It made a giant noise as it caught everyone by surprise — $230 million investment in a company providing photo services. After Adobe’s $800 million purchase of French microstock photo company Fotolia, Pond 5’s $64 million investment and Shutterstock’s $76.5 million IPO, it is the highest figures ever seen investedContinue Reading
Let’s say your company has developed very strong expertise that could be applied to other use cases or markets than those you’ve successfully pursued. That makes it very tempting to expand. However, while some companies do this successfully, a large number of others learn through the school of hard knocksContinue Reading
While the release of this person does not exist by three researchers created a massive wave of buzz, it never went beyond curiosity. When Ivan Braun and his team launched Generated Photos, the interest changed to concern and apprehension. Generating human portraits via AI was no longer a research paper but a real,Continue Reading
Depending on who you ask, photo prints are up, or down. Depending on where you look, DSLRs are dead, or not. If you ask VC’s consumer photo apps are out, if you ask developers, they are a hot item. The only certitude, one all seem to agree on is thatContinue Reading
New AI imaging products, research papers and scandals keep popping up – so, I thought it was a good idea to present a roundup of the AI imaging announcements of the last two weeks. Needless to say, there was a lot of commotion around FaceApp but, before we get into that, let’sContinue Reading
I’d like to share a few thoughts spurred by our recently released Building the Gig Photo Economy study, as well as the conversations I’ve since had with quite a few folks using or supplying Gig Photography services. First of all, we live in an era of diminishing stigma against outsourcing household tasksContinue Reading
After all, it’s not about a specific connection, nor is it about one particular talk or presentation. It is neither about any particular individual that you catch up with or meet for the first time. The real value of the LDV Vision Summit, instead, is the sum of it all.Continue Reading
Investors from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Lux Capital, Glasswing Ventures, Imagination Capital, B Capital Group, FirstMark Capital, True Ventures, Eniac and we at LDV Capital share insights. Visual technologies were once considered cute, niche & science fiction. With more visual technology companies like Pinterest and Zoom going public, the worldContinue Reading
The LDV Vision Summit, with its mixture of passionate visual tech entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, professors, journalists, and investors is right around the corner (May22-23). As a sneak peek and respecting our now well-established tradition, we touched base with some of the scheduled speakers. The biggest challenge for online clothing retailers isContinue Reading
In 2015, we interviewed the CEO of then little known visual search company Visenze. Four years later, after raising $20 million in a series C and announcing a deal with Samsung, we caught with Oliver Tan to see how things have changed for his company, the technology involved, the marketplaceContinue Reading