Shutterstock & PicMonkey. Acquisition. Stock photography giant Shutterstock acquires photo editing and graphic design app developer PicMonkey for $110M. Along the lines of its big brother competitor, Canva, PicMonkey is template-driven, offers thousands of templates, fonts and graphics, and focuses on the DIY Creator market. This acquisition also indicates the increased trend towards offering stock assets in conjunction with DIY design and editing tools (for instance, both Canva and Adobe have acquired stock photo providers in the past). PicMonkey’s acquisition by Shutterstock now shows the market expansion also going the other way by adding creative tools to stock photo providers.

Microsoft & Clipchamp. Acquisition. Microsoft jumps on the DIY video creation bandwagon by acquiring Clipchamp, a template-driven video editing and stock asset-infused app with solutions both for consumers and enterprise users. (Clipchamp is featured in our DIY Video Creation Apps study).

Creative Layer. Raising $. After selling Canvaspop earlier this year to Circle Graphics, Canvaspop CEO Nazim Ahmed has already launched his next startup, Creative Layer, a B2B personalized print-on-demand platform, and raised $3 million CAD from primarily the same group of investors who in the past backed Canvaspop, led by Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke and Celtic House Venture Partners.  

Albelli & Photobox. Merging? A new European photo product giant in the works? Rumors of Albelli and Photobox were breaking news a week ago, but as of this writing, they're still percolating in the “to be yet confirmed” category. 

PicsArt. Unicorn. Yeh, another Visual 1st alumnus gains unicorn status! PicsArt raises a fresh $130M at a near $1.5B valuation. PicsArt has been downloaded more than 1B times across 180 countries and reports to have 150M monthly active users.

Popcorn. Video messaging with colleagues. The new startup Popcorn wants to make work communication more fun and personal by offering a way for users to record short video messages, or “pops,” that can be used for any number of purposes in place of longer emails, texts, Slack messages or Zoom calls. 

LOVE. Video messaging with friends & family. A UK-based startup called LOVE is launching a messaging app that offers a combination of video calling and asynchronous video messaging, in an ad-free, privacy-focused experience. It comes with a number of bells and whistles, including artistic filters and real-time transcription and translation features.

Facebook. When AI gets ugly – again. AI algorithms are fueled by training sets, and training sets can reflect biases, including real ugly ones. Racial biases have come to surface in solutions from vendors like Amazon and Google too but this is a real ugly one, as reported by the New York Times: Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates.” Facebook’s response? “…while we have made improvements to our A.I., we know it’s not perfect, and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have…” etc., etc. 

Polaroid Now+. Best of two worlds? Retro camera with smartphone app control. The new Polaroid Now+ is not just a retro instant print camera but taps into shooting modes that are controlled with Polaroid’s free iOS or Android app once camera and phone are connected through Bluetooth. The Now+ special modes include Aperture Priority, Double Exposure, Light Painting, Manual Mode and Tripod Mode.

Adobe & Google. Upscaling. Upscaling, or “rezzing up” used to be a tricky and low-quality affair. But then AI got better and better, and developers now crawl over each other to enable resolution enhancements. Here is a DPReview review of Adobe’s Super Resolution capabilities (spoiler alert: they were impressive). And another DPReview reviewer analyzed Google’s upscaling technology (spoiler alert: he calls it impressive).

Apple. Caving in. In an un-Apple like fashion, Apple changed plans based on feedback from the public (+ the tech world + privacy experts): Apple’s controversial plan to scan iPhone photo libraries in order to protect children has been delayed for at least a few months due to privacy concerns. To be seen what will happen down the road.

Mobius Labs. Raising $ (read: €). Congratulations to Mobius Labs, last year's Best Business Potential winner of our Visual 1st Show & Tell Demo Awards. The company just raised $6M off the back of increased demand for its computer vision training platform. This year we look forward to Appu Shaji's participation in our Visual AI, AI, AI – The One-Click Future and Beyond panel at Visual 1st, as well as at our DIY Video Solutions for Consumers panel at our new DIY Video Summit!