Dateline Madrid. I head back to New York tomorrow after 8 days in several European cities. The business highlight of my travels was seeing so many of our 300 distributors at the CEPIC conference in Biarritz, France. We hosted a lunch and presented our plans to distributors for the coming months. It was also a good time to visit with many of our key personnel from all over Europe including the heads of our French, German and UK operations.

One thing to note was that many image companies are following the latest craze of launching high premium Royalty Free brands. I think this is an interesting idea, but one of necessity when an organization does not own many RF images and or brands. Thus the necessity of having to cover up this shortfall by launching a "premium" RF brand. With so many launching such brands, I think the concept loses its impact as the buyer will ultimately see premium brands as just one more commodity in the growing array of RF offerings.

I had time to kill over the weekend so I visited the Guggenheim Museum (designed by Frank Gehry) in Bilboa, Spain. Many know that this is a striking building inside and out - it did not disappoint. The odd thing was listening to the recorded tour. I could have sworn that the voice on the tour was none other than that of Jonathan Klein (CEO of Getty Images). By the way, Jonathan or whomever does a great job.

Now back to the USA.