Luminary Joichi Ito Joins PicScout Board of Advisors

December 8, 2009 - Silicon Valley, Calif. - PicScout, the market leader in worldwide image services, enabler of client image monetization activities, and standard for image credit, today announces that Joichi Ito has joined the company’s advisory board. Joichi Ito is among the most recognized names in Web technology. A co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and the CEO of Neoteny, Joi Ito is also CEO of Creative Commons.

"I'm pleased to join the advisory board of PicScout, a company that I believe will play a pivotal role in the future of the Internet and intersects with a number of my areas of interest. It is a model startup based on solid technology and managed by an entrepreneurial team operating globally," said Joichi Ito. "PicScout is bridging the interests of businesses and those of Internet users, supporting the hybrid sharing economy that is so crucial in getting past the destructive spiral that much of the online media business is in. ImageIRC provides a way to support the efforts of Creative Commons licenses and RDFa by validating, fixing and filling in missing metadata on all images online. In addition, PicScout has agreed to interoperate with the open standards we are working on at Creative Commons."

"We are elated and honored that Joichi Ito has joined us as a member of the PicScout Advisory Board. His interest in PicScout is a clear testimony to the company's potential, as we move to see that every image gets its credit," said Offir Gutelzon, PicScout founder and CEO. "At this critical juncture for the company, we gain even more confidence with Mr.Ito on the PicScout team, advising our important endeavor for the image industry. We look to Mr. Ito especially for help in defining standards and managing and optimizing metadata relative to fingerprinting and tracking. In addition, Joi Ito opens many opportunities for PicScout in the Asian markets."

Joichi Ito is one of the most influential people on the Web. Mr. Ito has been involved with many of the foremost internet companies and is a recognized and respected leader of the technological age. In addition to being venture capitalist and angel investor, Joichi Ito has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and others.

Recently, PicScout made a series of announcements based on its powerful PicScout ImageIRC with wide industry support for its enabling platform. PicScout developments for the industry point to a new model and technical standard for image credit. With ownership and licensing clarified, and an infrastructure facilitating connection for transactions with image users, a ubiquitous online image marketplace has emerged that already boasts tens of millions of images identified and offered through the PicScout ImageIRC platform with its enabling user tool, ImageExchange.

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