This week's photo & video tech industry news
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We are pleased to announce our partnership with Dscoop, which includes co-marketing activities and providing industry insights to Dscoop's members.
Why are Dscoop and Visual 1st partnering? Check out my brand new article, Boosting photo print products sales: it ends – but doesn’t start – with best-of-breed photo print product apps, which does not only cover my analysis of the trending photo printing monetization opportunities, but also the perspectives on this partnership from Dscoop and Visual 1st fans: Anthony Pieters, CEO Imaging Solutions AG, Rick Bellamy, CEO RPI and Blurb.com, Marion Duchesne, CEO Mediaclip, Charlie Alexander, Alexander’s Print Advantage, and Michal Czaicki, CEO Printbox.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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Virtual interactive conference
Covering photo and broader imaging innovation topics.
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Oct. 21:
Virtual interactive conference
Covering trends in enabling video creation by non-video professionals – consumers, SMBs and enterprises.
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Buy your ticket now! The earlier you register, the earlier you can participate in our pre-conference networking LinkedIn site to connect with fellow attendees.
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Newly added speakers:
(Spread the work by Liking or Sharing
on the LinkedIn links below!)
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Stay tuned for announcements of the remaining panelists in the next issue,
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Visual 1st Platinum sponsors to date:
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Visual 1st Gold sponsors to date:
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Visual 1st Silver sponsors to date:
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DIY Video Summit Gold sponsors to date:
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