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

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

Shoebox

Last week Shoebox announced it’s closing its door on May 22nd, signifying the end of an era when one innovative cloud-based photo management/synching solution after another came to market in the 2010-2015 timeframe. Founded in 2012, Shoebox has always stood out to me for its novel interface, which enabled users to search for photosContinue 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

Last year we changed the name of our conference, from Mobile Photo Connect to Visual 1st. Besides wanting to affirm our focus that visuals are increasingly at the core of how people communicate and retain their memories, we also felt we needed to let go of the words “mobile” and “photo”Continue Reading

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Global Blockchain Forum and immersing myself in this for me mostly new world of ICO seekers, self-proclaimed investors, blockchain developers, VCs suffering from FOMO, and libertarians and anarchists from all over the world for which the prime method of communication is Telegram – because you never knowContinue Reading

About a week ago, Unsplash announced that they had raised $7.25 million, along with plans to bring cryptocurrency to its free stock photo service. While most see their move as a potential Shutterstock killer,  Unsplash  could end up becoming a  potent competitor to Instagram, Pinterest, and Snap as they share more DNAContinue Reading

Mobile Photo Connect, the premier conference for the mobile photo ecosystem conference, today announces five additional sponsors of its October 25, 2016 conference.   New Gold sponsor is Portugal-based Storyo, makers of the highly acclaimed automatic multimedia story telling app of the same name.   Storyo will complement the conference’s previously announced Gold sponsors: HP, Fujifilm, Walgreens, and di support. Mobile Photo Connect’sContinue Reading