Imagga in 2014
2014 was quite exciting and challenging for Imagga. One of the most important things that have happened is the significant improvement of out tagging technology. We’ve trained and learned to recognize new objects so the tags the tech returns are more relevant than ever. This wouldn't be possible without the committed efforts of our machine learning researchers and software engineers. We grew in numbers as well. We’ve also got a new website and better business offering - see our current pricing plans.
What would be the year without great hacker events. We’ve attended and partnered quite alot - Photo Hack Day NYC, Seedhack Lifelogging London, LDV Vision New York, Photo Hack Day Japan, Telerik Hackathon. It’s always nice to meet excited developers eager to get their hands dirty on our APIs.
The end of the year got us a nice surprise - awesome reward from Trento ITC Labs. Besides the cash, we are excited to be able to leverage on their research and business network and spend couple of weeks in Berlin and London.
What 2015 have in store?
We are getting ready for an exciting and quite intensive 2015.
- Several updates of the technology are pending - more concepts and objects to recognize
- great demo tools are in works that we believe will help us better explain the power behind Imagga image tagging technology
- personal photo categorization app
- discovering new verticals and awesome application of image recognition
If you haven’t tried our APIs, sign up, our hacker plan is free forever.
Can The Machine Beat Humans in Image Recognition
For far too long image understanding has been considered too complex for the machines to deal with. It takes years of training for the human brain to build links between the visible and connect it to concepts of shapes, colors and objects. Even though neural networks were invented couple of decades ago and were considered huge step into machine AI, what lacked was computing power. With the advance of GPU computing, new opportunities were discovered, algorithms were reinvented so machine and deep learning are back on the table.
The machines are powerful enough now to grasp the world almost as good as a 3 years old kid. A prerequisite for neural network to work well is a clear, representative data that will make the outcome results more precise and accurate. Huge efforts to collect and classify the images of the world were undertaken in the last couple of years. Are the machines ready for a battle then?
At Imagga we take that challenge seriously by building an intelligent image recognition technology that can teach the machine to understand basic daily life objects, comprehend concepts and eventually deal with complex pictures, where lots of background information needs to be taken into account in order to be interpreted properly. It’s challenging task but we love what we do.
With that stated, we are ready to set the stage for an epic battle, the battle of the century - machines vs humans. To some it might sound funny, unrealistic, pretentious, but it’s coming. At least now in a form of a cool game, done with love by Imagga and Algolia.
We’ve called it Human vs. Robot: Chash Of The Image Tags. You will be taking central role of judging who tags better - the human or the machine. You will be presented two sets of images for a given text tag and need to vote for the set that better represents the concept of the text tag. As every good judges you will need to be unbiased and make up your mind only on the facts, so you will not know which set was tagged by humans or respectively by machines. You will get five rounds to decide and pronounce a winner. Of course you can play as many times as you wish, and even invite your friends to try it out and have fun.
The game is made possible by the joined efforts of Algolia and Imagga. Algolia is building powerful search technology for exploration of large data sets. Algolia’s hosted search API delivers instant and relevant results as you type your search query. Imagga’s part is to provide the automated machine tagging of all the images you will be seeing in the search results.
It might be just a game, but the real idea is to demonstrate how powerful machine recognition is nowadays. It can really replace or at least greatly assist people in the process of tagging photos - it’s much faster, more cost effective, most of the time - more consistent and even more precise than human tagging. This empowers a lot of use-cases in stock photography, digital asset management, advertising, cloud storage and photo sharing that are otherwise not feasible or even not possible with human tagging.
Why don’t you play and judge for yourself Clash of the image tags!
Imagga Gets Big Players Award by HM King of Spain at South Summit 2015
Georgi Kadrev getting Tech for Big Players Award from HM Felipe VI, King of Spain[/caption]
Imagga was honored to get Tech for Big Players Award at South Summit 2015, that took place in Madrid, Spain. At the closing day HM Felipe VI, King of Spain himself awarded the finalists of the startup competition at the event and spent some time to talk with the winning companies. Out of the four startups being recognized at the event, Imagga is the only company that doesn't come from Spanish speaking country.
South Summit is the leading entrepreneurship event for the Spanish speaking world. Over 12,500 participants, 100 startups, 650 investors, 325 journalists и 275 speakers took place in the forum, held in the historic Las Ventas building - build in the beginning of 20 century and home of the famous bull fights. Special guest of the event was Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple together with Steve Jobs.
Imagga was one of the 100 carefully selected startups from 15 countries (3 companies in total from Bulgaria) and we competed in Tech for Big Players category (the other categories were; digital solutions for the mass market, healthcare and biotech, industrial revolution)
“Being able to stand and pitch on the very same arena famous for bullfighting actually raised the adrenalin and made the experience quite unique. It was great opportunity to meet fellow entrepreneurs, talk image recognition and AI, currently quite hot trends, and talk to investors and media”, shares Georgi Kadrev, co-founder and CEO of Imagga.
https://youtu.be/6UQirQBi2Jc?t=52m20s
Imagga's automated tagging is getting traction and we see great use cases and lots of business opportunities. South Summit opened up a new world of possibilities as we've never been that much focused on the Spanish speaking world, but we see it's big and interesting.
"I took some time to contemplate why I like this tree as a prize that much - it's not just because it was given by His Majesty the King of Spain and is the symbol of Madrid, but also as it is a very beautiful metaphor - it has been planted some time ago, and it took a while before it shows up above the ground. Now it's grown but it's still small and it still needs care until it grows and give some sweet fruits. I believe it's the same with our Imagga.", shares Georgi Kadrev
Being part of SouthSummit was fun and very rewarding. Thanks for inspiring us and at the same time acknowledging our efforts to democratize image recognition and make it useful for great variety of business use cases.
Multi Language Support - Imagga API
We are happy to announce we are adding 50 languages (still in beta) to Imagga Auto-tagging and Categorization APIs. The tags/categories that the powerful Imagga image recognition API returns now speak your language. All you need to do is to add the language parameter with corresponding language code you want the results to be displayed in. You can even add multiple languages (for example &language=de&language=fr).
Currently there are 50 languages supported with the following language codes: ar (Arabic), bg (Bulgarian), bs (Bosnian), ca (Catalan), cs (Czech), cy (Welsh), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), et (Estonian), fa (Persian), fi (Finnish), fr (French), he (Hebrew), hi (Hindi), hr (Croatian), ht (Haitian Creole), hu (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), ja (Japanese), ko (Korean), lt (Lithuanian), lv (Latvian), ms (Malay), mt (Maltese), mww (Hmong Daw), nl (Dutch), no (Norwegian), otq (Querétaroo Otomi), pl (Polish), pt (Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), sk Slovak), sv (Swedish), sl (Slovenian), sr_cyrl (Serbian - Cyrillic), sr_latn (Serbian - Latin), th (Thai), tlh (Klingon), tlh_qaak (Klingon (pIqaD)), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), ur (Urdu), vi (Vietnamese), yua (Yucatec Maya), zh_chs (Chinese Simplified), zh_cht (Chinese Traditional)
Find out how to implement in Imagga API Docs.
You can see how auto-tagging and the language support works live on our demo page.
Not finding yours in the supported languages list? Talk to us.
Imagga Partners with Aylien
We are super excited to announce our partnership with AYLIEN - a natural language processing platform, that will make possible to add text analytics capabilities to our image recognition and analytics APIs. We believe this partnership will help users of both services better understand their multimedia content and do way more with it.
AYLIEN Text API is a package consisting of eight different Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Machine Learning APIs that help developers extract meaning and insight from text documents. It can be applied in Ad-Targeting, Media Monitoring and Social Listening projects.
Imagga’s Image Recognition API utilizes machine learning, image recognition and deep learning algorithms to identify over 6,000 distinct objects and concepts and return relevant keywords that best describe what’s in the images.
Currently Imagga’s image analysis endpoint is being added to ALYIEN’s Natural Language Processing API, giving developers the ability to analyze text and images in one API.
Having access to two powerful technologies in a single API creates endless opportunities for businesses that need to deal with large volumes of user generated content. Users rarely input or share just text or images, so being able to analyze and understand both at once, gives amazing new opportunity for any business to distribute and monetize content.
Together with AYLIEN we’ve been testing how our technologies can compliment each other for some time and the results were very exciting. Text and images are different but complement well each other in many cases and applications.
You can try the new hybrid image and text analysis service here. There’s nice demo to play with before you are finally sold (you can see the results for some sample images, but also can upload your own)
Analyzing Text and Images: Webinar
Happy to announce an upcoming webinar together with our platform partners Ontotext. The webinar on Self-Service Semantic Suite (S4) will take place on Nov 12th (11am ET / 8am PT / 4pm GMT) featuring Ontotext CTO, Marin Dimitrov as well as a guest speaker Georgi Kadrev, CEO of Imagga.
S4 provides on demand access to text mining and linked open data technology in the cloud. Using the platform you can quickly and easily build smart data prototypes at a fraction of the cost of enterprise solutions.
Georgi (@imagga) of Imagga will be covering the newly available image analytics capabilities into Ontotext’s Self-Service Semantic Suite (S4) platform. Thanks to powerful Imagga auto tagging & categorization API, S4 users will get more insights not just from the text but also from images on the web pages they need to analyze.
Marin (@marin_dim) from Ontotext will be covering some new exciting features of Ontotext Semantic Suite as improvements of the RDF graph database-as-a-service, new Python SDK for S4 as well as Product roadmap and new features currently in development.
Don’t miss the opportunity to learn about the Self-Service Semantic Suite (S4) – register for this event now!
Faster & Better Image Tagging
Dealing with images is still complicated and time consuming process. You never take the time to organize that vacation photos or add tags to your growing image collection. We can do that automatically for you thanks to our auto-tagging technology. There are two ways if we want to do it really fast – to get more powerful machines or to speed up the algorithms responsible for this. Actually we did both, but lets pay some attention to our improved image tagging algorithms. Tagging is faster than ever!
GPU comes to help image recognition and thanks to it we are able to do things impossible (or ridiculously expensive) several years ago. We just ported all components of our tagging to take advantage of GPU acceleration and the result is about 5 times faster tagging! GPU is a bliss for image intensive technologies as ours. Actually the biggest portion of the time we need for tagging an image now is used for retrieving the image to be tagged.
With significantly faster tagging API now we can handle even larger image volumes and this can be done simultaneously for hundreds of users. Real time tagging is made very attractive and we are already testing with several clients.
Intrigued how fast the tagging is now? Why don’t you sing up now and test it yourself!
Imagga @ Telerik Hackathon
After the exciting news of Telerik being acquired for over $260M last week it feels extremely exciting to report Imagga's API partnership at Telerik Hackathon. Being part of developer events like that reminds us of why we actually do what we do. Feels rewarding.
Imagga APIs help developers to quickly master any image data and extract meaning with the speed of light. Uses are numerous - you can extract color information and implement color search, classify images in predefined set of categories, extract keyword tags out of not annotated photos, even get the system learn from user feedback and improve the recall.
Georgi presented Imagga API's during the opening of the hackathon. Over 200 eager developers got excited about the awesome ideas they were about to build during the weekend. Three of the formed teams requested access to the API and it was our pleasure to walk the teams through the APIs.
Being part of Telerik Hackathon perfectly aligns with what we at Imagga intend to do. Reaching out to the dev community is important part of our strategy to make image recognition mainstream and showcase how Imagga technology can be used to solve real world problems and help harness big amounts of visual data that bombards us on a daily basis.
New Classes in Tagging Classifier
We've recently released Imagga Auto-tagging API and there's serious interest in using the technology. With auto-tagging now it's possible to automatically assign meaningful tags to any picture collection, no human intervention whatsoever. As any technology where machine learning is involved, there's a lot of room for improvements and tweaking the algorithms so they give best results in most of the cases.
Recognizing as many different objects and concepts as possible is very important for us. We are constantly adding more classes so our tagging classifier gets better and better. In our latest update we've added over 250 popular keywords that we found out were missing in the previous version.
You should definitely give it a try and let us know what you think. Sign up for access to the API here - Any feedback is welcome.
Imagga @ Seedhack lifelogging hackathon
It has become a good tradition to take part in Seedhack hackatons. This is our 3rd one as API partner and we can’t be more happy to support and learn from events like that.
This time the theme was lifelogging (previous themes were hacks for fashion and remixing content) and gathered around 100 eager hackers on Friday night. The lifelogging topic is still under-explored but there’s a lot of promise, especially with giants like Apple and Samsung investing heavily in not just software but hardware to advance this trend.
#seedhack presentations from the panelists.. Gearing up for the main ones coming soon! https://t.co/75My1vO5BN
— Carlos Espinal (@cee) July 6, 2014
Friday night is exciting for the partners of the event - they get their 5 min on stage to present what they have in store for the event. Facebook did present their back-end platform Parse, PayPal - integration options including BrainTree, and Georgi from Imagga our new and hot API for automated image tagging along with the powerful image categorization API.
Now we have @imagga discussing how you can monetise images using an auto-categorisation API #Seedhack pic.twitter.com/SQnyF9yMd2 — seedcamp (@seedcamp) July 4, 2014
The rest of the event by tradition belongs to the hackers itself. 17 teams have been formed and got their hands dirty on solving world problems. It’s alway awesome to meet and talk with minds so bright. About 15 people came to talk about our APIs and different ideas they have either for the hackathon, or about something else they do in their jobs or projects.
"Think first. Move fast. Remember the demo" 3 #hackathon survival tips after our 5th #Seedhack http://t.co/kyQuTtDLBN pic.twitter.com/yvPIhjsVcu
— seedcamp (@seedcamp) July 24, 2014
It’s amazing how much people are able to achieve in 48 hours when they work focused on a problem and collaborate in a team. So much you need to consider - get the right people on the team, with good moral and excellent skills, quickly pass through the technology stack, feature list discussions and start hacking, then validate your ideas, pivot and validate again, talk to people, incorporate their feedback, ignore some, hack more, prepare a deck, rehearse it, get pumped for the public presentation, win. The team that used our auto-tagging was Snipik - social review blogging platform. The winner of the hackathon is Calrity - "a smart calendar client that understands your context, gives you insight into how you spend your time and seamlessly organizes your future" - amazing progress implementing a complete prototype in just two days. They’ve also wrote an amazing blog post for Seedhack unveiling the whole experience during the event.
#seedhack presentations kicking off now!!! #seedcamp https://t.co/7zsa3GdKjQ — Carlos Espinal (@cee) July 6, 2014
One of our favorite teams, Dev Stats won the special prize. Dev Stats is a keystroke counter plug-in for Sublime (Nike+ like tracker for programmers, geeks and nerds ;) They also won the "most likely to catch you slacking at work" award.
Live demo from DevStats, created to track how many hours you code a day, how fast, and how effective #Seedhack pic.twitter.com/L1yangEYej
— seedcamp (@seedcamp) July 6, 2014
Some funny awards followed. The "dirty dancing" award went to Motion perfect - Kinect-based software to detect your fitness moves and help you control the quality of your workout. The "Tony Stark award" for highest achievements of a one-man army went to Popular - logging your offline social life. The "most likely to wake up a sleeping baby" presentation award went to Mr. Zen - advice from voice based mood logging.
Hackathons are one of the best type of startup events to attend and also partner. You meet with awesome people, movers and doers, get inspired and go home with hope and urged to move things faster in your own company. Definitely will be attending some more hackathons. See you there!