In July, Upendra Shardanand, chief executive and founder of Daylife, the aggregator that newspapers like, told the Observer that the digital services start-up would soon have new publishing products that would make it even easier for newspapers and magazines to get new, automatically updated content onto their Web sites. Earlier this year, Getty Images quietly invested $4 million in Daylife, and this week, the companies released a new Web publishing tool that will make it easier for photo editors to keep up with users’ demands for new content—and boost those refresh rates while they’re at it.
Daylife and Getty are working together to create what they’re calling “SmartMedia” products, which will make creating slideshows, widgets and other features using Getty content and Daylife’s technology easy and effective.
Daylife’s platform was already compatible with Getty, and gathered their photos, in their vast library of news, video and other data, into their platform. Daylife’s technology automatically tagged Getty’s snaps and other content with detailed information—from location and subject matter to proper names and tone (like “snarky” for example). Clients like Newsweek, USA Today and NPR are charged a flat yearly fee—ranging from $3,000 to $30,000—for access to all that content and publishing tools created by Daylife to pull that information onto their sites easily and effectively.
Their first collaborative product? SmartGalleries. Editors can set up photo multiple galleries for, say, the U.S. Open, and, after entering a few preferences, then walk away: The “intelligent” system will automatically display images of games, crowds and shouting matches, and the galleries will be updated with new photos in real time, as they are fed into Getty’s system. If they need a page for Fashion Week, they can set up galleries for runway shows within minutes. And if a celebrity goes to one of the shows, another photo gallery can be automatically curated to display an entire archive of their latest public appearances so users can keep on clicking until they get their visual fill.
“This particular tool is specifically targeting photo editors to make their lives easier, and make more use of Getty photographs that are up to date, and refreshed in real time,” Mr. Shardanand told The Observer by phone from his downtown office today. “It’s a good hybrid of how you can have an editor be assisted by the technology to do more.”
SmartGalleries will help “maximize traffic and advertising potential,” said Getty Images chief executive and co-founder, Jonathan Klein, in a statement. “Working with Daylife is further confirmation of our continued and unstinting commitment to move the industry forward for the benefit of the changing needs of our customers.”
Getty joins The New York Times, and a gaggle of angels including Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer as investors.
Getty’s New York offices are just four blocks from Daylife, so they’ll be working together on more of these kinds of futuristic products together, according to Mr. Shardanand.
He also told the The Observer that more content partnerships and “ambitious” tools from Daylife are coming soon.
