Widen Releases Smartimage Version 2.0 - A Simple Image Management Tool for Small-to-Medium Sized Businesses
Smartimage - a simple image and brand asset management tool from Widen - releases version 2.0. Click here for high-resolution version ·Marketwired
Marketwired
MADISON, WI--(Marketwired - Aug 13, 2013) - Widen Enterprises announced today the release of Smartimage version 2.0, a new solution for collaborative cloud-based media management. Designed specifically for SMBs, Smartimage helps organizations of all sizes collect, organize, and share visual content ranging from vector files, to photos and PDFs. The new lightweight image management offering will give smaller organizations some enterprise-level abilities to build and protect their brand image at a price point they can afford.
"Smartimage helps brands ensure images are used consistently and appropriately by anyone representing or referring to a brand," said Jake Athey, Marketing Manager at Widen Enterprises. "Many organizations currently share and manage these sorts of assets using tools built for consumers rather than brand owners. We're aiming to provide a simple tool built for smaller, up-and-coming brands. And, while many small businesses and organizations such as churches, school groups, sports clubs and musicians may not think of themselves as brands, we're providing tools to help them solve some of the same brand management and marketing challenges big companies face every day."
Widen, which has decades of expertise in building digital asset management software, hopes to help organizations with a wide range of budgets exercise control over their brand image. Smartimage lets users create public and private asset collections so that organizations can quickly share the right files with the right internal and external stakeholders.
"Small(er) organizations, like big brands, need to make sure it's easy to find and use the most accurate and up-to-date imagery possible," said Matthew Gonnering, CEO at Widen Enterprises. "Whether its bloggers using your logo, a sales force sending out product images, or fans of a brand sharing with friends, Smartimage provides a user-friendly solution for managing and distributing high-quality visual content. With Smartimage, we make some important, powerful tools accessible -- in terms of price point and ease of use -- to virtually everyone."
Smartimage was built to address the needs of marketers and SMBs managing brand identity packages, press kits, event collections, image galleries, campaign launch kits and similar content collections that include product imagery, event photos, senior leadership photos, charts and graphs, logos, brand guidelines, company culture images, PDF document collateral and a host of other digital content. The simple interface and wizards let users immediately take advantage of Smartimage without any training or IT resources.
"Cloud file sharing services are a real boon to marketers who need to share brand assets with others inside the organization and with external stakeholders such as their agencies," said Melissa Webster, program vice president, content & digital media technologies at IDC. "Small and medium sized businesses need an easy to use solution that is also cost effective."
Smartimage, with version 1.0 released earlier this year, offers the following key features:
1. High-quality graphics support: Smartimage specializes in handling high-quality, professional marketing & creative files -- including TIFF, EPS and AI files. Users can download image assets in a variety of auto-generated sizes and formats -- PNGs with transparent background for vector files and JPEGs for all other image formats. 2. Custom brand spaces: Smartimage allows account administrators to extend the branded experience of their main website to the collection pages used to distribute content with customizable color themes and cover photos. 3. Public and private collections: Public collections offer high-quality content that is available for public consumption and search engine access, whereas private content collections are only accessible by other administrative account holders or password-protected pages. 4. Optimized user experience: Smartimage uses Retina® and other high-resolution displays so users get the crispest, truest experience possible. The carefully curated collection wizards and automatic sorting for logo, image and document files are among a few of the niceties that make the user interface more streamlined. 5. Sharing & analytics: Users enjoy social sharing via email or Facebook, embed codes, and analytics tools to track collection visits, downloads and sharing activity. 6. Google Analytics integration: Users get audience-centric data including visits, unique visitors, duration/time on each page, language and location demographics, and traffic sources.
The newest additions to Smartimage with version 2.0 include: video embedding with YouTube- and Vimeo-hosted videos, custom collection colors and cover photos, shared administration and increased file limits with the paid subscription plans.
Next up for Smartimage includes embeddable image gallery templates, robust hotlinking with custom image sizes and an API.
About Smartimage: Smartimage is a simple image management and brand asset management solution that enables companies to better organize and share all of their digital image content. Users can create public or private collections of tagged, high-quality images in multiple file formats for usage in press kits, brand identity packages, and similar marketing communications collateral. Smartimage is a brand of Widen Enterprises, which is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information, visit http://www.Smartimage.com.
About Widen Enterprises: Widen has used more than 60 years of experience in helping customers build brand equity and consistent cross-channel brand representation to develop an inventive suite of Web-based Digital Asset Management applications. Widen software services provide marketers with real-time access to asset libraries, reducing the costs of search, file preparation, redundancy, hardware and software. For more information, visit http://www.Widen.com.
