Pondaray with GalleryPlayer announces new commercial content services to innovate display and merchandising to help retailer sales
Outdoor Retailer Summer Market 2005
Booth # 5610 in the Lobby below central staircase/elevators Salt Lake City, UT August 10, 2005 — Salt Lake City based Pondaray today announces at the Outdoor Retail Show the introduction of Image Content Services. A new service to help sales for manufacturers and retailers by developing custom products and merchandising environments using the power of imagery to excite and delight customers with inspiring and motivating images of the great outdoors. Pondaray offers three core services: 1) HD display of Interiorscapes (sm) to drive consumer experience merchandising; 2) Image licensing for branded products 3) Co-branded retail merchandise. Pondaray provides an exciting array of largely unpublished photography and video documenting the world’s natural history, diverse peoples, and cultural locales. Showcase Collections Include Exotic Travel, Rainforest Tree Frogs, Western Landscapes, Asian Mountains, Coral Marine Life and Tropical Wavescapes Pondaray through its partnership with GalleryPlayer provides a turnkey media and technical solution to provide and maintain HD Display for retail Interiorscapes. “With GalleryPlayer we can digitally reproduce our images with stunning quality and ultra high resolution, and deliver them all the way to the screen in a secure and protected format. Just as important, GalleryPlayer exposes the Pondaray collection to a completely new audience and market that is at its early stage and set for marked growth,” said Hugh Bollinger, Pondaray founder and president. GalleryPlayer security software controls image security, copy protection, and digital rights management (DRM), content and software updates, and gallery and image usage tracking. “GalleryPlayer is the first company to develop a secure DRM environment that meets the requirements of the top-tier content providers who will drive consumer and commercial interest in digital art galleries and art as a video on-demand service on cable and satellite,” said Kirsten Soderlind, GalleryPlayer vice president of creative and acquisitions. “The GalleryPlayer distribution network is based on a new standard for the secure distribution of digital content, and offers GalleryPlayer and its content partners with a scalable infrastructure upon which to deliver and monetize its media products.”
About Pondaray
Pondaray image sources represent an eclectic mix of outstanding scientists and adventurers in the fields of geographic exploration, ethnography, marine research, genetics, and environmental studies. The result is an immense library of largely unpublished photography and video documenting the world’s natural history, diverse peoples, and cultural locales. Pondaray Enterprises is a closely held content services provider and producer of fine photographic wall prints, posters, and note cards offering …images for your world! For more information visit www.pondaray.com.
About GalleryPlayer
GalleryPlayer is the first digital home and commercial gallery service that delivers super high resolution, museum quality art and photography into the home or commercial site as both a premium, on-demand HD service for cable TV and satellite networks, or through download to any Microsoft Media Center Edition PC display. It offers never-before-available, name-brand content that transforms TV/flat panels into a dynamic digital canvas, and provides viewers with a new way to experience art and a new alternative to regularly scheduled HD programming. For more information visit www.galleryplayer.com. Adnewsonline.com
In the predawn hours as a dark storm approached the aboriginal Arnhemlands of the Australian Outback, the idea for Pondaray came to life in the still, timeless moment inside a clap of thunder.Hugh Bollinger lay there half awake, half asleep and scribbled the words,“create products from images.” The “images” are the cumulative work of a dozen friends spanning 40 years and amounting to some 100,000 pictures and a mass of motion footage. The images are a distillation of passion and when people see the images of Pondaray, the impact resonates like a thunderclap of astonishment, emotion and inspiration. “The dream is the dream,” says Hugh Bollinger, president and founder of Pondaray Enterprises, Inc., a provider of elite photographic content. Founded in 1996, the first iteration of the company was to create commodity items such as cards and posters from the collection of unpublished images. The card sets, loose note cards, screen saver/mouse pad sets, posters and adventure videos are sold in sporting goods and gift stores. The note card sets are themed and a portion of sales goes to several non-profit organizations. In the case of the “Faces of Culture” card set, a portion of sales goes to the Tibet Fund. Other sets include, “Eternal Rhythms,” “8000 Meter Peaks,” “Colors of Antarctica,” and “Coral Treasures.” The trademarked “Help us/Help you” program established by Pondaray assists the corporate intent to benefit non-profit efforts. Pondaray licenses rights for usage to corporations for environment enhancement as well as to the commercial, editorial, educational and text publishing industries. Pondaray was selected by NBC to produce large wall décor for its International Broadcast Center during the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games. Other retail environmental display opportunities lie with sporting goods and outdoor stores. One of Pondaray’s unpublished baobab images from Madagascar is being used as the cover photo on the new “Adventures of Riley” book being released later this spring. The library is used in the commercial arena for advertisements and the direct-to-consumer route via the Internet is another huge market.
Pondaray feeds the new dreams of digital technology. Areas of development include image content services, media technologies, cable, satellite, broadband media companies, mobile services and content providers such as phones, music players and camera devices. Pondaray recently entered into a three-year agreement with Beon Media in Seattle, WA to provide unpublished images for its pioneering display technology, GalleryPlayer, now marketed by Microsoft. Beon Media through GalleryPlayer is offering subscription and collection-based pricing for image access-to-display on computer and television screens. GalleryPlayer is the first service that delivers super high resolution, museum-quality art and photography into the home as both video-on-demand HD service for cable TV and satellite networks, or via the Internet to any Microsoft Media Center Edition PC display. This transforms the TV and computer viewing experience into digital canvases for art imagery presentation.
As a premium content partner to Beon Media, Pondaray offers an array of largely unpublished photography and video documenting the world’s natural history, diverse peoples and cultural locales.
With myriad image libraries in the world, why Pondaray, a relatively small and obscure image asset marketer? As spoken by executives with the Beon Media team, Pondaray delivered the “WOW” factor to the compilation.
There are many new opportunities for imagery with the new ways people use and consume media through camera phones, iPods, and digital cameras/video/PC editing. The next step is the technology mainstreamed for Image Interiorscapes™ for retailers, hospitality, corporations and medical centers.
Peter Klinge of Klinge & Associates is consulting with Pondaray towards business strategy. He says, “The relationships we create in these various channels enable us to create markets for a great variety of our image products. For example, exposure of Pondaray’s imagery on Beon Media’s GalleryPlayer creates interest in paper goods for individual buyers of prints that can be fulfilled by a simple click with print-on-demand technology. By embracing the latest digital market trends we create new value for the hard goods business for Pondaray photographic wall prints, note cards and posters.
“Additionally, we receive immediate customer feedback and adjust our product development and channel plans to meet demand and access preferences to our imagery. Digital is great but we believe people will still want to own a wonderful print or customize it to fit their artistic tastes, and so by combining technology and marketing we can provide customers with a variety of ways to purchase and enjoy Pondaray imagery.”
The words unpublished, elite and “WOW” have been used to describe the image assets of Pondaray and a tiny sampling is shown with this story, but to understand the nature and origins of the images, it helps to know more about Hugh.
When the idea came to him, he was considering his next steps professionally and personally on a walkabout, of sorts, in Australia for several months at the tail end of a 15-year career where, at its conclusion, he was vice president of Business Development for NPI, a pioneer in early development of plant biotechnology. He built relationships with companies like Pioneer Hybrid, DeKalb, Martin Marietta, British American Tobacco and Sumitomo Corporation. Hugh served on NPI’s Board of Directors as well as one of the joint venture companies based in Singapore.
He holds a PhD in ecology, an MS in botany and a BA in environmental science. Hugh served as a trustee and advisor for the Center for Plant Conservation, a network of botanical institutions spread across North America that works to identify, propagate and restore rare and endangered plants. He served as a member of the Executive Committee for the Bosque Lluvioso/Pax Natura Foundations that manages a tropical rainforest reserve in Costa Rica with E.O. Wilson, Jane Goodall and Oscar Arias. He also served in an advisory capacity to the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.
His interest in photography connected him with dozens of like-minded scientists and curious world wanderers. There is no shortage of image libraries, but what sets Pondaray’s images apart is the motive that drives the people who take the pictures. His library of 100,000 images is not even tapped yet with new imagery forthcoming daily. Yet of what is being sold through Beon, Pondaray images rank in the top three for sales.
The images are born out of passion whether it be for geographic exploration, scientific study, ethnographic documentation, marine research, genetic studies or the dedication of a molecular geneticist who takes a month each year and wanders into the deep Asian forests to photograph tree frogs at night.
Not only are these images unpublished, they also come with contextual overlay. Pondaray has the rights to one of the most impressive photographs of K2’s east face unveiling the entire cap with blue sky and scattered clouds. The person who took these photographs, Dr. Gil Roberts, was a member of the first American expedition to summit Mt. Everest in 1962. The images show the world his unique view; the stories that come with these images are from the mind of a man who devoted his life to high altitude exploration—each image capturing a moment on his life’s path.
More images come from a field station located in the rainforests of Borneo. A simple photo of a tree frog captured by Pondaray licensee Jan Post stops the eye in contemplation for its classic composition, contrast, color and subject matter. Richard Cheski is engaged in a study of tropical ocean waves and water patterns. “We are tapped into an extraordinarily high level of competence,” says Hugh about the relationships he has built over the past 40 years. Through licensee Walsh Environmental/Space Imaging, Pondaray has access to images taken from IKONOS, a remarkable orbiting camera that circles 400 miles above the earth for the purpose of documenting with imagery for detailed environmental analysis. The satellite offers a glance of Bora Bora or the recent eruption of Washington’s Mt. Rainier; current and otherwise inaccessible imagery.
We look at a close-up image of a rare magnolia. “This is, of course, a magnolia. The magnolia species depicted here, as well as others, are found in the mountains of Sichuan and elsewhere in China. However, that is not the only place in Asia where magnolias are seen. The Yulan Magnolia, the specific species grown by monks for over 2500 years, is found widely in Southwestern China,” says Hugh with enthusiasm. (The pictured magnolia was cultivated in the USA.) We continue to peruse the CD filled with exclamation-quality images as he restlessly aborts descriptive gestures and bites his tongue preventing the sharing of fascinating detail for each image.
Boxes of images are ready to be scanned and entered into a developing digital image management system. Pondaray has a bright outlook with the business model of taking each single asset and generating multiple streams of revenue. Pondaray, now nearly 10 years old, is building through proper capitalization and filling management roles.
“Pondaray” is the englishisation of “lac pon d’orille” named by the French fur trappers who first spied the long, glacially carved lake in northern Idaho near Sandpoint. It is pristine with unknown depths—as is the future of Hugh’s dream.
GalleryPlayer Strikes Content
Deal with Pondaray
Showcase
Collections Include Exotic Travel, Rainforest Tree Frogs, Western Landscapes,
Asian Mountains, Coral Marine Life and Tropical Wavescapes
Seattle, WA, April 12, 2005 — GalleryPlayer (www.galleryplayer.com)
today announced that it has added Pondaray (www.pondaray.com)
imagery of the natural world to its ever-expanding list of premium content
partners. GalleryPlayer is the first service that delivers super high
resolution, museum quality art and photography into the home as both a
video-on-demand HD service for cable TV and satellite networks, or via the
Internet to any Microsoft Media Center Edition PC display.
GalleryPlayer now has more than twenty signed
major license agreements, providing access to tens of thousands of the most
popular fine art and photographic images, including National Geographic, The
New York Times, The Time Life Picture Collection, The Andy Warhol Foundation,
Corbis, Dorling Kindersley, George Eastman House, America 24/7, Art Resource,
Artist Rights Society, and other major museums, brands and collections.
Pondaray provides an exciting array of largely
unpublished photography and video documenting the world’s natural history,
diverse peoples, and cultural locales.
“With GalleryPlayer we can digitally reproduce
our images with stunning quality and ultra high resolution, and deliver them
all the way to the screen in a secure and protected format. Just as important,
GalleryPlayer exposes the Pondaray collection to a completely new audience and
market that is at its early stage and set for marked growth,” said Hugh
Bollinger, Pondaray founder and president.
GalleryPlayer security software controls image
security, copy protection, and digital rights management (DRM), content and
software updates, and gallery and image usage tracking.
“GalleryPlayer is the first company to develop a
secure DRM environment that meets the requirements of the top-tier content
providers who will drive consumer interest in digital home art galleries and
art as a video on-demand service on cable and satellite,” said Tim Dunley,
GalleryPlayer vice president of marketing. “The GalleryPlayer distribution
network is based on a new standard for the secure distribution of digital
content, and offers GalleryPlayer and its content partners with a scalable
infrastructure upon which to deliver and monetize its media products.”
About Pondaray
Pondaray image sources
represent an eclectic mix of outstanding scientists and adventurers in the
fields of geographic exploration, ethnography, marine research, genetics, and
environmental studies. The result is an immense library of largely unpublished
photography and video documenting the world’s natural history, diverse
peoples, and cultural locales. Pondaray Enterprises is a closely held content
services provider and producer of fine photographic wall prints, posters, and
note cards offering …images for your world!
About GalleryPlayer
GalleryPlayer is the first
digital home gallery service that delivers super high resolution, museum
quality art and photography into the home as both a premium, on-demand HD
service for cable TV and satellite networks, or through download to any
Microsoft Media Center Edition PC display. It offers never-before-available,
name-brand content that transforms TV/flat panels into a dynamic digital
canvas, and provides viewers with a new way to experience art and a new
alternative to regularly scheduled HD programming. For more information visit www.galleryplayer.com. |
