Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

Searching for stock photography has always been a pain — visit corbis, then getty images, then veer and then… who knows what else. I’d like a single site to deliver a consolidated image search across all of these image databases.

And most stock photographs seem to be pretty well tagged, but how about letting people tag/rate photographs, collections and stock photo companies? This additional meta data could go a long way to making it easier for designers to find good stock photographs.

The site could make money through referrer fees (assuming that these sites have such a thing), though this sort of revenue model could create a conflict with the goal of providing high quality search results. Maybe the site could make money providing other services to a designer community that it would foster.

One of the other cool trends that I think will grow to dominate the stock photography business, or at least grow it to a new set of customers that don’t buy stock photography today is the trend towards amateurs and prosumers selling their work online. Why couldn’t some average photographer upload a bunch of his stuff to flickr and, in turn, have someone else pay him for those photographs? I’d buy those photographs — they’d be less expensive and there’d be a lot more to choose from.

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Originally uploaded by rakeshagrawal.

We’re off to Austin. Check out the house all boarded up!

I feel good tonight because I fixed a mechanical problem with Shonali’s Dell Latitude laptop. The hinge on Shonali’s laptop (between the screen and the base) has been extremely loose for, oh, about the last year or so. I spent about 30 minutes this evening, took the thing apart (thanks in part to the service manual on www.dell.com), found the loose screws in the hinge, fixed it and now the laptop feels like new.

I’m surprised at xeni and boing boing for taunting India’s offer to help the United States with handling the aftermath of Katrina in this post. The post is entitled, “Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!” Hey Xeni, boing boing, way to propagate American arrogance to all of your readers in and outside the United States!

I’ve been using Gmail now for a little bit and it works pretty well — I’m impressed with the Gmail interface. There are still some things I need to experiment with like attachments and keyboard shortcuts (are there any?) but right now, I’m not feeling much pain after using Gmail for a while. I wonder if there will be pain associated with not having my calendar or tasks in Gmail.

One thing that I wish worked better: I’ve setup my personal and work e-mail addresess to both forward to my gmail account and I’ve also verified both against my Gmail account so I can send e-mails from personal/work addresses from with gmail. But one problem I’ve encountered is that Gmail doesn’t make any inferences about which e-mail address to use when replying to a message — it simply uses whichever e-mail address you’ve marked as default. In my case, I have my personal address marked as the default so when replying to work e-mails, I have to CLICK on other choices (under the from address) and then I have to CLICK and CHOOSE my work e-mail address. Three extra clicks, in my opinion. Hey Gmail product people: why not do away with those extra clicks?

For the past week (give or take) Outlook has randomly been crashing on me about 3-4 times a day, on average. What a frustration. I spent a little bit of time playing with GMail yesterday and with their support for third party verifiable e-mail addresses, I’m thinking about making that switch. It sure would be nice if Google had a client-side rich app, though I have to say that Gmail is pretty damn rich for a web app. Off to re-run Outlook. Sigh.

So here’s my quick review of slide, after using it for 15-30 minutes:

• I’d love to have the sidebar thingy as a feature of flickr or have it as a plugin to the Google sidebar (feeding off of my flickr photostream).
• I’d also be interested in the ability for the software to scan my local hard disk and just automatically find them and then, with the click of one button, upload them to a central site (I’d prefer flickr) for sharing or subscription by my friends (imagine this as a feature to picasa — it does most of this, it’s just the “upload to flickr” part that I’d want it to do).

All of my photo management stuff revolves around one software package: picasa. I’m starting to introduce a second service into the mix: flickr. I’m just not sure where slide fits into this.

One thing that Slide hasn’t done, in my 30 minutes of installation and expirmentation: it hasn’t found most of the photographs on my hard drive, which is weird. They are all in a pretty standard place (the My Pictures folder) yet it’s only found other, more obscure photos.

One thing that I find to be a bit annoying is how when I mouseover a photo in the stream at the left, it automatically enlarges the image that I’ve hovered over and then it takes a moment for that image to go away. The enlarge thing happens too easily — it’s almost like I have to avoid that section of my screen now because if my mouse rolls over there, I suddenly have this big pop-up taking up my screen (and covering up the slider and preventing me from browsing other images). And, if I want to see an even larger version of that image, I double click on that image in the enlarged slide window and it takes me to a webpage (slide’s webpage for some channels or a 3rd party website for some other channels). When I do this, I would expect for the enlarged slide image window to go away but it doesn’t. So now I’m looking at the enlarged-enlarged image in a web page, I close that, I have to go back and close the enlarged and then I’m back to viewing the slide bar. Basically, this whole (important!) part of the app doesn’t seem to be polished from a usability standpoint. The dynamics should be slightly different I think, at least for the way I want to use it.

Also the slide thing can be annoying and distracting. I used the Google Sidebar for a couple of days (before I decided it wasn’t a useful enough allocation of desktop real estate) and I like the alternating single image in its photo plug-in a lot better.

So those are some scattered notes and first impressions.

In this post Robert Scoble wonders if Google is trying to recruit one of Microsoft’s researchers because there are Google Adwords on her name. Maybe, but what I think is more likely is that she’s well published in her field and they are ads targeted at other researchers who are likely to be doing searches for her work. I noticed this a long time ago because there’s a well known computer science researcher with my name at IBM and for a long time I’ve noticed that Google has adwords running on his name.

Hmmm, actually, now that I think about it, maybe their ads on “Rakesh Agrawal” are because of that great elevator algorithm I wrote in my operating system class in college that won me fame and adulation around the country! 🙂

I read two interesting articles this morning about Google Talk and the IM industry. First, Nugget’s livejournal post, picked up on slashdot. Thesis: Google’s not implemented s2s in their implementation of Jabber which means that Google Talk users are still in a closed system. What Nugget didn’t try to do is answer the question that this article lead me to: why isn’t Google supporting s2s? There must be some reason for this over there. I read something on one of their Google Talk web pages, where they talked about federation, about how they had federated with sipphone and earthlink because they ‘agreed with their philosophies about open chat systems’ or something like that. It sounds like there are some hints at the reason in that statement, but it doesn’t fully connect the dots for me.

And then there was this story that Nugget posted to about how Google Talk was shaking up the IM world and how this might accelerate some real competition and how that would be a welcome thing.