of gains for individual crafters and designers on places like Etsy.

From the sustainability point of view in particular, we should be interested in who gets to offer products to the emerging consumer. This has to do with how we distribute wealth from the growth.

Setting up a presence on the global market has become ridiculously easy. Starting your online store takes five minutes. Signing up for a long tail search engine takes one email. Buying keywords, three minutes. Advertising to your friends requires one click on Facebook. Of course, if you are a one-person entrepreneur, scaling is still a problem – or is it?

On Etsy alone there are currently 6.5 million users and there seems to be no end to its growth. New search engines and shopping places for small brands and fair trade are popping up like mushrooms after rain. Can the small really beat the big? Difficult to say, but at least the long tail can put up a fight against the fat tail.

Or perhaps they don’t have to fight. Perhaps, under the pressure from consumers, multinationals are willing to consider complementing their centralized models of production and marketing with more distributed models. Would they really? I must ask.

 Mr Abdalla coughs, Mr Ed Chan straightens his tie again, and Mr Dongming stares into the emptiness. “You are right”, said Mr. Gurnani finally, “the internet is coming”.

Habitare 2010

Bright colors, big prints and reproductions keep coming. Here are some shots form Habitare 2010, Helsinki Design Week. Feel free to complete the tagging!

 

Notes from DLDwomen 2010: no woman wants to waste time

Since serveral technology and social media conferences suffer from the lack of female speakers, organizers, and participants, it has become common to put together an obligatory panel on the ”female perspective in technology”.

When I first heard there is a whole conference on the subject, the DLD women by Hubert Burda Media, I was a bit sceptical. How could it work?

I signed in the last minute, and I’m extremely glad that I did, because DLD women was a superb gathering both in terms of content, spirit and networking opportunities. Here are my notes:

Doris Dörrie: Turn of the control button and relax

The first presentation I saw was by a German film director Doris Dörrie, who lit the whole room with her positive and relaxed carisma and reminded us that women’s continuous tendency to manage and control everything leaves too little time for creativity. ”The most difficult thing is to have the body and the mind in the same place. Typically the body is in one place, but the mind is (managing) somewhere else. You really need to excersise to keep them in one place. I’ve tried zen cooking.”

Paulo Coelho: don’t use drugs to be creative

Few moments later the man in black, Paulo Coelho, stepped on stage and told about his creative process: ”I live my life and one day I feel I’m pregnanat and I need to give birth to something. Then I go and write a book.” He also recommended not to use drugs to enhance creativity: ” Drugs kills the most important thing in you: the power of decision.”

Sonali de Rycker: show your desire to win

The lack of female managers or web entrepreneurs is alarming. Sara Öhrvall, the head of R&D at Bonnier reminded that in Europe and Northern America the number of female computer engineers has dropped from 37 to 18 percent during the past two years and that at MacWorld conferences you only see women in Apple’s commercials, where a tech-savy future mom uses an iPhone to send an ultra sound image to the dad who cannot attend the ultrasound.

Still, what is at least equally alarming is the lack of female investors and venture capitalists. With more women investors, more female-led startups would get funded. Sonali De Ryckel gave advice for women who are to pitch their start-ups: don’t hide your feminity, but show your desire to win.

Andrew Robertson: For men the web is about fantasy, for women about reality

Andrew Robertson from BBDO loaded some statistics:  ”for men, the Internet is about scoring (84% of all virtual players are men), for women, it is about relationships. As much as 69 % of young mothers frequent on one or more social media sites. Both men and women on average have 130 Facebook friends. For men the web is about fantasy whereas for women, it is about the reality. 40% of men feel more attractive online than offline.”

What all women really want? Kate Sayre knows: ”No one wants to waste time”. (And every woman in the room nodded in accordance). Everyone is trying to do the household related duties faster, and earn more time for ourselves. According to Kate Sayre the Internet serves women perfectly, since it helps save time and explore the world around us without having to leave home.

Women are adapting interenet at a fast speed, and there is already 8% more female internet users in the world. Women dominate the use (but not the development) of social web. More men than women use smart phones.

There was one point when I felt quite uneasy, and that was when shopping mass fashion was framed as a wonderful way  for women to be online and to express their female aesthetic creativity. I think I was not the only one in the room thinking that there should be a better use for that  creative energy. I regretted missing the ”Women with mission” panel in the end of the second day.

One female super star on stage to entertain us was the queen Zaha Hadid, and his husband and colleague Patric who carried her handbag and gave us beautiful descriptions of their marvellous work.

Female managers are few, startup entrepreneurs even fewer

During one of the breaks I met with Imi Eiron from Saloona online magazine, with whom we had a good chat about the conference. In general, we thought it is useful to distinguish between women who work for others (managers) and women who work for themselves (startup founders, entrepreneurs). In many European counties, at least, being a female startup entrepreneur with small children is almost mission impossible. This is because:

1. New ideas typically emerge and develop ourside your daily job, in the evenings and weekends.  If you have kids, you don’t have this extra time.
2. Few men are willing to take the main responsibility of the household and the kids during the first intensive years of the startup.
3. Few woman are willing to give the responsibility of the kids and the household for anybody else.
4. Few have an alternative support structure such as grand parents
5. Few can afford to to hire a household person or a nanny before their funding is resolved
6. Few can afford being without pay for 2-3 years

As a woman with kids your best chances to become an entrepreneur is when

• your kids are old enough to go to daycare or school
• you are wealthy enough to hire help with household and childcare
• you have good connections with important people in your field
• your husband does not mess around with other woman, drugs, or anything that disturbes your ability to focus

 

Fantasy fills fashion

This week has been great in terms of lunch meetings. Yesterday I met with the CEO of Zipipop Helene Auramo, who introduced me to a fantastic new brand Gilles et Dada (check out their amazing photo blog!). Today I bumbed into the queen of coctail dress Tiia Vanhatapio, whose Druidress SS11 will show at the New Your Fashion Week in September.

 

Some points that Thinglink private beta taught me about social objects

We built the Thinglink private beta to explore how people socialize around objects. For this version we enabled different ways to converse or associate with lifestyle objects. These include:

- photo sharing; users can post photos of their favorite places and things from their desktop or from Flickr

- object identification; users can identify things in their own or other people’s photos

- conversation; users can comment each others photos or posts about interesting products

- expressions of liking or ownership; users can click “I like” or “ I have” when browsing objects in the Thinglink database

- activity streams; users own actions and their followers actions are shown in each user’s personal activity stream

For making the social side of an object visible, we saved things in our database as blueprints, and included a small community section on each things’ page. I this section we showed: user photos of that specific object, the number of people who owned the object, the number of people who liked the object, as well as the number of posts and tweets of the object. This tentative representation of the network of users around an object led us to an idea of a ”thing graph”, a collection of connections that an object can have to its various contexts of manufacture, use and promotion.

1. Blank objects are hard to grasp

Quite soon we noticed that posting about things per se did not get our users excited. Without a connection to a real or an imaginary place, a person, or an idea, objects remained ”blank”, and they did not invite conversation.

2. A shared taste indicates a shared sense of life

On the other hand, we noticed that people are used to expressing their own taste by saying whether they like something or not. The expression of ones taste and lifestyle is interesting, because it creates opportunities for people to connect with someone who thinks similarly. Most active users on the Thinglink private beta who shared an interest in similar objects started developing friendship. They arranged to meet each other, visit each others’ homes, compare collections and exchange things.

A shared taste for everyday objects seemed to be a powerful indicator of a shared sense of life between people. This is because an object is always an outcome of choices made during its design and production, and an object always reveals and reflects the values of its makers. People as consumers are naturally interested in objects that fit their style of living, and brands that share or understand their values, desires and dreams.

3. Connections of a thing serve various kinds of discovery

During the beta phase we also noticed that discovering new interesting things almost always includes other types of discovery. Sometimes things lead to other things, which again lead to places to buy or articles about the designer. Other times things can introduce us other people, and we are thrilled to discover aesthetic soul mates or fellow collectors. Old things can open us new horizons to ourselves, to our family, or to our cultural history. We at Thinglink found it important to support various kinds of discovery, not only commercial.

4. Images are inspiring filters

On Thinglink private beta images invited more comments than posts. The most inspiring images were the ones that had a connection with the uploader: photos from a person's home or summer place, office, favorite place, or outfit. Thinglink beta users also found it interesting to tag and browse screen shots from famous movies (e.g. James Bond and Star Wars).

The identification and linking of things in an image made the Thinglink users filters for other users. When both people and things became points of navigation, we ended up with a multi-layered representation of a thing where facts (product details) and fiction (stories), commerce (places to buy), games (identification contests) and social life (conversation and information from other owners) converged and intertwined.  But this was too much to start with.  So we rebuilt Thinglink and made it something extremely simple: a tool to link things in an image, and make images interactive. 

Back to basics: giving things an identity

Over the spring we built an easy bit.ly-style image-tagging tool where anyone can tag things in an image and link them to where they want. It is built to serve both publishers and photographers of lifestyle magazines as well as designers, crafters, artists or basically anyone who want to show their photos in an interactive format. This is our minimum viable product, and we want to see how it works before we make it any more complicated. You are welcome to try it out and let us know how it works for you! 

Here is an example how it works for me: I tagged a photo of my summer sewing room. I'm a great fan of second hands and vintage textiles that I use for decorating spaces. I love sharing information about my projects and of the things that I've set to live together.

Prohibiting photography prevents promoting art exhibitions in social media

One morning at La Torrefazzione I bumped into Sami Sykkö, the editor-in-chief of the Gloria Magazine,  who invited me to share a selection of my second-hand discoveries in their style section. I said ok, and packed some of my favorite outfits and accessoris in a suitcase, but then I remembered that I was also to pick a place for the shooting.

Our house was a mess so I said that won't work, and suggested we go to a nice art museum nearby.  There was a wonderful exhibition of 1950s abstract art that I thought would visually fit with whatever I wanted to show.

It was only at the shooting place early in the morning where we were reminded of the museum's copyright policy that prevented any reproduction of any part of the artworks shown at the museum. 

With many public museums moving more recently towards more open photography policies, it was  disappointing to learn that the Didrichsen art museum has chosen to prohibit photography. For small cultural institutions struggling to attract new generations this is not only unfortunate but quite certainly  self-destructive.

No-Photography policy at museums typically aims at preventing two things: 1) light exposure of sensitive artworks and 2) unauthorized reproduction and distribution of the exhibited artworks.   Majority of photos taken with a camera phones at a museum end up feeding the visitor's activity stream on Facebook or Flickr, and thus, promoting the exhibition onwards. Photos where artwork is shown as an element of an interior or a fashion setting certainly should not harm the artist nor the museum, quite the contrary. For an increasing number of visitors using camera phones to feed their various activity streams  'No Photos' equals 'Don't Tell Your Friends'. So, how about just restricting the use of flash?

As Didrichsen was full of paintings, it was difficult to find a shooting angle without any artwork in the background. Eventually, we found one: the bathroom. Below the full story.

Images: Elina Simonen for Gloria