In 2009, it was estimated that 80% of the downloads on the Internet were illegal. The numbers have improved since then and there is greater awareness and appreciation of creative work – thanks to image sharing sites like Shutterstock (NYSE: SSTK) that basically licenses images, video clips and pieces of music on behalf of photographers, designers, illustrators, videographers and musicians adding 80,000 new images a day from 100,000 contributors in 150 countries.
Shutterstock brings together a marketplace of creators and consumers in a seamless way, offering the services to consumers in an efficient and intuitive way. Today, Shutterstock has extended its ability to bring these images directly into Microsoft Powerpoint.
This collaboration with Microsoft embeds Shutterstock’s offering directly into the presentation process, bringing simple functionality to users who can choose images they love and preview them in a slide before buying.
“One of the most common ways business professionals use Shutterstock images is in presentations,” said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock. “With hundreds of millions of users, PowerPoint is one of the most successful presentation tools in the world; it’s the short-hand of business communications. We’re delighted to be working with the Office team to offer incredible images directly in the application.”
“We know our customers are frequently using images to enhance their PowerPoint presentations,” said Steven Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President Developer Experiences at Microsoft. “With this PowerPoint plug-in, Shutterstock is broadening its ability to enhance productivity, offering its extensive collection of high-quality imagery to professional users.”
“Making high-quality imagery available in PowerPoint greatly increases the ability of our users to communicate visually. Concepts previously expressed as bullet points can come alive with a memorable image, leading to greater retention of ideas and effectiveness of the presented content. Access to better images, like those the Shutterstock add-in will provide, is another step in helping our users prepare more impactful presentations and is complementary to features like PowerPoint Designer, which makes recommendations on how to use that high-quality imagery effectively” said Shawn Villaron, PowerPoint Group Program Manager.
To begin purchasing images, PowerPoint users can log into their own Shutterstock accounts or sign up for one. Users can quickly search by keyword, or browse custom curated image categories like backgrounds, business, people, and nature.