Fotegrafik

Great company which is fund-raising. Any interest?

Comments from Daryl:
Overall suggestion: Take a second look at the business plan.

1. Competitors are gaining traction in relatively large consumer markets, this direct approach seems to be gaining more traction than Fotegrafik's B2B business model. With the extension to the video segment, Fotegrafik has potential to recapture market share from competitors.
2. No clear pain point. It seems that the most probably anchor customers would be security or event companies (such as youth olympic games), which may result in scalability problems if the company grows. Fotegraphik has yet to generate its first sale dollars, but with the current security concerns, has great potential to gain anchor customers in this segment.
3. There is a good balance within the management team between business experience and technical knowledge.

Aspiring global leader in the search and automatic meta-tagging of visual content
Fotegrafik wants to be a global leader in visual search and automatic meta-tagging technologies
- applied to digital images and videos - that can be licensed or sold as a service.
The Company started in 2007, as an image bank business based in Singapore, offering
photographers and other digital media providers a platform for monetization of their content.
Realizing immediately the important challenges of acquiring, managing, sorting, indexing and
searching new and existing libraries of visual assets, the Company decided to refocus on
building innovative solutions to address them, in partnership with a team of world leading
experts in the field of computer vision.
Together they co-developed cutting-edge image understanding technologies that analyze images
and assign them a unique digital signature comprising of color position, textures and shapes,
faces, quality metrics and keywords. This allows powerful visual searches and automatic metatagging
to be performed, a breakthrough capability creating a substantial business opportunity
for Fotegrafik .
Very large addressable market worldwide, growing exponentially
In 2008, the digital storage universe was estimated at roughly 281 billion gigabytes, of which
80% was made of digital images (Source: EMC2). Fotegrafik estimates that 90% of these
images are not key-worded and therefore cannot be searched nor found with the traditional
keyword meta-tag based methods used by the likes of Google, Yahoo, Flickr. In addition the,
common way to keyword an image is labor-intensive, therefore expensive, slow and subjective.
The Company addresses 3 major segments:
• Owners and resellers of visual content, namely stock photo/news agencies (Getty,
Corbis, Thomson-Reuters..) TV and movie studios, public and private libraries, which
typically manage large media libraries. Fotegrafik allows them to acquire and process
more images in a faster way, hence dramatically reducing cost, increasing monetization,
improving the visual quality of their content, helping detect copyright infringement. It
also provides their end-users with easier, faster ways to find and purchase content.
• Social networks, search engines, photo or movie online services, such as Facebook,
Google Flickr. Fotegrafik allows the automatic keywording of visual content, and
searching for images based on visual characteristics; this helps create stickiness for the
sites. In addition, it allows them to automatically generate relevant advertisements next
to content with no (or wrong) keywords.
• Homeland and private security agencies, which collect and monitor large volumes of
digital images and videos. Fotegrafik allows them to search and filter by visual
characteristics and quickly draw links between images or videos, hence creating critical
information that can be acted upon.
Solutions tailored to the needs of the various segments
Fotegrafik offers tailored solutions:
• An integrated enterprise solution model, licensed-based, running on resident servers at
the client: revenues to come from licensing, post sales services (project management,
installation, training), warranty, support and maintenance, and potentially revenue
sharing.
• A SaaS platform model for organizations that prefer initially not to commit to an
investment in an enterprise solution, or want to evaluate Fotegrafik’s solutions prior to
licensing: revenues to come from revenue sharing and/or based on usage.