WWDC takeaways: lots of great news for photo app developers, but one major puzzler

Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality, computational imaging, content, Content Recognition, Facial recognition, mobile, Mobile Photo Connect, news, photo merchandise, photo organizing, photo sharing, tablet, visual recognition June 9, 2017 Hans Hartman Leave a comment

The photo app developers I spoke with are overwhelmingly excited about a range of WWDC announcements, even though one of these dumbfounded several developers. We’ll get into that one later; let’s start with the four most exciting announcements. ARKit: making mixed reality easier to create and more realistic to view Apple’s OS 11 developer ARKit enables developers to build mixed reality apps that interpret the imagery from the user’s iPhone camera by identifying surfaces, tracking motion, estimating scale as well as ambient lighting, and by providing fast and…

The battle of the photo format

Adobe, big data, computational imaging, content, editing, flickr, mobile, news, Social Media, technology, video June 8, 2017 Paul Melcher 1 Comment

Hidden deep inside Apple’s WWDC 17 was an announcement that made little waves but that might have great repercussion: In their OS11 release, the Cupertino company plans to store images using their new HEIF format rather the almighty JPEG. The reason? HEIF compression takes half the space of the JPEG compression, suddenly doubling storage for photos. What is HEIF? HEIF is short for High-Efficiency Image Format. It was created by MPEG, the committee in charge of all standard video compression formats ( MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, HEVC/H.265). An HEIF file…

10 Questions to a Founder : Picasso Labs

advertising, analytic, Artificial Intelligence, big data, Brands, content, Content Recognition, interview, marketing, PhotoTech, Social Media, visual recognition June 1, 2017 Paul Melcher 1 Comment

While billions of images are being shared daily, little to nothing is known about how viewers respond to them. Until now. Using hundreds of thousands of data points extracted from million of images, Picasso Labs offers the first A.I. powered insight tool for images. Thanks to its deep analytical resources, it helps brands and marketers understand which images work best for what audience, and why. We sat down with founder and CEO Anastasia Leng to learn more: – A little about you, what is your…

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2017 LDV Vision Summit : A world of foresight

Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality, computational imaging, computer vision, Content Recognition, Facebook, google, imaging, investment, LDV Summit, PhotoTech, Pinterest, technology, video, visual recognition, VR May 30, 2017 Paul Melcher Leave a comment

When electricity was finally mastered at the turn of the XX century, it triggered a whole new range of new products and industries while improving existing ones. From light bulbs to fans, fridges, air conditioning, factory tools little that we interact with today is not affected by electricity. Today, computer vision is having the same effect. Now that it has reached a certain level of maturity, both in performance and availability, computer vision is opening a huge array of new opportunities and new businesses in…

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Google: what’s wrong with a lack of jaw-dropping announcements?

Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality, computer vision, content, Content Recognition, Facial recognition, google, Interface, mobile, Mobile Photo Connect, photo merchandise, photo sharing May 23, 2017 Paul Melcher Leave a comment

In short: Nothing. With an emphasis on incremental improvements to Google’s photo organizing, sharing and search solutions, Google’s maturing solutions are now becoming so easy, efficient, and helpful that many consumers will feel they can’t live without them. Perhaps equally important, Google is opening up more and more of its supporting AI technologies to developers – for companies who can’t afford to hire an army of AI PhDs. The Google I/O announcements important to mobile imaging vendors To put the photo-related announcements in perspective, note…

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LDV Vision Summit 17 – 10 Questions for an Investor: KBS Ventures

advertising, analytic, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality, big data, Brands, Funding, interview, investment, LDV Summit, marketing, PhotoTech, Pinterest, Snapchat, Social Media, VR April 27, 2017 Paul Melcher Leave a comment

There’s a definitive symbiosis between visual tech and digital marketing: Not only is vision the primary sense used when making a buying decision, it is also the most efficient in tracking and deciphering a consumer’s path to the critical buy impulse. While brands might not have yet adopted the rapid pace of evolution offered by the countless new start-ups in the field, advertising agencies and their investment arms have long known that it’s a battlefield with huge potential outcome. We spoke with Jessica Peltz-Zatulove – Partner…

Move over Snap: Facebook is the camera company to beat

Adobe, Augmented reality, computer vision, content, Content Recognition, Facial recognition, mobile, Mobile Photo Connect, Snapchat, Social Media, visual recognition, wearable April 25, 2017 Hans Hartman Leave a comment

It’s the platform, stupid Just as the world finally figured out why Snap relabeled itself as a camera company, last week Facebook proclaimed it’s not just a camera company, it’s a camera company built on the world’s ambitious augmented reality platform. Let’s add some perspectives to their F8 announcements: Recently, Facebook has put its camera front and center in its various properties (not just Instagram, but also Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp). For instance, in Messenger, this changed the traditional texting workflow, which normally starts with…

LDV Vision Summit : 10 Questions for a Research Scientist @ Google

Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality, computer vision, Content Recognition, Facial recognition, interview, LDV Summit, photo organizing, research, visual recognition April 20, 2017 Paul Melcher Leave a comment

From automatically organizing personal photos, monitoring crops, medical diagnostic, driving cars, security monitoring, computer vision is always everywhere. Not surprising since we, as human beings, use vision as our primary tool to understand the world around us. For a search engine like Google, it does make perfect sense to be one of the leaders in research. Ahead of her keynote address at the upcoming 2017 LDV Vision Summit, we spoke with Google Research Scientist Tali Dekel to learn more: A little bit about you. what is…

LDV Vision Summit 17 : 10 questions to a visual search expert at Pinterest

analytic, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality, content, Content Recognition, e-commerce, interview, LDV Summit, photo organizing, PhotoTech, Pinterest, Social Media, technology, UGC, visual recognition April 12, 2017 Paul Melcher Leave a comment

[It’s Spring and the LDV Vision Summit is coming back. Like every year since its inception, we are proud to feature some of the prestigious speakers and judges who will take the stage during the two-day event. Here is the first of the series] With appetite for visual content showing no signs of taming down and users wanting to do more than just look at pictures, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others have been in a close race to outbid each other with new…

10 Questions for a founder : WordsEye

Artificial Intelligence, computational imaging, content, Content Recognition, editorial, imaging, Interface, interview, keyword, PhotoTech, research, Social Media, technology, visual recognition March 27, 2017 Paul Melcher Leave a comment

Most people are familiar with Artificial Intelligence capable of understanding images or videos and describing its content. But what about the opposite: asking the same machine to generate visual content based on a textual description? This is exactly what WordsEye solves. While the current 3D rendering might appear simplistic, this could very well be a first glimpse into the future of photography and video. Creators will no longer need to travel to capture a scene but rather just imagine it and have computers create it.…