Startup microstock vivozoom have announced several changes to their site following buyer feedback , new marketing activity, improved search and "vivotweet" their twitter account. Interestingly they plan to announce their image needs to photographers via email and via twitter; currently citing agriculture, vineyards, farmland, animals, crops, harvest fruits and vegetable as subjects in need.

isyndica announced they now allow users to create new account using their settings from one of several third party sources including flickr, google and facebook. isyndica also now supports the distribution of illustrations (vector images) as well as photos and video. You can now also pay for your upload credits with paypal.

Shutterstock announced (press release) the launch of their shuttertweet application which automatically 'tweets' various (banal?) messages about contributors latest approved batches and sales stats.

Dreamstime announced a facebook application and fotolia launched a plugin for the wordpress blogging platform.

Mostphotos announced some server upgrades and that they were still on track with development of their new platform (mostphotos 3.0) details in the mostphotos development blog. A visit to mostphotos will show that the current platform seems excellent at picking attractive looking nature and landscape photos, not necessarily good microstock, this might be one reason my stock photo sales are so low at MP.

Panthermedia announced a new extended license to cater for the needs of corporate buyers, more flexible terms for double the cost of a standard license. New extended subscription options were also announced photographers can choose to opt-out of these extended sales options by 1st September if they want.

In late July Getty officially welcomed the free stock photo site stockxchng (sxc.hu) into the fold by replacing all the stockxpert advertisements on sxc with ads for istockphoto. Getty have controlled sxc since the February takeover of jupiterimages. sxc contributors who have an istockphoto account can include a link to their istock portfolio on scx.hu. Alexa recorded a noticable drop in traffic to stockxpert but only reducing levels to those back in March this year. As most of my sales on stockxpert (SXP) come from Jupiter unlimited and photos.com so it's hard for me to be exact about any drop in sales since the change but with alexa reporting 30% of SXPs traffic coming from sxc.hu it can't be good news for SXP contributors and their sales.

Clustershot added webdav support to allow easier batch uploads.

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