Techcrunch featured a report on a new startup yesterday which aims to let photographers sell images from their site without sending visitors off to a third party store. Currently in closed beta for US customers only, Fotomoto allows you to add a couple of lines of code to your templates and their widget will index your images. As Techcrunch explains,

Fotomoto does things differently: photographers only need to insert a few lines of codes in their website, after which the images on his or her website will automatically be indexed and automatically provided with a ‘purchase photo’ link. Sellers can tweak the settings so the ‘buy’ links appear completely integrated and branded to match their sites’ look and feel, and the back-end of the tool enables them to set the availability next to the sizes and pricing of the photos. When visitors click the link to buy photos, a Fotomoto widget pops up and enables them to instantly purchase images through PayPal (with the ability to pay by credit card coming later this month). There’s also a sharing link, which lets people send the picture to others as an e-card, with the ability to push to social networking and bookmarking services coming in a couple of weeks.

There are no monthly costs, just a commission fee based on the image price and product chosen. At the moment there are just prints available, but this will expand into t-shirts, mugs etc in due course. I’m looking forward to this being available for UK sites – it’s definitely going on my blog then. 

Read the full article on Fotomoto at Techcrunch here, and if you’re interested sign up to the beta program here.

Social media has hit the big time in the last couple of years. First Facebook, and now Twitter are being used by hundreds of thousands of users. With real-time search hitting Twitter you can see what people are commenting about instantly – I’m always checking for useful photography hints and equipment reviews.

You can see how important this will be as a marketing and business tool in the future. So my question is how prepared are you? Have you reserved your personal and business name on Twitter? If not now is the time to do it.  I’ve even reserved Twitter names for my sons now just in case..

Quick post tonight – I’ve had a few situations recently when I’ve wanted to check out product videos or shows which use geolocation and your IP address to work out that you’re not in the US. Because of licensing agreements this can often be the case. So how do you watch the shows?

ReadWriteWeb put me on to a great free little VPN product called AnchorFree. Not only is it free, but when you connect and browse through it you are automatically routed through their network in the US. Which gives you a US IP address!

Download Anchorfree VPN software from here.

Here are a couple of my favourites – you can’t beat a bit of slapstick comedy followed by bugs.

You can vote for your favourites at a special YouTube Adblitz site. Voting closes soon though so hurry!

My favourites in 2008 were:

1. Techcrunch - The Bay area is where it’s at for new web technologies and Michael Arrington has his fingers right on the pulse.

2. Readwriteweb – A broad overview and review of the latest web startups all over the world.

3. Scobleizer – Robert Scoble’s tech blog and videos.

Enjoy!