Present your photo or video product at Visual 1st!

Andy Kelm is Managing Director at Palmarés Advisors, a boutique M&A investment bank. Andy has over 20 years of product, corporate development and general management experience in wireless, mobility, and cloud services.

Andy’s former positions include General Manager at Amazon Web Services and VP, GM Browser Services at Nokia. (more…)

Anna Dickson is a Product Manager at Google. Anna's work brings visual media content to many of Google's product teams.

Anna formerly was deputy director of photography at the Wall Street Journal, photo director at the Huffington Post and photo editor at iHeartRadio and Rolling Stone. (more…)

Jeff Herbst is Co-Founding Managing Partner of GFT Ventures. He brings three decades of venture capital, operational, business development and M&A experience. Prior to launching GFT, he spent 20 years as NVIDIA's Vice President of Business Development where he oversaw more than 40 global investments and 20 acquisitions valued over $8 billion.

Jeff also ran the Business Development function at the Altavista search engine, and was a Partner at the Wilson Sonsini law firm in Palo Alto. (more…)

Sami Niemi is a general partner at Spintop Ventures, a Nordic early stage tech venture capital firm.

Sami’s former positions include Director of Photography at Microsoft, Director & GPM, Capture & Relive at Nokia, and CTO & co-founder mobile imaging software company Scalado, which was acquired by Nokia. (more…)

Interested in doing a Show & Tell demo? Check out the qualification criteria and let us know!

Locket. Reinventing photo sharing draws $$$. Locket, a popular app that lets you post photos to your friends’ home screens, raised $12.5M in seed (!) funding from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Sugar Capital, Costanoa Ventures, along with Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.

RevenueCat. App subscription churn data. App subscription enabler RevenueCat analyzed 10K+ subscription apps across iOS and Android to understand how renewal rates stack up during the first 3 months. While not specific to photo or video apps, their data might give an indication for our industry. Monthly subscriptions have a median first month renewal rate of 56%, which then increases over time. In other words: retaining your customers beyond the first month is the hardest. However, if you do succeed, 75% of your customers then stay for month 3 and 81% of those will continue for the next month.

Pinterest. Collage app. Pinterest soft-launches a new iOS app called Shuffles for putting together collages using photos, image cutouts and other animated effects. The idea is to inspire Pinterest users to share their ideas visually in a more engaging way. They can share their project with friends for collaboration or post it to public groups where others can “remix” the original creation to their likings. The app’s description suggests it could be used for things like visualizing a room makeover, fashion ideas, or moodboards.

Joel Hruska. Upscaling video. There are more and more photo upscaling solutions coming to market [check out these impressive James Webb Space Telescope images upscaled by Let’s Enhance for instance]. But cranking up the resolution of your videos is a different beast. ExtremeTech managing editor Joel Hruska has set his teeth in this challenge and for the not so faint at heart, he wrote a 16,000-word explainer chock-full of video samples and image comparison sliders.

Insta360. The webcam that follows you. Past Visual 1st Best of Show winner Insta360 keeps on cranking out innovative cameras for a large variety of use cases [Just a few weeks ago: the Insta360 One RS 1-inch 360 Edition, featuring Leica lenses with a 1-inch sensor for 6K resolution of 360 imagery]. Newest on the block: Link, a 3-axis gimbal equipped webcam, along with ML-based software to keep you in frame during your Zoom call. Unlike Apple’s Center Stage software-based feature, the Link camera actually follows you – there is no cropping and subsequent resolution loss in order to show you centered on screen. And you look good in it, as Link captures 4K video at up to 30 fps, featuring a f/1.8 lens, and a “specialized” HDR mode.

Capsule. Going post. DIY video creation tool and past Visual 1st presenter Capsule is releasing its 3.0 version, which includes Capsule Studio, a brand new AI-powered video editing tool, labeled as the fastest browser-based renderer on the market.

Announcing our first fireside chat session:

M&A Trends in the Imaging Industry:

Rudy Burger is a leading expert on M&A transactions within the technology sector. As the founder of Woodside Capital, he focuses on computer vision and imaging companies across multiple industry sectors.

Prior to Woodside Capital Partners, Rudy was the founding CEO of the MIT Media Lab Europe, a joint venture between MIT and the Irish government. Over the past 25 years, he founded five technology companies in the U.S., ran a European public company, and served as a senior executive for two global 500 companies. He is an effective, results-oriented professional with a proven track record in strategic planning, change management, and corporate development.

Rudy has a BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Computer Vision from Cambridge University, UK.