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Amaze. Acquiring Spring. Amaze, featured in the Empowering Shopping panel at our recent Visual 1st conference, acquires Spring, a platform for Creators to sell their physical digital products to their fans. Spring’s merchandising platform serves 5.5M new Creator stores and previously pivoted from being an apparel customization company to a "Creator company.”
PhotoRoom. Raising $$$ and adding generative AI. Past Visual 1st presenter PhotoRoom raises a $19M series A and is further expanding its AI-based and ecommerce-focused photo editing features with generative AI functionality. This will enable SMBs to create marketing product photos from a single product photo and a short text description.
Claid.AI. Generative AI for e-commerce. Claid.AI by Let’s Enhance is in closed beta testing its generative AI solution for brands to create product imagery.
Picsart. Generative AI inside photo editor. Picsart has added a text-prompted AI image creation feature inside its Picsart Editor app. The benefit of this integration: after you’ve generated your own AI image from text you can then continue editing it by leveraging Picsart’s stickers, tools, filters, fonts, and various photo editing features.
Capsule. Generative AI for b-rolls. Capsule announces G-ROLL (got it? Generative b-roll) to add b-roll images to videos. In short: it’s video-to-text-to-video. G-Roll transcribes the spoken words in the video to text, which then generates AI images that are added as b-roll images in the video. If needed, users can modify the transcribed text fragments before generating their desired b-roll image. So, if the transcribed video text says “camera,” you can highlight that word to generate a camera image. If you manually add the word “compact” it superimposes a compact camera onto the video.
Nvidia. New generative AI creation model. Not only are we seeing an explosion of generative AI applications, but the generative AI-creation models keep innovating at a rapid pace as well. Following OpenAI, Google, Midjourney, and Stability AI, Nvidia announces eDiffi, a new generative text-to-image model. All major generative text-to-image models today are diffusion models, meaning they add noise to images and then train their AI to denoise these images. Nvidia’s eDiffi model uses multiple specialized denoisers. According to Nvidia this has several advantages, including the ability to add text inside the image, such as by depicting a person wearing a T-shirt with specific text on it.
Popsa. Photo Tiles product going global. Popsa has completed the global rollout of its Photo Tiles product range, enabling US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand customers to order no-nails photo-personalized wall decor products and have them shipped locally rather from far away photo printing plants.
Xiaomi & Leica. A smartphone with an interchangeable Leica M lens. In our last issue we rubbed in that most camera manufacturers were slow to respond to the emergence of smartphones as the default cameras. While a bit late, in the last few years Leica has become the exception by licensing its technology, products and brand to smartphone vendors, most notably with Huawei and Xiaomi, as well as by developing their own smartphone.
Now they're at it again: by means of Xiaomi, who unveiled the Xiaomi 12S Ultra Concept Phone, which features an appearance almost identical to the Xiaomi 12S Ultra phone, but with a second 1-inch 50.3-megapixel Leica sensor occupying the middle of the camera island instead. On top of that, this new sensor is designed to work with an interchangeable Leica M lens.
It’s easy to imagine the use cases when bringing dedicated lenses along with your phone makes sense, such as when taking wildlife or sports photos. However, taking this from a concept phone to a product that works as envisioned won’t be an easy feat!
Descript & OpenAI. Whopping valuation. Congratulations to Descript, last year's panelist at our Visual 1st DIY Video Summit, who reportedly raised "tens of millions of dollars" from generative AI technology developer OpenAI and others at a whopping $550M valuation.
Perfect Corp. IPO. Congratulations to past Visual 1st presenter Perfect Corp., makers of the YouCam AR beauty apps, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), following a merger with a SPAC, Provident Acquisition Corp. As of this writing, Perfect Corp.’s market cap is just shy of to $1 billion.
Piczo. My early lessons in photosharing virality. On a personal level, it was great to read how some of Piczo’s early users now as adults look back at their teen photosharing days back in 2006
(Piczo: The Internet’s Influential But Forgotten Social Network).
For full exposure: as the startup’s equity-paid incubator and co-founder, I was quite skeptical when my partner Jim Conning insisted on giving in to all these teenage and tween girls who begged us for a free version of our photosharing site Funtigo after we started charging a subscription fee. But within days of exponential growth, it was clear Jim was right to have given in – and that we were on to something with our new free teen photosharing site, Piczo.
But a few years after I’d left there was MySpace where most of Piczo’s users went. And then there was Facebook. And then there was Instagram, the final nail in Piczo’s coffin. A fascinating retrospective from some of these early users now turned millennials!
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