High-tech image company enjoys exposure at Mac showpiece

Visitors to last week's annual MacWorld Expo show in San Francisco couldn't possibly have overlooked the bright yellow oasis of colour lighting a corner of the Moscone Centre's massive south hall.

The Irish had staked out their turf among the Silicon Valley kingpins and a Kerryman wasn't going to come all that way and not be noticed. Mr Jerry Kennelly, managing director of Tralee firm StockByte, had arrived in San Francisco with thousands of shrieking yellow phonebooksized catalogues and everyone was going to know about it.

Not that Mr Kennelly was making a fuss. He spent the long Expo days in shirt and tie, quietly talking to potential customers and distributors of his CD-Roms full of royalty-free photographs. Meanwhile, a dozen employees most flown over from Ireland, with a few Yanks added for good measure

roamed around their glaring yellow floor space in yellow T-shirts and caps, handing out catalogues and free posters to a continuous stream of curious visitors.

For added effect, Mr Kennelly had hired a presenter, whom he watched with amused satisfaction. Dressed in mismatched plaid shirt and trousers and dark wrap-around sunglasses, he paced a tabletop and barked at the crowds, encouraging people to fill in forms to win thousands of pounds worth of StockByte products.

Not a bad showing for a company which began life a year ago, with a small booth on a neglected edge of the showfloor at last year's MacWorld Expo.

Then, it had 10 CDs available. Now, StockByte offers 46 CDs with more than 5,000 images, which customers either buy from their website, catalogue or call centre, or through its 35 distributors in 25 countries.

"We were seeking distributors last year," noted Mr Kennelly. "Now, distributors are seeking us."

StockByte is a good example of the opportunities available to small companies which can identify and exploit technology market niches. The company is not a technology newcomer in the traditional sense of a software developer or hardware manufacturer. Instead, StockByte caters to the international publishing industry, which has become increasingly computerised.

Designers and editors need a wide range of images but hiring a photographer or using photographic agency images for projects is expensive. Companies like StockByte offer collections of themed images on a pay-once, royalty-free basis, at around £200 a disk. In comparison, a single image from an independent photographer used in an advertising campaign might cost £150,000.

Mr Kennelly said 1997 was a breakthrough year for the industry, which is valued at $100 million (£72.5 million) annually worldwide. "The quality [of the images] in the early years was very mixed," he said. "The industry had to create a benchmark for itself and prove to designers, publishers and editors that they had the quality." The point has apparently been made. Now he is rushing to keep up with demand, and plans to add another 50 CDs to his stocklist in 1998.

StockByte images appear in newspapers and magazines, brochures and websites. They've also been used in a number of advertising campaigns for companies like British Midland, Du Pont, Rank Leisure and Wallace Arnold Holidays.

StockByte has serious competition both established vendors like industryleader, Photodisk; weighty newcomers like software company Adobe; and a number of companies from areas like the Far East where labour costs are cheap.

Small and aggressive, StockByte decided it could compete in the competitive royalty-free photograph sector by producing all its own images rather than buying work from other photographers, and by offering quality images and a deep knowledge of the technical and content needs of publishers.

How? "We've got a good, solid base of technical skills, photographic skills and colour separation skills," said Mr Kennelly. Most of those abilities are concentrated in Mr Kennelly, who worked as a freelance photographer for Irish and international publications for 12 years and has a photographic bureau called Newsfax, based in Tralee.

The rest of the Kennelly family is also involved in news and print his father was a journalist with RTE and his three brothers produce the weekly newspaper Kerry's Eye.

Mr Kennelly attributes his own interest in design and publication to the Macintosh computer, which enabled even the technically inept to work with text and images. StockByte CDs are in PC/Mac format but Mr Kennelly said he targets MacWorld Expo (in San Francisco and London) to sell his wares because most publishers and designers continue to use Apple computers.

Because of his work on Macs, Mr Kennelly became interested in the technical process involved in producing quality colour images for printers and publishers, and in 1990 set up a colour reproduction facility in Tralee. That led, in 1996, to a decision to combine those various strands into StockByte (initially launched as StockPix, but Mr Kennelly had to change the name because of similarities to a French company called Pix).

While the first CDs from StockByte had a strong Irish flavour faces and settings often look distinctly Celtic newer offerings feature a range of nationalities, races and settings, as well as collections of objects like tools, food, dolls and office supplies.

Staying competitive means looking for the content niches StockByte's competitors have overlooked as well as filling in the holes in its own catalogue. "We are good listeners," claimed Mr Kennelly. "We want to know where our gaps are, where our competitors are failing."

Last year, customers and distributors wanted a greater ethnic mix. They got it, as well as a confident, exuberant series of CDs called Busy People. These feature a range of unusual characters with exaggerated facial expressions and energetic poses. There are a couple of men in drag and a few rude gestures, and many of the images are shot from a distorted, overhead angle.

"We've taken some pretty wild concepts. It's mental fodder for ad men," said Mr Kennelly. "You have to tune yourself to as many different cultures as are out there. You can't afford to restrict yourselves to Ireland." This year, he says the clear message from customers was that they wanted more gay and lesbian, sports, and medical images, which will be reflected in future offerings.

With a recent $1 million in funding from Ireland's ACT Venture Capital, which took a 25 per cent equity stake in the company, Mr Kennelly feels StockByte is ready to take on the big guys. "We're number three in the race in terms of product content delivery," he said. "The challenge is to deliver the sales to match."