Now, on the main topic for this post… Thanks to the organizers of Startup Weekend Sofia the upcoming weekend (18-20 May ’12) our beloved city of Sofia is the right place if you want to push yourself  to start something in a few days of “mind-blowing”-intensive work on your ideas.

Startup Weekend Sofia'12

We are happy to support then event in several ways:

Our marketing ninja Chris Georgiev is in core organizing team, our creative magician Pavel Andreev will help the teams with some design inspiration and advices and our technology master and CEO Georgi Kadrev will help with technical and business advices and feasibility checks.

Aside from organizing and face-to-face help we will also help the start-ups with some image juice

As we really want to help start-ups’ prototypes and presentations look prettier – here is the deal – all start-up ninjas at the event will get a 15% discount on stock images bought from our image bank. They just need to make sure to use the promo-code SWSOFIA12 when signing-up for an account!

At the end of the weekend we will also award one of our juicier image packages to the project that our creative magician Pavel Andreev prounce to be the most visually inspiring

Good luck everyone!

Yes, I can, image by Anke van Wyk

The beginning of the year is time for great celebration but also time to stop and evaluate what have been achieved during the passing year. It’s time for setting new goals in order to overcome the disappointment that we haven’t been able to do as much as we wanted.

Accoring to intriguing study  45% of all Americans do write their own resolutions in the beginning of the year. The most common topics are related to money, weight, self-improvement and relationships. 3 out of 4 people though never succeed fulfilling their year resulutions.

How do we change that?

Well, the first step is to write down your resolutions. I usually write my new year’s resolution on a sheet of paper. Actually I did that couple of times as it looks like I tend to lose everything put on paper. Then I sow somebody have uploaded in Facebook a gallery with image enhanced resolutions. Man, that was great idea! Micro-stock is perfect for that so in a minute or so I’ve compiled a list of some general resolutions.  Then I spent some more time digging in StockPodium and created a New Year’s Resolution lightbox of images that can fir with the goals in my list.

Do spend some time and money and make your resolutions a bit more prominent. Chose images that reflect your goals, print them out and pin somewhere you can see every day – the fridge, bathroom mirror, walk-in closet door, you know better.

Some more tips on how to set doable resolutions:

• be realistic, you are not going to the moon in March, right?
• start with some small steps – if it’s a language, sign up for a language course, if you want to read more – set a weekly number of pages, etc.
• do not wait until it’s time to set goals for the next year, it all starts today, not tomorrow!
• get support from your friends, let them know what are you planning to achieve, let them motivate you and keep you acountable
• make them public, put them on your blog (if they are not too personal)

Here are some inspirational examples. Have a look and grab some that will best fit your 2012 goals.

Be free, image by Dario Bajurin

Travel the World, image by guilu67

Explorer Europe, image by Andrii IURLOV

Stay with my boyfriend/girlfriend, image by Cathy Yeulet

Play Guitar on the Beach, image by Volodymyr Khomiakov

Fall in love, image by Guido Vrola

Be a party star, image by Dmitriy Shironosov

Sleep more, image by Vitaly Valua

Be happy, image by Andres Rodriguez

Do better in school, image by karen roach

Road trip with friends, image by Andrey Kiselev

Read more, image by nyul

Get in shape, image by Galina Barskaya

Spend more time with my family, image by Darja Vorontsova

Get a nice care, image by diego cervo

Get a better job, image by iqoncept

Buy a perfect bikini, image by vgstudio

Lose weight, image by Jason Stitt

Have you already posted your New Year’s resolution, share it with us!

Christmas images – feel the spirit of the season!
We wish it will be snowy and full of good surprises. Santa is busy getting ready to deliver presents to kids and grownups. We are sure there’s a big nice box under the Christmas tree specially for you! Feel the spirit of the season, grab a Christmas image.

Featured lightbox

image by nejron	image by Ivanka Filipova	image by Erik Reis
image by VIKTORIIA KULISH	image by Erik Reis	image by Ingrid Balabanova

View our Christmas collection »

We got invited to attend and present StockPodium at VentureConnect, a VC-startup meeting that’s held annually  in Bucharest, Romania. The goal of the event is to facilitate investors’ direct contact with local technology entrepreneurs who have already established successful ventures and help them raise investments. Bucharest is so close we almost spontaneously decided to take part in the event.

Most of the projects presented at the event were from Romania. StockPodium was the only project from Bulgaria. Being at events like that has lots of pros. It’s great opportunity to pitch for your product and get really valuable feedback from people with great experience in the technology entrepreneurship. Talks with possible investors and also creating contacts is probably the most valuable outcome. What’s really valuable for events like that are the talks after the presentations. We  managed to talk to some interested VCs and some potential business partners from Romania.

Bucharest was fun, hope to see our new friends soon in Sofia or somewhere else in Europe

Georgi did great job presenting StockPodium. You can watch his 8 min pitch here:

Visual similarity has always been the focus of StockPodium. We believe using combination of keyword search and image examples uploaded from your computer or just selected from the text search results can significantly shorten the time you spend searching for the right image. That’s why we feature the visual similarity image search on the home page showcasing with couple of image examples.

Lightboxes are industry standard and a helpful way to create collections of images that you can send to client for approval or save for later download. We’ve carefully selected some public lightboxes and feature them on the home page. We believe you can get inspired and may be assisted when selecting images for particular theme.

Home page estates is highly valued. We decided to place some information on our new home page regarding our charity efforts. It’s you that actually help us support worthy causes, that’s why we tought it’s great to have some charity initiatives posted on the home page.

Hope you like the redesign of StockPodium home page. We value your opinion so post as a line if you like it or have any suggestions!

If you know Bulgarian you actually will be able to read about our exciting story as startup – our ups and downs. It’s been exciting and challenging but worth it. Working on a startup in Bulgaria might look challenging, but it’s been great fun, and we are just in the beginning…

The whole interview thing was very exciting. We went back to the start and had to re-experience some of the pure startup days of our journey.

Mother’s Day is big in USA. It was first introduced by Anna Jarvis in efforts to memorialize the legacy of her mother. Early records show the idea of the holiday was to raise awareness on poor health conditions and peace promotion.

In the States the Mother’s day is probably the busiest day for family dining out – going to a restaurant with the family members, buying gifts, cards and flowers for the moms.  As it’s celebrated the second Sunday of May, attending church is also very common activity. Usually women are given the pulpit to preach and tell stories of great mothers of the nation.

Mother’s Day is the perfect occasion to say Thanks to your mom, to send some flowers or write a Thank-you-mom card. Do not miss the opportunity to take some Mother’s day pictures with your mom and family, that you can show around or put on Facebook.

We at StockPodium want to say Thanks to our moms – great women, that helped us be what we are, supported us during the years and continue to care and love us. Thank you, mom!

Moms are great, here’s a really funny video for moms on Facebook and Twitter:

It’s been great and festive week at StockPodium. Just before the holidays we managed to get you some really nice Easter presents. Here’s just a gimps what’s in labs mode and soon will be available on StockPodium:

• be able to make public ligthboxes and share them with friends and family (we’ve got you couple already – Spring Images, Easter Photos, Young Smiling People)
• Color search – great asset to our visual similarity search. You will be able to do more in less time. Now you can filter using keywords and sample visual image (via search results, upload from your desktop or pasting image URL). We will be adding color search capabilities that will make you able add one or more colors for search. Pretty handy if you need image that needs to blend nice in a website design with predefined color palette.
• more ways to pay credits for stock images – you will be able to pay with credit cards and MoneyBookers
• earn some money – enroll to StockPodium Affiliate Earnings program

If you can not wait for that – take a look at some beautiful royalty free Easter images and illustrations.

Happy Easter! Happy Passover.

StockPodium Affiliate Earnings program is quite simple. You put a link or badge to some of your websites or share it in the social media channels. Every time somebody clicks on the link and buys credits from StockPodium you get affiliate reward – 10% of the referred sales price. The referral click is valid for 30 days, which means that the user  you have referred is not expected to register and buy from StockPodium right away. Any time she visits StockPodium within these 30 days after the referral click event, and decides to buy credits, your referral still counts.

Here’s what you get from StockPodium Rewards:

• Affiliate commission of 10% of the referred sale price
• Applicable to all sales made within 30 calendar days after the referral has happened
• No matter if the referred user is a new or an existing, you are still rewarded
• Unlimited number of referred purchases
• Auto-generated affiliate links for easier sharing
• Real time reporting of affiliate earnings in your StockPodium profile
• E-mail notification every time you get awarded
• Withdraws via PayPal or Money Bookers once your earnings reach $50.

Excited!? Let’s get started

To start earning from the StockPodium Reward Program you may follow these steps:

• Sign up for a free account on StockPodium.com, takes no time
• Validate and log in to your account
• Go to Profile -> Affiliate Earnings or click on the Affiliate Earnings link in the footer of the site
• Choose the referral links and badges that best suite your preferences
• Copy the code and paste it in your website or blog. Make sure your affiliate ID is intact
• Start spreading the links to your friends, clients, website or blog readers. Use the social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook or send them over e-mail. Include the referral URLs in your forum signatures.

We really hope we offer great opportunity which is of mutual interest. If you have any suggestions or something is not really clear, please, drop us a line and will try to answer shortly.