Theres been plenty going on since my last new round-up, here's a few news stories that caught my eye:

Polylooks, a German photo agency announced (PDF release) the launch of their the UK microstock offering, with the polylooks.co.uk domain name clearly angling for a slice of the UK microstock market while polylooks.com still directs to the German language site. The release states that they already have 35000 UK submitted images along with an "extensive European collection".

Yuri released a sales predictor (arcurs.com/cal) for those who love to crunch the numbers. To be honest I can't see the point in trying to predict monthly sales? Analyse yes, but extrapolate future earnings? The sales analysis in isyndica seems to work pretty well for me at guessing what the end of the month will bring (although it probably does not take into account reduced weekend sales at the end of the month etc. DBtale posted a little bit of analysis on his blog.

Fotolia passed 7 million images (including their vector collection of 300k+).

Lookstat formally announced the launch of their back office services for photographers. For a pay-as-you-go flat-free-per-image they will embed keywords and descriptions, edit and upload your images handling any necessary resubmission of your work. The services is aimed at pro photographers who (perhaps like all of us) would like to spend more time concentrating on shooting and less on uploading.

Lookstat also announced the launch of their Partner API which will allow developers controlled access to lookstat data, and hinted at new analytics features coming soon.

Subscription microstock market leader Shutterstock announced the purchase of bigstockphoto, providing bigstock with a larger advertising budget and allowing shutterstock to take a bigger slice of the pay-as-you-go / individual image sales market. Related post on the bigstock forum.

I've started using twitter to post and comment on smaller microstock news stories as they happen.

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