Visual 1st: this year's panel topics and confirmed presenters

My partner Alexis Gerard and I are thrilled to announce the contours of Visual 1st 2024, the 12th edition of our annual conference promoting innovation and partnerships in the photo & video industry.

Below is an overview of the program and speakers so far. You can also check out our up-to-date lineup of fireside chat presenters, panelists, moderators, and Show & Tell demo presenters at visual1st.biz/program2024.

We hope you can join us again, or for the first time!

Fireside Chats

Jeff Herbst

Founding Managing Partner

GFT Ventures

Early stage AI and frontier technology investor with GFT Ventures.

His journey from 20 years as Nvidia’s VP of Business Development to founding a $140M venture fund focused on AI.

Conference:

Oct. 16 (PM) – 17 (AM + PM)

Pre-conference networking:

Oct. 16 (AM)

Dead Pixels Society Meetup

Women in Imaging Luncheon

Where: Fort Mason, San Francisco

Buy $100-off Super Early Bird ticket! 

($699 instead of $799; expires June 7)

About Jeff:

Jeff Herbst is Co-Founding Managing Partner of GFT Ventures, a fund that also invested in last year's Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner, BRIA. He brings to the fund over three decades of venture capital, operational, business development and M&A experience.

Prior to launching GFT, Jeff spent 20 years as NVDIA’s Vice President of Business Development where he built an ecosystem of accelerated computing applications spanning the domains of AI, Data Science, Autonomous Machines, and Graphics and Visualization. During his tenure at the company, among other things he created the NVDIA ventures and acquisitions programs, overseeing more than 40 global investments and 20 acquisitions valued over $8B. He also led the NVDIA Inception global startup accelerator, now comprised of more than 10,000 AI, Data Science and High Performance computing companies.

Prior to joining NVDIA, Jeff ran the Business Development function at the Altavista search engine, and was a Partner at the Wilson Sonsini law firm in Palo Alto. He holds a JD from Stanford University and a BS with Honors in Computer Science and Economics from Brown University.

Last year's lineup of fireside chat presenters

Moderators

Panel topics

Innovation in photo print products, technology, and manufacturing.

Where is the money?

The photo print industry continues to thrive and transform itself to meet evolving customer demands, while leveraging advances in hardware, software, AI tech, and manufacturing. 

Our panel of experts will explore today’s, and tomorrow’s, opportunities, while delving into the latest trends, innovations, and business strategies shaping the photo print market.

Speakers to date:

Hans Scheffer, CEO, HelloPrint

Krista Minekime, Vice President, US Operations, Gelato

Anya Thrash, Executive VP of Marketing, Pro Channels, Bay Photo / Sensaria

Diversity in the photo & video industry. 

Gender matters.

While female consumers are often the primary purchasers of photo or video products, women have historically been underrepresented among startup founders and enterprise executives in our industry. However, things are changing. Join us for an engaging panel discussion featuring four trailblazing women who will share their experiences and insights. 

Discover how companies can benefit from greater gender diversity, and explore actionable steps we can all take to dismantle the remaining barriers.

Speakers to date:

Anna Dickson, Group Product Manager, Google

Stephanie Mansolf, VP, Business Development & Partnerships, Perfect Corp.

Scalable imagery for ecommerce.

The new frontier for innovation.

It’s hardly news that visuals sell. Ecommerce relies on compelling photos and videos to inform and entice customers, so procuring these visuals is a necessary cost of doing business. 

But what if, with a little help from AI, still images and videos could be captured or generated at unprecedented scale, and individualized with just a few clicks – all at a fraction of historical budgets? 

In this panel we’ll examine the opportunities and challenges of developing – or implementing – next-generation scalable solutions to capture, curate, modify and manage visuals, for businesses ranging from SMBs to global brands.

Photos & videos are more than a collection of dead pixels. 

But how to empower consumers to engage with their imagery?

We all face an overload of photos & videos – those we’ve taken ourselves, shared with us by friends & family, or thrust upon us by social media and advertising. How could innovative products empower consumers to re-discover the joy of engaging with visual content rather than mindlessly scrolling through? 

Hear from 4 entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of tackling this challenge straight on, discover what types of solutions get traction, and learn how they could be monetized.

Show & Tell Awards Judges

Show & Tell Presenters to date

Troy DeBraal, Imaige

Marie-Eve Lemieux, Mediaclip

Eray Basar, IMG.LY

Bec Ryttersgaard, Frintz

Noam Eshel, Photomyne

Ryan Jacobs, SpotMyPhotos

Sarah Lefebvre, EyeQ

Have an innovative photo & or video product you'd like to show at no charge for attendees? Check out our Show & Tell demo admission guidelines.

And a few more things...

Soona & Zerolens. Acquisition. Ecommerce visuals enabler, Soona acquires Visual 1st 2021 Best of Show Awards winner, Zerolens. Yah! Zerolens marks the 21st acquired Visual 1st presenter – a list that keeps on growing.

Soona provides 20K+ brands a platform to make, manage and measure their creative for whatever they sell and wherever they sell. Zerolens’ GenAI product Mokker enables its 350K customers to combine existing product imagery with dynamic AI scenes. 

(This will also be an important topic of conversation in our “Scalable imagery for ecommerce” panel at Visual 1st this year].

EyeEm & Freepik. In hot water. At Visual 1st last year Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, mentioned he’d already set his eyes on acquiring EyeEm as far back as 2020, at a time when acquiring photo AI training sets wasn’t yet the Big Thing. Freepik ended up acquiring EyeEm in 2023, at a time when EyeEm’s owner, Talenthouse, was in bankruptcy proceedings. 

But these days the prospect of having 160M images as an AI training set is a valuable trove – if you can actually use these images for that purpose. 

So what happened? Freepik recently changed the EyeEm Terms & Conditions to say that users would grant the company the rights to upload their content to “train, develop, and improve software, algorithms, and machine-learning models.” Users are given 30 days to opt out by removing their content from EyeEm’s platform – but requested deletions can take up to 180 days. 

Not enough to justify this biting article in TechCrunch? There’s more: users who delete their account forgo their right to any outstanding payouts for their work.

Ouch! Not a great start to take over what was once a warm and inspiring photosharing community.

Boris Elgadsen. Need some great wall décor art? The Electrician, the AI image that won a Sony World Photography Award last year only to have the award being refused by its creator, Boris Elgadsen, is on sale. The giclée-printed image is on sale for €20K at the Palmer Gallery in London as part of an exhibit entitled Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley. The exhibit contains other AI image prints as well that are also available for purchase, although none come close to the hefty price tag of Elgadsen’s. 

(We had the pleasure of hearing Boris’ perspectives in our The Latest AI Tech Announcements Visual 1st Spotlight last year, and yes, we had Boris’ permission displaying the Electrician as part of our stage backdrop at Visual 1st last October 😀).

Mood Camera. Taking great pictures has gotten too easy. Several apps, such as Lapse, Dispo and Later Cam, have popped up to solve that “too easy” problem by delaying your ability to view your photos after capture. 

Newest kid on the block: Mood Camera, an iPhone app that lets you apply different retro filters when capturing photos, but won’t even let you see a live preview of what the photo with these filter effects would look like until after it has been taken. The intended result? When taking photos it forces you to focus on the image in the viewfinder rather than on applying the effects, enabling you to generate “authentic photos with film character,” according to the developer.

Meta, Alphabet and Snap. Yah, the big boys can make $$$ from advertising again! Remember the dark days of 2022 when making money from advertising seemed like a thing from the past? The concerns were: high interest rates + inflation causing brands to rein in their spending, while that other big boy, Apple, changed its iOS privacy policy, which made it much harder for social media companies to target users with ads. 

Well, the world hasn’t ended. Meta, Snap and Google all reported first-quarter results last week that beat analysts’ estimates, showing substantial acceleration in advertising growth.

How come? All three have rebuilt their ad systems platform, infusing it with AI, all in order to continue to deliver value to brands despite the roadblock imposed by Apple. 

Case in point: Meta lost two-thirds of its value in 2022 and was forced to dramatically cut headcount. But their stock almost tripled in 2023. 

And why does this all matter to our photo & video industry? Compelling visuals sell – as has been the case for ages, and still very much applies today. The implication: there are opportunities galore for innovative products that boost the creation of compelling visuals.

Best,

Hans Hartman

Join us Oct. 16-17 in San Francisco for our 12th annual edition of Visual 1st !

Platinum Conference Sponsors to date:

Gold Conference Sponsors to date:

Silver Conference Sponsors to date:

Partner Sponsors to date: