Why this Photo Print App Innovation Spotlight?



With major transformations occurring throughout the photo print product value chain – in manufacturing, channels, and consumer behavior – it’s more important than ever to think outside the box as to how to best serve today’s – and tomorrow’s – photo print product buyers.

Rather than turning this rethinking into a conceptual exercise, our March 15 Spotlight will host up to 8 photo print app developers who’ll live-demo their innovative phone, web or PC apps, and discuss their apps’ merits vis-à-vis the photo print product value chain trends.

Join us! Get inspired, meet old or new industry friends from across the world, and share your own perspectives!

March 15, 8:00 – 9:30 am PST

(5:00 – 6:30 pm CET)

Photo Print App Innovation

Live demos & discussions with up to 8 innovative photo print app developers

Attendees: Startup founders and corporate executives from the global photo ecosystem

Buy your ticket now! More info.

$19 Early Bird Tickets expire February 28.

Sponsors to date:

Previous Spotlights:

Generative AI (98 attendees)

The Metaverse (84 attendees)

Photo Print Sustainability (73 attendees)

Presenters to date:

Roger Bloxberg, CEO, PlanetArt

Laura Sparks, Senior Product Manager, Special Projects, Blurb

Axel Lilienblum, Founder & CEO, Grow

Thomas Beguin, Co-CEO, IXXI

Malhar Patil, Co-Founder, Zingcam

Kirandeep Kaur, Business Manager Mobile Commerce, ip.labs



Ink Cards. ChatGPT is for text and can’t be used for photo print products, right? PlanetArt doesn’t think so. Its Ink Cards users who feel lost for words to accompany their photo can now let the app’s new MagicMessage feature do the work for them. If does this after soliciting basic guidance from the user, such as the card recipient’s name, occasion and optional details, including information about the user’s relationship with the recipient or the recipient’s interests. 

MdBy. MdBy, Blurb’s sister brand launched last fall, is an intuitive, design-focused, web app for creating high-end photobooks, framed prints, and gifts that leverage a range of elevated print manufacturing options. MdBy’s photobooks include printed fabrics, linen covers, and matte full-image wraps with foil. Options for MdBy’s gallery-quality wall art include handcrafted frames and sustainable canvas. MdBy gifts include giclée fine art prints and unique takes on print sets and display options.

Grow.photos. What does it mean to be a parent-first photo book app? Grow’s answer: subscriptions to continuous photo albums that grow along with the must-retain memories of young families, coupled with an obsession with quality that combines ease-of-use UI with premium design and print product quality.

IXXI. How to disrupt the well-established wall décor market? For IXXI this means offering a picture playground for your wall with their patented modular system. IXXI turns the concept of photo tiles into a creative playground that meets consumers’ interior design aspirations. The keys to success? Giving you the choice to display one image per tile or to display a single image though a collection of (almost literally) seamlessly connected tiles. Letting you use your own photos or licensed artworks, while offering you the opportunity to go as big and impactful as you want and change tiles without effort. And that’s just the start.

Zingcam. What’s next with last year’s Visual 1st Special Recognition Award winner, Zingcam? While applying AR features to photo prints is a long-pursued use case and Zingcam’s 1.0 version “brought an element of wonder, whimsy, and delight to how consumers can enjoy viewing their visual memories,” according to last year’s Visual 1st Awards jury, Zingcam is ready to take its AR for print product features to the next level. Enjoy viewing their next version, to be revealed at our March 15 Spotlight.

ip.labs develops a range of white label middleware and consumer-facing applications for photo print, app-to-print and web-to-print businesses. At our Spotlight, Kirandeep Kaur will introduce ip.labs' turnkey print and design software toolkit and services that enable any photo app business, small or big, to start selling personalized photo products within their existing apps.

And a few more things...

Save the date. Visual 1st conference. Oct. 24-25, San Francisco.

DMLA. Generative AI Webinar: Separating Fact from Fiction. It’s not too late – join me Friday at 8 am PST for this Digital Media Licensing Association webinar. Fellow panelists: Michael Osterrieder, CEO of vAIsual.com, Henrik de Gyor, a Consultant at Another DAM Consultancy, Ian B. Crosby, acclaimed attorney in the fields of intellectual property litigation & licensing and partner at Susman Godfrey LLP, and Tom Smith, CEO of Gado Images and panel moderator.

TechCrunch. “The AI photo app trend has already fizzled.” Really, TechCrunch? Surprised that repeat usage of gimmicky “wow, I can now create an image from just text” apps has dried up? As we discussed at our January 19 Visual 1st Generative AI Spotlight, we are only just starting to tap into the wide variety of potential use cases that generative AI could address. And yes, disillusionment with the initial hype is inevitable. (Check out our main takeaways here).

Colorful. Product shoot creator. AI commerce startup, Colorful (née as Zerolens, Visual 1st Best of Show Award winner 2021) has quietly launched Mokker.ai on Product Hunt. Mokker lets you generate product shoot-like photos for ecommerce by adding matching backgrounds based on an analysis of a few of your photos, as well as your choice of template styles. Another nail to the coffin of traditional catalog product shoots?

Getty Images vs. Open AI. Hand us $1.8 trillion please. While Shutterstock has a deal with OpenAI that includes licensing images to OpenAI, Getty Images is suing OpenAI for illegally copying 12M images from Getty “without permission ... or compensation ... as part of its efforts to build a competing business.” Getty is seeking up to $150,000 per infringement, or up to $1.8 trillion. Why so much? “Getty Images’ visual assets are highly desirable for use in connection with artificial intelligence and machine learning because of their high quality, and because they are accompanied by content-specific, detailed captions and rich metadata,” according to Getty. The real bad thing? It could take several years to get through discovery and summary judgment motions before trial. In other words: uncertainty of what is and isn't legal in generative AI creation will stay with us for a long time.

The Guardian & the Pulitzer Center AI Accountability Network. AI and gender bias. It’s certainly not the first time researchers detect gender biases among AI tools. But a new study by The Guardian and the Pulitzer Center AI Accountability Network also finds biases among AI tools that aim to detect “raciness” or sexual suggestiveness in images. The study found that these tools systematically rate photos of women as more sexually suggestive than those of men, especially if nipples, pregnant bellies or exercise is involved. Let's not forget: social media companies that leverage these types of AI algorithms have suppressed the reach of countless images featuring women’s bodies, and hurt female-led businesses – further amplifying societal disparities, as the researchers noted.

Runway. Generative AI for video. While generative AI for images is at 1.0, you can make a case that generative AI for video hasn’t progressed beyond 0.5. But Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, aims to change this. The company, which BTW no longer collaborates with Open AI, has released an AI model that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image or video. Check out their impressive demo reel. No surprise, the company already raised $50M back in December, at a whopping $500M valuation.

Perfect Corp. Image enhancer. Perfect Corp. announced the launch of YouCam Enhance for iOS and Web, which can update their blurred, pixelated, or unclear photos, bringing them into sharp focus in a matter of seconds.

GlossAI. Raising $ for repurposing content. GlossAI raises a $8 million seed round. Gloss AI enables users to easily create short short-form videos, trailers, eBooks, blog posts, carousel images, and more from existing content, which is then automatically uniquely packaged for the intended medium. 

Best,

Hans Hartman