Microstock News: Fotolia news - a busy May !

• May 1st: Fotolia* now supports video - great for those that can afford the astounding Canon EOS 5D Mark II*.
• May 6th: Fotolia bring in iStockPhoto co-founder (Patrick Lor) to be US CEO/President
• May 21st: Fotolia launches PhotoXpress - a free (!!) image bank to rival Getty owned stock.xchng
• May 23rd: Rumours that TA Associates have invested between $50m to $100m in Fotolia. Christian Grunwald from TA is now on Fotolia's Board.

Is this ultimately leading to a duopoly in stock photography between Getty and Fotolia, or is there news to come from any of the other players... they can't afford to be left behind.

Microstock News: Lookstat gets funding

Lookstat is a website which claims to help take away the burden of tracking sales across multiple microstock sites. As someone that does this tracking manually, I'd certainly appreciate a tool to speed this up, although my sales are so low (in fact, have pretty much dried-up!!), I'm losing faith in microstock altogether.

They've recently received $500k of funding, which is admirable. Hopefully they'll use it to develop support from more than the two current sites - iStockphoto and Dreamstime. Long-term, the future will be interesting, as with increasing consolidation between microstock players, there may be less need for photographers to track sales across many sites. They may also have certain resistance from people who aren't so keen to share their secure logon details with a third-party.