Digital Railroad is leaving the station!

Features

Digital Railroad is leaving the station!

By Brent Phelps July 08, 2005

Last night I attended a nice presentation by Evan Nisselson (pictured below) the CEO and Founder of Digital Railroad at the Apple Store in Soho (a geek wonderland!) As reported last month Digital Railroad received a butt-load of money from investors and I was anxious to learn more about their current product and where they are going with all of this cash. Apparently I wasn’t the only one because there were about 150 people in attendance (most of them appeared to be photographers).

Evan Nisselson gave a brief demo of his service on the big screen for all to see. After the demo Evan stated “Corbis and Getty represent approximately 40% of all licensing revenue in the stock industry but only represent about 1% of the professional photographers working today. Digital Railroad has created the tools any photographer needs to build their own photo archive with all of the efficiency of the systems employed by the large stock agencies.” Evan claims to have over 160 photographers and more than a dozen agencies currently using his service.

Evan Invited the following photographers who currently use the service to speak.

Ron Haviv - Ron is an excellent photojournalist and showed a nice video featuring images from his trips abroad. Ron extolled the virtues of digital Railroad as an easy to use way to syndicate your work from anywhere in the world.

Jack Reznicki - Jack is a commercial photographer who uses the Digital Railroad system as a way to reach new customers. Jack reported that he loves coming into work in the morning to see e-mails from customers who saw his Digital Railroad archive and are looking to license images or hire him for assignment work.

Marcel Saba - Marcel is a veteran of the industry and has selected Digital Railroad to manage the archive for his new agency Redux Pictures. Marcel said that when he started Redux Pictures he was looking for two things, Price and reliability. “Digital railroad offers an excellent solution with all of the tools of a big agency but not the big costs.”

After reviewing Digital Railroad it became clear that most of the features of the service are geared towards photojournalists and editorial photographers. That said, commercial photographers will likely find the service covers nearly all of their needs and maybe a few things they don’t need. The one thing that seemed to be missing from this solution is e-commerce capabilities. Evan stated that very soon they will offer this and several other features (thanks to the new investor money – no doubt). One thing was clear however from this presentation, Evan and Digital Railroad are off to a great start and with hard work (and maybe a bit of luck) Digital Railroad could become a major force in the industry.