All You Need To Know About Shutterstock Reveal
Shutterstock , a leading global technology company offering high-quality assets, tools and services through its creative platform, announced the launch of Shutterstock Reveal, a new Google Chrome extension, together with the release of its new experimentation site, Shutterstock Showcase, which features two additional new search innovations – Copy Space and Refine. Shutterstock Showcase, previously known as Shutterstock Labs, is the new home of Shutterstock’s most innovative Artificial Intelligence research and launches with three new tools including:
- Reveal – a Google Chrome extension allowing users to select any image online and find a similar photo, vector or illustration within Shutterstock’s collection of more than 180 million licensable and ready to use high-quality images.
- CopySpace – a tool based on Shutterstock’s custom built computer vision technology enabling users to specifically search for images that have space for text and then select where and how much copy space is needed.
- Refine – a tool that allows users, from the first page of search results, to select those images most similar to what they are looking for, and Shutterstock’s technology will surface other images that have a similar style and other commonalities to the selected images.
After installing the plug-in, images in the search results will have an icon in the upper right corner. Clicking the icon opens a Shutterstock pop-up that displays images similar to that first image from the Shutterstock library, which now numbers more than 180 million images. The plug-in works for photos as well as illustrations and vector graphics.
Shutterstock is dedicated to providing our customers with smart, easy to use tools and technology that are seamlessly integrated into their daily workflow. We continue to invest in building an innovative platform for our users around the world and investing in computer vision research and deep learning to improve the customer experience. It’s exciting to be able to share the results of some of the AI technology we have been working on,” said Jon Oringer, Founder and CEO of Shutterstock.
In October 2017, Shutterstock’s computer vision team launched its Composition Aware Search, now called Composition Search, to help customers find the exact image layout they need by placing keywords on a canvas and moving them around to where they want the subject matter to appear in the image. The patent-pending, spatially aware technology, previously launched in beta on Shutterstock Labs, is now featured prominently within the new Shutterstock Showcase site.
Working with its growing community of over 400,000 contributors, Shutterstock adds hundreds of thousands of images each week, and currently has more than 190 million images and more than 10 million video clips available. Headquartered in New York City, Shutterstock has offices around the world and customers in more than 150 countries. The company also owns Bigstock, a value-oriented stock media agency; Shutterstock Custom, a custom content creation platform, Offset, a high-end image collection; PremiumBeat a curated royalty-free music library; and Rex Features, a premier source of editorial images for the world’s media.
Using WhatsApp for business – the new important trend?
WhatsApp has become one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, with 1 billion daily users. Besides being a phenomenon in the people’s private lives, the app is taking control in the work side of the story, businessmen and women using it more and more in their everyday business activities.
A reality that is seen also by the app’s owners that are getting ready to start capitalizing more on its success. According to Tech Crunch, WhatsApp is gearing up to finally monetize its messaging app by charging large enterprise businesses for tools to better communicate with customers. WhatsApp will also offer a free app to small-to-medium sized businesses, though it hasn’t outlined the specific functionality of the app. The enterprise solution will allow global companies “to provide customers with useful notifications like flight times, delivery confirmations, and other updates”.
Moreover, recently, WhatsApp began testing verified accounts for businesses. “Conversations with businesses are encrypted and they can be blocked. Interestingly, if a business isn’t already in your phone number contacts, its name will appear as whatever they register themselves as instead of their number. This could allow WhatsApp to create a business search engine with optional sponsored results, or let businesses cold-message people, possibly for a fee,” wrote Josh Constine for Tech Crunch. More on the subject one can read here.
As the interest towards the app’s use for business is constantly growing, we are offering you some tips on how to maximize the app’s features on the professional life as well.
- Look at its importance in Customer Communication
According to ProfitBooks, following up on WhatsApp instead of direct calling on the phone calls will help you get a 40% higher response rate. “No one appreciates phone calls from unknown numbers, but we are more likely to respond to personal messages. When we start using WhatsApp for customer communication, we noticed better response and engagement. This also gives an opportunity to be little informal. For example, you have sent a quotation to your potential customer but haven’t heard from him, what do you do? You either call him or send a followup mail using formal language. Instead of doing this, if you just send a short message on WhatsApp asking about the status, you might get a quick response,”writes the website.
2. A great tool for Marketing, Promotion and Customer Support
WhatsApp could be a great tool for customer support simple because of its wider reach. Your customers would always prefer to send you a message over WhatsApp rather than calling a helpdesk number or talking to a robot.
Moreover, WhatsApp can prove to be a very strong marketing tool. It is a good one-to-one platform for direct communication, making it easy to send and receive any type of content (images, audio files, short video clips, etc), really fast, to users all over the world. Unlike SMS or Email, there are less restriction on the format and delivery chances are higher.
This doesn’t mean that you should spam your customers with WhatsApp messages. Ideally you should use WhatsApp to connect with existing loyal customers rather than trying to reach new users.
3. A place for using your creativity
Technology and digital are helping businesses become more creative, offering them the possibility to innovate and surprise their target on a regular basis. WhatsApp, like any fresh and hot app, makes sure it gives its users the chance to grow their business in a cost effective manner, all one has to do is be up to date with its technical features and try and see things from a different perspective. One can get inspired from here.
4. Great for Market Surveys
Whatsapp is a great interactive tool for getting real-time suggestions and feedback from your customers about your products and services, through brief and concise questions relating to the areas of your business or service you need information on.
5. Amazing for Internal Communications purposes
One of the greatest things about WhatApp is that is easy to use and understood by all types of target, almost everyone uses it. At the same time, as pointed out by vanguardngr.com, you don’t need to explicitly ask your employees or team members to check the app, because chances are they’re already hooked to it. “You can form WhatsApp group for different teams in your business, for example you can form a WhatsApp group for the Business Strategy team, another for the Sales and Development team etc. Your team can share ideas, instant messages, images, audio files, video clips and other media among themselves in a quick and fun way. You also don’t need to be too afraid of the information shared on the these groups getting out, because Whatsapp messages are protected with an end-to-end encryption that not only makes it one of the safest messaging apps in existence, but also adequately protects your data from leaks,” adds vanguardngr.com.
More pieces of information and ideas you can also read here.