Four New Providers to Join, Providing Additional Rights Managed and Royalty Free (Microstock) Inventory

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 15 -- CogniSign, a leader in image and video search technology, has expanded its stock photography search portal at xcavator.net to almost six million images of inventory. Xcavator.net is unique due to CogniSign's award-winning Intelligent Image Recognition Technology, which enhances conventional text based searches with powerful Image Search tools.

The portal is open to the public at http://www.xcavator.net/. A video introduction is provided to help new users get the most out of their xcavator.net experience.

This new launch ends a very successful six month Beta test. Garth Johnson, vice president of business and community development for iStockphoto, the pioneer of micropayment stock photography and the first agency to test xcavator.net said, "We are impressed by how quickly the Image Search technology at xcavator.net presents stock photo buyers with many viable options during the stock photo browsing and final selection process. We're very pleased to be a provider of microstock inventory at a site where there are so many powerful search tools to help buyers make their final selections."

Xcavator.net Image Search tools help users dig easily through millions of photos using visually. The site meets the needs of stock photo buyers looking to quickly find the exact photo needed to complete marketing, advertising or communications pieces. The site is also useful to sellers of stock photography; they can search the site by provider to quickly determine which one needs the type of stock photos they have to offer.

New providers will be added selectively over the next few months, increasing site inventory to more than 10 million photos -- making xcavator.net one of the largest stock photo portals in the world. Today, in the Royalty Free (Microstock) category, the four providers are Fotolia, iStockphoto, LuckyOliver and 123RF. In the Rights Managed category, the two providers are Photovault of San Francisco and Danita Delimont of Seattle.

Danita Delimont, Founder and CEO of DanitaDelimont.com, a niche agency specializing in worldwide travel and nature, believes the site's powerful Image Search technology will have a major impact on converting browsers to buyers. "This technology can help browsers to quickly find exactly what they need, in a fraction of the amount of time it takes using traditional keyword methods," she says. "I know that when potential buyers come to us from xcavator.net, they've already dramatically narrowed their search and are very close to a buying decision. This is extremely valuable to my business."

Market research has shown that designers, art directors, marketing and business communications professionals and others in the design community are incredibly rushed when making final selections of stock photography, which is often the last element needed before going to print. The proprietary Image Search tools at xcavator.net allow buyers to quickly get to a large number of photos that approximately meet their needs, providing enough relevant choices to make the final selection a much easier, faster and more satisfying process.

In addition to keywords, the xcavator.net stock photo search portal uses proprietary Image Search and color filtering technology, giving users a combination of tools to find what they are looking for. The key to these search capabilities is the portal's image and color search engines. These engines allow a user to look for similar images within databases containing millions of images -- just like a human can look at a few dozen manually -- based on color, key features and their spatial relationships and proximity, etc.

CogniSign's objective for xcavator.net is to create powerful, fast, fun and easy to use Image Search tools to augment the keyword (text based) search currently used to search stock photography. In most cases, just a few keywords are needed and the site's proprietary visual browsing can easily complete the task.

"In user testing, we saw a natural inclination for users to spend a lot of time changing and adding keywords to refine their stock photo search," said Bryan Calkins, CEO of CogniSign, "which is a time consuming and iterative process that can often lead a user down a blind alley with very few results. Xcavator.net's Image Search tools need just a few keywords to get the process started and search refinement happens visually. This provides much more powerful and efficient browsing, where the user is presented with a lot more options that have still been refined to meet his needs."