Pixmac Founder Interview

Founded in September 2008, Pixmac is a fast-growing microstock site with a database of more than 10 million photos available for sale. The small team is based in Prague led by founder Vita Valka, a designer turned tech entrepreneur. Besides their flagship site, Pixmac also recently launched a stock photo site for people as well as vector illustrations. I had the chance to ask Vita a few questions about running his company…
Why did you start Pixmac?
There was a huge opportunity in the market. Traditional stock photos were declining, microstock was a rising star. I’m a designer and I was using sites like Pixmac for years. That was a great challenge for me.

Can you give me a brief overview of where the firm is today?
Pixmac is one of the Top 10 agencies in microstock worldwide. We have the best technology inside and we still refine it again and again to [...]

Site of the Month: Note & Point

Note & Point is a simple idea — a collection of well-designed presentations submitted by users. The gallery-style site follows the same principle of the dime-a-dozen CSS galleries but instead of showcasing websites, the site exclusively focuses on Powerpoint and PDF presentations.
Hopefully, this will inspire some of the cookie-cutter slide decks we see too often in the business world.
Aside from aesthetics, I was surprisingly pleased to find a lot of the presentations with quality content. Hmm, there could be unlocked potential here…

Spain Goes Groupon Crazy: 12 Sites To Find Daily Deals

I’m not much of a coupon guy nor have I tried Groupon yet. But the group-buying craze has entered Spain with a vengeance and it’s hard not to pay attention. It seems like every other month there is a new site that pops up but the game is still wide open and still too early to declare a clear winner.
For us consumers it could be considered good news because there are plenty of opportunities to find a deal if you know where to look. The compiled list below are 10 worthy sites that offer quality deals for major cities in Spain. Do you know of any other sites that offer deals in Spain? Add them in the comments!
1.) Groupon (CityDeal)

2.) Groupalia

3.) BuyTheFace

4.) Reduti

5.) Colectivia

6.) Offerum

7.) Ofertius

8.) LetsBonus

9.) Cuponing

10.) Groupola

11.) Amitad

12.) CholloCity

Hey Gary Vaynerchuk, It’s Just Not That Easy

I like Gary Vaynerchuk and give the guy a ton of credit. He’s full of energy, very passionate and good at inspiring people to get off their ass and do something. But (and a BIG but) I have to be critical because what he preaches is seldom reality for most people and usually just doesn’t work.
His story is something like this: 1) Follow your passion 2) Build a business around it 3) Cash in. To this, he adds stuff like “look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself ‘what do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?’… do that. I promise you can monetize that shit” Well, guess what? That shit doesn’t usually work.
I completely support the notion of following your passion (in anything you do in life). But building a business around it and, more importantly, trying to cash in is not [...]

What is an API and Why You Might Need One

There is a lot of buzz and innovation stemming from the rise of APIs these days so I wanted to dig in deeper to learn more.  The following is a guest post by Steven Willmot, an expert in the API arena and CEO of 3scale – a company that provides API management services.

I asked Steven if he could shed some light on what is an API and why you might need one. Here’s what he had to say…
Today’s web is 95% about web pages of one sort or another – content sites, ecommerce site or web apps which allow you to get things done. Running a great sight or service means getting people to your site and keeping them there (SEO ninjas wanted here!). However, what about this other 5%? It turns out there is another kind of web emerging which is pretty different – one which is driven by [...]

Happiness at LeWeb ‘09

LeWeb wrapped up in Paris a few days ago and turned out to be a star-studded event with some great discussions and panels covering a variety of issues. The theme was supposively  “real time” but in reality the topics were all over the place, ranging from: mobile apps to music to funding to the european tech scene… oh, and Violet Blue presented something about crazy future-porn-robot-sex.
Although, several of the panels were a bit of a bore and have received quite a bit of slack for lacking substance, there were a couple stand-out presentations. One of which included Tony Hsieh’s (CEO, Zappos.com) presentation about Delivering Happiness and the importance happiness has on the culture and overall success of his company.
You can see the full presentation below:

Web Technology Trends for 2009

Still trying to get a grip on web 2.0?… sorry, too late – it’s time to move on to bigger and better things. Richard MacManus recently wrote a post about some of the emerging web trends we are seeing in 2009.
Some of the noticeable trends he cites are greater focus on web services (90% of twitter activity happens through its API!), real-time, open data, structured data (semantic web) and personalization.
Below is a quick introductory presentation he put together on this topic.

Play.fm: for those who love DJ sets

There´s nothing new about online DJ sets but the guys at play.fm have pulled off a killer online music site.  Robin Wauters recently wrote a post about the reemergence of the site and, yes, it does impress. Based out of Vienna, Austria (my birthplace!), play.fm aims to be a hub for DJ studio mixes, radio sessions and event recordings and currently includes a database of more than 12,000 recordings.
I like this site for a few reasons, most notably:
1) It´s free – you can stream hours of music without interruption at no cost (woot!)
2) Beautiful interface – spanking clean interface  and super easy to navigate around the site. the player is just as lovely.
3) Track IDs – ever hear a great track during a set and have no idea what the hell it is? now you can try and find out with the help of community members.
4) Buy stuff you like [...]

Getting Nice with Beatboxing at Google London

This video has been getting heavy circulation… but for good reason. Nathan “Flutebox” Lee and Beardyman please the Google employees with their incredible beatboxing skills.
Might take some time to load, but well worth watching.

YouTube

Sikbox – Slick Search App for Your Blog

Looking for a live search tool for your blog ? Then check out Sikbox, a light-weight and impressive search application that can be easily embedded to a site with a simple piece of code.  We added it to our celebrity site and the results are displayed fairly fast in a very nice, slick user interface. The relevancy of the results is still not perfect, but overall it´s pretty decent.
There is also support for image search and, best of all, it´s free and customizable.