I've been very busy wrapping up our DIY video apps market study, so this week no feature article but covering some interesting industry news instead:

MyHeritage. Animating these old photos. We all know the value of our irreplaceable family pictures. But what if they could be animated and it appears that grandma’s grandma is still alive? Unless you've been living under a stone the last few days, you've seen samples created with the MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia web tool that lets you do just that. The technology is licensed from Israeli facial AI company D-ID.

Dispo. Retro photo app raises $20M. Dispo, the retro photo app co-founded by YouTube celebrity David Dobrik raises $20 million in a Series A round led by Spark Capital. The app lets you snap photos in an old-fashioned camera interface (the screen for snapping photos looks like the back of an old-fashioned disposable camera, leaving the user with only one option — turning the flash on and off). But its real differentiator: the user’s photos don’t “develop” until the next morning.

memmo. Celebrity video messaging the European way. Sweden-based memmo raises $10M to expand their “pay a celebrity for a personalized video message” web app. On the surface a knockoff of Cameo, but apparently the European entertainment and sports celebrities were an underserved market, and operating localized markets is a different ballgame than Cameo’s (highly successful) US-centric approach.

FiLMiC. Speeding up image remapping. FiLMiC, the company behind mobile apps FiLMiC Pro, DoubleTake, and Firstlight, has announced that it has patented a new image remapping technology called Cubiform that is 4.75 times faster than traditional GPU pipeline methods.

It gets a little technical, but the idea is that rather than directly modifying images, Cubiform generates a stream of color look-up tables (C-LUTs) from a dynamic set of parameters which can be modified by a user in real-time. That stream of C-LUTs created by Cubiform can be applied to an image, or set of images, with minimal performance impact on the CPU or GPU.

Kaleido & Canva. Acquisition. Congratulations to last year's Visual 1st presenters, Kaleido, the Austrian-based developer of foreground-background segmentation web apps, remove.bg (for still images) and Unscreen (for video), which have been acquired by visual communications platform provider, Canva!

[Kaleido is the 11th past Visual 1st presenter that has been acquired. Who is going to be #12?]

Samsung. The camera sensor to beat. We’ve covered the Samsung Isocell GN2 camera sensor before, but more details are emerging. How about upscaling the RGB color info up and above the default 50 megapixels, throw some staggered HDR and Smart ISO Pro in the mix? If you don’t quite know either what that all means, it’s all explained here. Samsung says the Isocell GN2 sensor is already in mass production, and while nobody's officially announced a phone that uses it, leaks suggest the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra will be one of the first phones to get the sensor.