Adobe – Where art thou?

If you can’t keep up with the phenomenal growth of Canva, you’re not alone. Last week the company announced it has raised $200M at a $40 billion valuation. Wasn’t it only a few months ago the counter stood at $15B?

And it is not because investors are going overboard because of FOMO. Well, maybe a little, but still… Canva expects to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. More than 500,000 teams at various organizations are paying for the product in some capacity.

Keys to success? Quantity and quality of templates, stock assets, collaborative team features, and a broad range of design features for photos, videos, animations, page layout, print – you name it (note: Canva acquired last year’s Visual 1st presenter Kaleido, maker of removebg and unscreen). But most importantly, or at least the thing we’ll zoom in on during this year’s Visual 1st and the DIY Video Summit: Canva offers easy and versatile solutions for businesses of all sizes who care to create visual products “DIY.”

And yes, this could have been Adobe’s turf, but they mostly missed out on the SMB DIY creation market by continuing to focus on the professional and enterprise design and advertising markets.

Adobe might very well acquire Canva at some point in the future, but at that time, it will be too much, too late.

If you can’t keep up with the phenomenal growth of Lightricks, you’re not alone. If you missed their presentations at Visual 1st in 2017 (when Itai Tsidon discussed their app subscription plans, which he expected them to get above the $10M annual revenue level) and at Visual 1st last year (when Ophir Abitbol participated in our Visual 1st Start Performer Alumni Check-in panel): Lightricks is the developer behind the best-selling Facetune selfie retouching app, and several other use case-specific photo and video smartphone apps, including its fast-growing Facetune Video app.

Yesterday, the company announced $130M in new funding at a post-funding valuation of $1.8 billion. Across its suite of apps, the company now touts 29M monthly active users, with over 5M paid subscribers. Lightricks expects to generate over $200M in revenues this year and plans to grow that figure by 40% next year.

And yes, this could have been Adobe’s turf, but they mostly missed out on the smartphone native photo and video app market by continuing to focus on the professional and enterprise design and advertising markets, and the perceived need to integrate smartphone apps with their desktop-based brothers and sisters.

Adobe might very well acquire Lightricks at some point in the future, but at that time, it will be too much, too late.

Apple says it every year, but the iPhone 13 cameras do seem much improved. Well, in areas other than megapixels that is, because these are still just 12 MP for the telephoto, wide and ultrawide cameras on the iPhone 13 Pro.

There are lots to say about the iPhone 13 camera features, but I’d like to highlight the feature Apple made the most noise about: on the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max models, a new Cinematic Mode allows you to adjust the aperture, or f-stop, to change the depth-of-field after you’ve shot your video. So you change what’s in focus, or rack focus from one subject to another, and you can do this during capture and after-the-fact (in the Photos app as well as iMovie for iOS, and soon also in iMovie for macOS and Final Cut Pro).

In other words: shoot once and you use the footage for different purposes; or shoot once – for a quick shot without needing to worry about the intricacies of your camera settings – and make things right in “post.”

It’s the same premise of the Lytro camera for those who can remember, which got a lot of praise among observers, but the company could never get it quite right and was eventually acquired by Google for their IP in 2018.

Well, Xiaomi is not shy of highlighting its cameras’ resolution on its newest flagship phones. Xiaomi’s new 11T Pro offers a triple camera array, headlined by a 1/1.52″ 108MP sensor. The other two cameras onboard are an 8MP ultrawide module and a 5MP telephoto/macro lens with a 50mm (Equiv.) focal length. Video capabilities include 8K30p or 4K60p.

Xiaomi calls its boosted filmmaking capabilities “Cinemagic,” i.e. the Xiaomi marketing folks beating their Apple peers on their own turf with a cutesy new buzzword.

kick off in just 28 days!

Oct. 19-20: Visual 1st:  Covering photo and broader imaging innovation topics.

Oct. 21: Visual 1st  DIY Video Summit  Covering video creation tools

Buy your ticket now!

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