CEWE. Departure. CEWE’s Board of Trustees announced that CEO Christian Friege will leave the company by the end of the ear due to "differing opinions on corporate management." In 2019 Christian participated in one of our Visual 1st fireside chat sessions, and we were all impressed by his high energy and forward-looking perspectives. The industry will miss him! 

D-ID. Bringing old photos to life attracts $s. D-ID, the AI-powered technology company behind MyHeritage’s “Deep Nostalgia” feature, which animates the faces of long-lost relatives in your old photos, and the recently launched LiveStory feature, which adds audio to the animated photos, allowing the people in the photos to narrate their own life histories, announces a $25 million Series B round of funding led by Macquarie Capital. 

Qualcomm. Pushing the Metaverse. Qualcomm launches a $100M Snapdragon Metaverse Fund, which will invest up to $100 million in companies focused on building virtual and augmented reality apps, as well as those working on key underlying technologies. The move aims to both spur the industry and promote adoption of Qualcomm's technology, including its Snapdragon processors.

Flickr. Paying for NSFW. Running a photosharing site the size of Flickr is not an easy undertaking without sinking lots of money in it, as Flickr/SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill stressed at our Visual 1st conference last year. Coupled with a further restriction of the number of non-public photos that Flickr users can post, Flickr changed its content guidelines to only allow Flickr Pro users to post “restricted” or “moderate” content, which includes photos of “full-frontal nudity and sexual acts.” 

Stay tuned for our next issue:

Takeaways from our highly informative March 15 inaugural Visual 1st Spotlight event,

Snap. AR billboards. Snap launches Custom Landmarkers, a new AR feature that allows Snapchatters and marketers to link their own AR creations to any location they choose. Through development on the Lens Studio, a brand can virtually transform one of its store’s logos or use a local landmark to tell its virtual business story. The company vets all Lenses before they go public – no word yet about charges or Snap’s vetting criteria.

Twelve Labs. Cmd-F for video. Search for “the office party where Courtney sang the national anthem” and you instantly find not just the video clip but also the moment in the video where it happens. That’s the premise of Twelve Labs’ neural network, which delivers multimodal understanding by taking in both visual and audio content, and formulate context around that. Twelve Labs jus raised $5M in seed money.

Skylum. Software development from Ukraine. Our 2019 Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner and Ukraine-based Skylum now has its team of 130 people “scattered” around Ukraine and the world. Skylum says that while it is challenging to keep up normal operations, the majority of the team is working from different locations that range from bomb shelters, the homes of relatives, and even on the road as they move from one location to the next in search of safe harbor. With all that said, Skylum has managed to push out an update for its Luminar Neo app.

PAI. Synthetic Media Code of Conduct. Synthetic content can not only be a tremendous source for cost savings and creativity, but also be used as misleading deepfakes. The Partnership on AI (PAI), an organization with representatives from industry, civil society, academia, media, and journalism, has evaluated both the limitations of and opportunities for synthetic media. It plans to publish a Synthetic Media Code of Conduct, which will set normative guidelines for the use of synthetic media. We’ll keep you posted!

Sony. Content Authenticity. On the standard side of things, Sony has joined the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) as its latest steering committee member. The C2PA is an open, technical standards body aimed to address the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (otherwise known as provenance) of digital content.

C2PA was launched in February of 2021 and is a unification of the efforts from the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) — which focuses on systems to provide context and history for digital media — and Project Origin, a Microsoft and BBC-led project that was designed to tackle disinformation in the digital news ecosystem.

PicsArt. AI-based font creation. We’ve seen all kind of AI applications for photos, videos, text, and audio, but how about fonts as part of an appealing visual story? That’s what PicsArt much have thought: the photo & video app developer launches an AI-powered Font Generator, using generative machine learning as a creative tool.