BENlabs founded by Bill Gates
BENlabs, formerly BEN Group Inc, is a Los Angeles-based product placement, influencer marketing and licensing company. The company offers AI-driven product placement, influencer marketing services, music partnerships, rights clearance, and personality rights management services for the entertainment industry.
The company was founded in Seattle by Bill Gates in 1989 as Interactive Home Systems, and later renamed Corbis. The company's original goal was to license and digitize artwork and other historic images for the prospective concept of digital frames. In 1997, Corbis changed its business model to focus on licensing the imagery and footage in its collection.
The Corbis collection included contemporary creative, editorial, entertainment, and historical photography as well as art and illustrations. Among its acquisitions were the 11 million piece Bettmann Archive, acquired in 1995; the Sygma collection in France (1999); and the German stock image company ZEFA (2005). Corbis also had the rights to digital reproduction for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.Corbis later expanded into providing services for the entertainment industry, including brand integration and rights clearance services. In January 2016, Corbis announced that it had sold its image licensing businesses to Unity Glory International, an affiliate of Visual China Group. VCG licensed the images to Corbis's historic rival, Getty Images, outside China. Corbis retained its entertainment businesses under the name Branded Entertainment Network, which has since evolved to BENlabs—the name reflecting the company’s commitment to continual testing, development and optimization of its AI-driven brand to entertainment opportunity matching services.History
Founding
Bill Gates founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems; he envisioned a system for allowing customers to decorate their homes with revolving displays of artwork, including works by notable painters, using digital frames and technology that had yet to have been developed. The company's name was changed to Continuum Productions in 1992 and later, to Corbis Corporation. Interactive television was suggested as a way to deliver the content, but as the development of the planned product was under way, Corbis focused on digitizing content and acquiring rights to images. Corbis signed agreements with the National Gallery of London, the Library of Congress, the Sakamoto Archive, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.In October 1995, the company purchased the Bettmann Archive collection, which included the pre-1983 photo library of United Press International and its predecessor photo agencies, Acme and INP, the photo arm of the International News Service. Prior to acquiring the Bettmann Archive, Corbis represented roughly 500,000 images, a total that increased substantially when the Bettmann drawings, artworks, news photographs, and other illustrations were added to the company's portfolio. In all the Bettmann Archive contained 19 million images. The archive was stored 220 feet underground in a refrigerated cave in the Iron Mountain storage facility,In 1995, the company won a contract with its first major photographer, Roger Ressmeyer, followed by several more, including Galen Rowell; this signalled growing interest in the world of professional photography, which up to that point had not taken the company seriously. In 1996 the company acquired the exclusive rights to approximately 40,000 images photographed by wilderness photographer Ansel Adams.In 1997, Corbis named company veterans, Steve Davis and Tony Rojas, co-CEOs. Corbis also hired David Rheins to run Corbis' Productions, and Leslie Hughes to lead the company's B2B image licensing division, Corbis Images. These hires marked the company's shift to a more market focused entity.  Corbis Productions published several award-winning CD-ROM titles such as A Passion for Art: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Dr. Barnes, compiled from the Barnes Foundation collection, and Leonardo da Vinci, which showcased the Codex Leicester.In 1998, Leslie Hughes was named President of Corbis Images. The company expanded internationally and through product development and further acquisitions.  The company acquired Digital Stock Corp., a supplier of royalty-free images to further expand its offering. In 1998, another division was added to Corbis Images when the company acquired Outline Press Syndicate, Inc., a supplier of celebrity portrait photography. Renamed Corbis Outline, the company syndicated studio portraits and candid photographs of actors, musicians, athletes, politicians, business leaders, scientists, and other celebrities and provided the images for sale to a broad range of national magazines. The same year, Corbis also acquired Westlight, adding over 3 million images to their archives while scanning best selling images.In June 1999, the company acquired the French news photo agency Sygma, adding 40 million additional images to the company's collection, and expanding Corbis's portfolio beyond 65 million images.  The archive is today stored in a preservation and access facility outside Paris.In 2000, Microsoft (a fellow venture of Gates) purchased the rights through Corbis to the image Bucolic Green Hills, which it renamed to Bliss for the default wallpaper of Windows XP. The image was taken in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States by photographer Charles O'Rear in 1996, who previously sent it to Westlight which Corbis had acquired in 1998.
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