– A little about you, what is your background ? I’m a fairly recent New Yorker, having moved here only about a year and a half ago. I had been living in San Francisco for many years until then and working at a number of tech companies out here: First at Google as a product manager, then joined Instagram when the company was still very small. Once we were acquired by Facebook, I stayed for another year and a half before deciding it was time…
Everyone agrees that VR is the next big opportunity in the consumer tech industry. Goldman Sachs estimates the market to yield $60 billion by 2025, with almost a 50/50 split between hardware and software. It is currently a giant land grab, where companies are positioning themselves, launching headsets, cameras, platforms and content. But, as much as the excitement is real, it is still all about the potential rather than the reality. Before the VR year kicks in at full gear, we thought we would stop and…
The 2015 year ends pretty much as it started. Some promises were delivered, some fell short. At least for now. With mobile continuing to dominate as the number one gateway to the online experience and visual being its strongest appeal, one would have thought that visual tech would have exploded by now. But not yet. At least not at full capacity. While image advertising has taken a foothold on all major social media site, with Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest adding a “buy” button within photos,…
When discussing this year’s Mobile Photo Connect “Prospering in the emerging Photos at your Fingertips” theme, several photo app developers commented along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be nice if… companies such as Google or Facebook would share their machine learning and image recognition technologies with all of us?” Few expected this was likely to ever happen, let alone within weeks after the conference. On November 9 Google announced its open source TensorFlow machine-learning framework, followed three weeks later by its Cloud Vision image recognition…
When the 1,000-pound gorilla eats your lunch, you eat his breakfast: Right on the heel of Google’s opening its visual recognition API for free to anyone, Clarifai launches today a free consumers app that can store and classify photo which could very well give a run for its money to Google’s Photo app. Constructed entirely on the company’s award-winning deep learning visual recognition engine, the Forevery app might become the favorite companion of every mobile shutterbug out there. The process is simple. Import your images and…
Google has recently launched its Cloud Vision API, making it easier for companies to build all sorts of applications using its image recognition. Even more, Google is offering it for free to begin with. This puts the whole image recognition industry into a different motion, and there are many other vendors that might get out of business soon. To find out more about how the image recognition industry is impacted, we interviewed Guangda Li, the Co-Founder and CTO at ViSenze, a machine intelligence company that…
While the numbers are familiar – 1.8 billion images uploaded daily, over a trillion in a year – what they hide is not. A recent study by Kodak Alaris ( unfortunately only limited to the UK) shows that the vast majority of photos taken are never processed and worse, end up being lost forever. While there are many reasons for this, it is interesting to note that the size of the photo universe is probably 5 times bigger than anyone believes, even if most of…
A new L2 intelligence report show cable prices rose a staggering 231 percent from 1998 to 2013, despite limited increases in underlying innovation.1 Like sharks sensing chum in the water, a host of well-funded companies entered the content fray, pioneered by YouTube in 2005. From 2006 through 2011, Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Roku, HBO, and Amazon all introduced on-demand, digital video substitutes for live TV broadcasts. These platforms have been wildly successful in going “over- the-top” of traditional TV and cable networks. Audiences are watching more…
That’s it. It’s official. Google photos is now free from G+ and starting a life of its own. For those who subscribe to our weekly newsletter, you might have noticed that we called what would be the key differentiator: free unlimited storage. With so many of the other features ( with variations) available via competitors, it was the only true unique play Google could make. And while a major draw for any mobile user, it is not the only attractive feature. Let’s review. Not really…
Different day, different crowd : If day 1 of the LDV Vision Summit was all about science, research and data ( massive amounts of data), Day 2 opened the doors to more practical applications of visual tech, mostly around revenue. In other words, how companies are using the discoveries of researchers to extract value, information and monetary rewards. As in the previous day, panels were a flowing mix of individual presentations and group discussions. Here are some elements of day 2 which particularly caught our attention. Opening…
