Imagga @ LDV Vision Summit
The LDV Vision Summit brought together world’s top imaging technologists, visionaries and investors to share and shape the future of image and video recognition technologies.
Organized by Evan Nisselson, LDV Capital the summit was held in NYC to showcase how imaging and video technologies are empowering and disrupting the our day to day life and global businesses.
"Why are photos so valuable? Because they are our memories"-@nisselson @LDVVisionSummit pic.twitter.com/qnVtvyUldi
— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) June 4, 2014
Visual web is upon us. Images and video are starting to dominate all web channels we are collecting data and impressions from. It’s not just the digital cameras and smart phones, but also drones equipped with cameras that will basically record and archive important moments. This will eventually enable us to take part in moments, conversations and event we couldn’t attend or be physically present.
The advance in GPU power, machine learning algorithms, well labeled data and some magical tricks implemented by various researchers and startups working on image recognition will eventually create new ways of exploring the visual web - collection of personal and common image and video experiences.
It was exciting to see Georgi presenting Imagga on stage of LDV Vision Summit as one of thoroughly selected startups developing image recognition products and services. On stage were as well Eugenio from teradeep, Alex from visiosafe and Chris from TAG Optics. Quite good company. Some of the exciting lectures at the event were Camers - Video, Still & Wearable with panelists Martin Kallstrom from Narrative and Flo Meissner from EyeEm. The panel on Recent Progress in Computer Vision using Deep Learning with Rob Fergus from Facebook artificial intelligence lab was also quite interesting as it tackled the technology challenges we are facing with Imagga’s image recognition technologies. The Future of Image Recognition discussion session with Serge Belongie from Cornell NYC Tech, Gary Bradski from Magic Leap and Moshe Bercovich, Shutterfly set the trends for the next couple of years and was followed Trends in Visual Communications Technology from the investor’s perspective with the awesome Om Malik from True Ventures and Evan Nisselson.
"Gif is the video of the ADD generation", Om Malik #ldvvision. pic.twitter.com/LMqCJagPE0
— Kaptur (@KapturMag) June 4, 2014
Imagga’s automated tagging technology is what we consider groundbreaking and with huge potential to contribute to the change we perceive image content in the near feature. According to KPCB Internet Trends 2014 report over 1.8 billion photos are uploaded and shared on a daily basis. Most of image date is not properly keyworded or not tagged at all. Memories are stored in archives, in the best case somewhere in the cloud. Exploring this visual records of our lives, interactions, personal encounters and important moments will be of key importance in the years to come. Using machine learning and super smart image analysis, technologies like our tagging API will be able to bring back the meaning to important moments, shorten the time we dig for them, automatically highlight the best quality content and feature significant events.
Beside the imaging summit, being in NYC is always exciting, especially for image intensive business like Imagga’s. So many of our current customers are headquartered in NYC, so couple of extra days were well spent on biz dev meetings. Thanks to the summit we’ve got quite valuable new prospects and couple of partners.
Photo Hack Day Japan - Imagga Prize
It’s exciting to take part in photo hackatons. We’ve been to several during 2013 - Photo Hack Day Berlin, Photo Hack Day Melno Park, SeedHack in London to name a few. This time we were not present physically but that did not prevent people from using Imagga APIs.
Over 120 hackers and supporters gathered on Feb 22-23rd at Mixi’s office for an awesome hacking experience. Sponsors of the event were Mixi, Shutterstock, gettyimages, 500px, Leap Motion, Amazon, Mashup9, Recruit, EyeEm, Pux, XLoudia, Sendgrid, Zenrin, FlashFoto and Adobe and we at Imagga are quite happy to be listed among this great innovative companies.
As any serious hackathon it all starts with opening remarks of the organizers and API partners presentations just to be followed by the creative chaos of team formation, idea generation and hacking over lots of fried rice, shushi (it’s Japan after all) but also coffee, tea and beer. It’s great fun and we were a bit jealous we’re not physically present.
23 teams have been formed and were judged based on originality of the idea, overall value of the application and technical achievement. The tree overall winners of the hackathon are:
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Back to the Future - visual learning app that allows you to "walk through time” via an interactive interface.
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Before the filter - Android app that teaches would-be photographers the fundamentals of Photography
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VOCA Getty - innovative photo dictionary app that uses images sourced from Getty Images to help users learn a language visually. The team used Imagga APIs.
We were excited that 3 teams actually activated, reviewed and used Imagga APIs during the event.
Our special $2299 in credits prize goes to Imagic Workbench, a smart keywording tool which employs object recognition technologies to automatically keyword your photos. Imagic Workbench is a project of TT and Nego and we really hope they will follow up and make an awesome product for image tagging.
Stay tuned for our next hackathon participation, it's fun!
Interested to try our auto-categorizatiom? - signup for a free account at our Playground
Blitline Integrates Imagga Auto Tagging
Super happy to announce our magical Auto Tagging API has been integrated into the Blitline image processing platform! Besides smart cropping, now Blitline offers to its customers the ability to add meaning to the images in a fast and convenient manner.
Integration is quite easy if you are already familiar with Blitline. You will be surprised how good results are, at least this is what initial users of the service state! It’s Imagga’s machine learning core that does the job, not some mechanical turk guys reviewing and manually annotating your images. So your privacy is kept and you are getting the job done faster than any army of keywording specialists can do.
Some of the tags that Imagga’s Auto-tagging API returns are far from perfect, but we are constantly working to improve the algorithms and broaden what we know about the world represented in images. The system is currently trained for the most common types of objects and concepts and we add more constantly. If it’s not working well with your set of images, we can train the system for your specific needs, simply contact us here and we’ll be happy to help.
If curious what the Imagga Auto-tagging API can do for you and your untagged photos, give it a try here and share your feedback with us.
Apollo App Uses Imagga APIs to Help People Get Current Imagery from Places of Interest
Photo hack days are great fun and we are always surprised by the creativity and sometimes crazy ideas hackers have. Even though we were not physically present this time.
The runner up for Imagga API award was team Apollo, named after NASA’s Project Apollo, which gave us the first images of man walking on the moon.
"Our team began with the premise that mainstream photo sharing is characteristically narcissistic. As photo sharers, we often tie our own self-worth to attributions of our digital self. If we could make photo sharing altruistic, there's a chance that an entirely new set of content would be created", shares Joe, one of the guys behind the idea.
On AirBnB, public attraction and school websites we see polished images that sometimes do not correspondent with the current conditions of the place. Quite disappointing to head to a well deserved vacation just to discover your hotel hasn’t been renovated the last decade and the photos based on which you booked are heavily photoshopped.
The solution allows users to request a photo from other users that are currently present in a specific location. All users in that location would then receive a notification requesting a photo, and all of the photos for a given location are respectively tagged and stored in an image database.
Photos are curated by location (utilizing FourSquare's places API) using both user requested photos and those from existing content sources (e.g. ShutterStock, Behance, FourSquare). Imagga image recognition API was used for photo tagging and Twilio was implemented to make a photo request via SMS.
As a hypothetical use case, think of a prospective college student that wants to obtain a more realistic view into dorm life at the universities they’re considering. The student could request photos from dorm room locations at their target schools and current students share a photo of their room. It can also be used for inspirational purposes - say your are organizing a party at a hall and want to see how other organizers used the space and to get ideas for your own party.
"Imagga’s image recognition API quickly became a huge asset to us as we built out Apollo, enabling our team to intuitively apply relevant tags to the photos that comprised our image database.”
You can find more detail about Apollo App on Challenge Post.
We are really looking forward to see how the idea unfolds and becomes a real project.
There are thousands of ideas that Imagga API can help you make reality. Sign up for Imagga API and start hacking for free (or send us a request for special startup discount for bigger API volume)
Parrots and The Rainy Days at Imagga
It's summer like no other. Weather has been crazy for the last couple of months. Sofia fills like it's hidden somewhere in the rainforest. It's happening over and over again - late afternoon showers, couple of times with hail.
Some people say rainy days are good for a day off with a nice book. Well, at Imagga we do that, but with our Macbooks (and several Windows machines). Weather can be inspiring, even for startups - to learn and work harder. Specially when you have two roof windows at your office. And parrots pay a special visit!
The Ingredients of Startup Success
Recently Georgi wrote a post on startup math and shared some really valuable insights on the power of entrepreneurial mind. You can read his original post in his blog, but here, I want to summarize and elaborate a bit more on the lessons learned.
You can be better in doing business and research than bigger companies
The common perception is that if a well established, resourceful company is tackling a problem, a startup can't really outperform and thus needs to pivot.
To be able to do that startupers need to be really dedicated. Startup business is like sports. There are people that can coach you, but you need to do the exercises, you need to get early in the morning and run, eat healthy, rest enough so you have the power to perform.
Your hobby is your startup and your spare time is actually filled with activities connected to your project. There's nobody that will do that research for you, or will summarize these scientific papers so you can hack straight away. You need to find ways and time to fill in the blanks. Grit is required to do so. A recent study shows that people with grit are more likely to succeed. It's not your IQ, nor social intelligence or physical health. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals, sticking with what you want to achieve, working on it 24/7 until you see if fulfilled. Grit is not a week or a month of full commitment, it's working really really hard to make the vision reality.
Pareto in Full Power - 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes
Georgi puts it this way:
And this is one of the best and most romantic and revolutionary things about startups – you must be extremely resourceful! And Pareto is on your side here – with five times less resources you can still achieve 80% of the result, of course only if you are smart/intuitive/customer-oriented enough to figure out exactly which 20% to go after.
Startups need to focus on things that really matter, work on the MVP of their product, use the most effective marketing and sales channels to be able to put things together. It's not so easy to find that winning 20% but it's possible.
Every Hour Counts
Whatever you do, should be done with the presumption it will be helpful to advance your startup. Yes, you need to sacrifice lots of fun activities - going out with friends, playing games, TV, etc. It's like being on the war front. If you are not there on you post watching out, somebody will take over the land. That doesn't mean you've become startup slave, chained to your startup, no pleasures whatsoever. Remember, what you drives you is your vision, your believe you changing the world, providing better product, service for the others. It's like the first faze of love relationship - you want to spend every second with your beloved, you call him 3 AM in the morning just to tell her how much you love her.
Now, have some fun and go back to what you are supposed to do to see you startup blossoming. I promise, it will be worth it.
Imagga @ Photo Hack Day Japan
Imagga continues to take part in hackathons. It’s in our DNA and it’s one of the best ways to show support for the photo hacking communities all over the world. This time Photo Hack Day 5 hackathon will take place far far away of where we are. Japan is exciting place for tech events not only for the level of tech penetration but also for the thriving creative community engaged in visual arts.
Thanks to our friends from Aviary we will be partnering Photo Hack Day, that will take place on February 21-23 at Mixi Headquarters in Tokyo. Hackers will be able to play with Imagga API's and specially with the recently announced Imagga Auto-categorization API.
It's too bad we will not be able to make it in person for the great event, that's why we produced short video that describes what we do and how exciting Imagga APIs are.
Here are some ideas on how Imagga APIs can be used:
- Our brand new auto-categorization API can be used for personal photo sorting. But you can also train your own categorizer to recognize particular types of objects or scenes or even moods depending on the use-case. Let say you want to build a Pinterest like site but for cool products, manually crafted locally. In most of the cases you will be able to scrap the photos from personal blogs, artist online shops but they might not be well structured and organized. You can train the with selected product categories our APIs and then all photos will be automatically recognized and placed in the relevant category.
- you can create some nice looking retrospective photo album with the photos smartly cropped, something like a better version of the Facebook Look Back video, but without bodies and faces cut in half
- what is your favorite color app that can detect your favorite colors from the clothes that you wear or things you posses
- detecting mood by color, or suggesting music by color apps
We will award $2 300 in Imagga API usage for the best use of our APIs and $400 in API usage for all teams who make use of them during the hackathon.
You might also have great ideas about possible implementation of Imagga APIs. Let us know about your idea and we will be helping out with any technical challenges you might have.
Imagga to partner Photo Hack Day NYC
It’s already a tradition to take part as partner at Photo Hack Day, organized by Aviary. Photo Hack Day this time is in New York, and is organized for 4rd time (Imagga partnered the second and third editions of the event in Facebook HQ, Melno Park and in Tokyo, Japan). The hackathon brings together talented developers and designers to build amazing image applications using web and mobile photo APIs. This edition is sponsored by Shutterstock, with API partners like Walgreens, Astra by Photoshelter, Foursquare, Filepicker, Twilio, Behance, Shutterstock, Aviary and of course Imagga.
We are giving free usage of our APIs for all participants during the hackathon, 6 months free of our Pro plan (worth $2,094) for the best use of our API & 6 months free of our Indie plan (worth $474) for all teams that use our API.
Here are some good idea how our API can be of help:
- Personal photo organization app based on auto-suggested tags or categories
- Twilio-powered app where people can automatically text SMS/MMS by taking a picture: for example taking a photo at the beach and sending it with auto-text "Having fun under the sun :)" or a concert photo with auto-text "the band is killing it!", etc.
- Dropbox/Box/Copy app that tags your photos and make them searchable
- Pinterest image analytics tool that tag or categorize all images from an user/pinboard/whatever and shows the distribution of the different type of content, for example 15% dog photos, 19% cat photos, 65% horse photos, 1% pizza photos
It’s awesome to take part in photo hack meetups. Will keep you posted about the results and the great implementations as result of the hack day.
Imagga Joins The Pirates This August in Cologne
Hey Pirates of Europe, we are happy to announce we will be joining the Pirate Summit in Cologne this August. We fought for the right to be there and won the ARRRR noise vote of the public at Pirates Summit Sofia meetup.
European Pirate Summit 2013 is probably the craziest start up event we will be attending. This will be our first time at the summit but we have high expectations as friends that attended last year were really happy with the event in Cologne.
It’s advertised as two day event but there pre-events the whole week. We might be attending the hackaton during the weekend.
THe organizers promise we will be able to meet founders, VCs and business angels at Odonion, a scrapyard in Cologne which – what an unusual place to meet a VC, but hey, why not, VC are people, and they drink beer and they need to have some normal talks. With crazy startupers!
See you in Cologne, European startup pirates!
Imagga at European Pirate Summit 2013
ARRRR! European pirates gathering in scrap yard next to very busy and noisy railroad, that's European Pirate Summit. It'a an event one of it's kind. Over 600 stARRRtup pirates from Europe and beyond have gathered in Cologne to walk the plank but stay on board, share treasures, get rum-inspired, fire-tested MVPs, exchange startup pray and train crew.
Very exciting Imagga was part of European Pirate Summit 2013 together with really big Bulgarian delegation - Stefan from LAUNCHub, Boyan from StorPool, Ivo from UAN, Simeon from SocialNet365, Milen Ivanov from Sponsia, and couple of Bulgarians that study and work in Cologne.
Getting to the Western part of Europe from Sofia looks like it's not easy. For second time our flight was delayed (come on WizzAir you can do better then trowing a croissant and bottle of water for 4 hour wait), the previous time was for Photo Hack day with BulgariaAir in June.
Besides the travel trouble, Cologne and the event was awesome. And I mean it! The startup community in that part of Germany is not as big as in Berlin, but still very vibrant.
We were invited to pre-event dinner in White Rabbits Mansion - co-working, co-living, co-partying space with awesome vibe and even more awesome inhabitants.
Monday started with participation in pitching workshop in one of Cologne co-working space - Clusterhaus. Great feedback for Imagga presentation, but may be too much slides. 3 min pitch is not easy to do, specially when it's not just product pitch but you need to say a bit about the company, competition, business model, next steps, current customers, etc.
The speakers lineup during the first day was extremely exciting - Evan Nisselson on Ups and Downs of Entrepreneurship, Gabriel Hubert on Pivoting like a boss, Rob Fitzpatrick on Lean Startup in Practice to mention some. Oh, the party, but I am not supposed to write about this, right! You know, mainly networking, biz cards exchange… A, and a bonfire, the pirate style.
Day two was marked with the excitement of Walking the plank - 9 startups where town to the VC sharks!
Some of the talks that I visited and really enjoyed - Shira Abel on Starrrtup Marketing for Pirates, Andreas Klinger on Startup Metrics for Pirates, Devin Hunt on Advanced Business Model Design and the closing keynote of Rob Fitzpatrick.
Pitching time, the adrenaline was speeding up my pulse, and walking on the stage felt really good. Imagga's presentation went really good, just on time and with interesting questions from the jury.
We've even got a really cool suggestion from Andreas Klinger (originally it was proposed by Luca Sartoni last year at WebIt in Istanbul) - pitch Imagga as offering MAGIC as a service instead of the boring SaaS. Thanks guys, we gonna use that in the future pitches ;-)
Even though Imagga was not one of the three finalists of the pitching, we got really positive feedback and genuine interest in what we do from both VCs and prospective users of our services.
@immaga good pitch. Like your service. Let's talk #EPS13
— Johnny Than (@JohnnyThan) August 27, 2013
Worth mentioning are two publications in the German startup press:
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- Imagga named one of the three exciting startups at Pirate Summit (t3n.de German)
- Honorable mention in an article about the Pirate Summit (netzwerting.com German)
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Thanks Cologne and Pirate Summit team for making this even happen. We will be coming back!