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!
Remixing Content - Imagga at Seedhack London
We are excited we are taking part in Seedhack 4.0, Seedcamp hack event that will take place in Central Working at Google Campus in the heart of East London’s Tech City. Remixing Content is the theme of this event, so we thought Imagga APIs are perfect match for the nerds to play and mess up specially with our specialty - images.
This spring we partnered Seedchack 3.0 aiming at fashion. 11 out of 21 teams requested access to Imagga APIs, 3 teams ended up trying it and one team got it’s hands dirty and implemented Imagga Color API into a project called Colourtag.me - a slick and easy way to discovery what colors fits you.
The Seedhack experience is awesome. The idea behind the event is not just to have fun and play with exciting new technologies, but since Seedcamp is organizing it, there is great chance if you have a nice idea, form and manage a good team, and execute well, to get scored and get even funded. That’s we call startup fun and that can actually turn into some serious business.
We've made significant progress with our technology and will be offering three APIs - Smart Cropping API, Color API and Auto Categorization API. The last is our latest attempt to fix the problem with organizing the rapidly growing image collections and will be publicly available for first time at Seedhack 4.0. Be sure not to miss it! ;-)
What Auto Categorization API can be used for:
- you can use it to automatically categorize images scraped in volume from the net
- works great with personal mobile image collections - we snap lots of photos but non of the mobile platforms provide an easy and working way to organize these photos without spending days tagging or putting them in albums. When was the last time you did an album on your iPhone?
- you can use it to distinguish between product and complex scenes. Let say you want to hack IKEA website and need to get just the product photos but not the room setups.
- can't wait to see how you will use the API and surprise us
The hackathon will run through the weekend from November 8-10th and two of our team members will be there to help out setting the APIs. Who knows, they may end up hack a bit and mix Imagga APIs with some other useful tool from the great list of API partners to the event, some of which are:
- BBC News Labs
- Crowdprocess
- EyeEm
- Getty Connect
- Harper Collins
- Nokia UK
- Stupeflix
If you happen to be in London during this weekend and mixing content is something you what to try, do apply as the available spots are few. We will be more than happy to meet you in person and guide you through the opportunities Imagga APIs can offer.
Imagga @ Techcrunch Disrupt Europe
What a week! It will start with super cool startup event in Berlin - Techcrunch Disrupt Europe, then off to Dublin for WebSummit. But let start with Berlin. Imagga will be at Startup Alley and you can VOTE so we can be selected to present on stage.
Techcrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin is two day event where the best European startups will be pitching on stage, will meet investors, will get together to network, find partners, get noticed and party a bit. Berlin is the perfect place for all that. No need to state Berlin have positioned itself as the startup hub of mainland Europe. Sure London is also very hot place to do technology business, but Berlin has it’s big advantages as well. To mention some - relatively cheap to live, lots of tech-savvy young people, awesome club and underground culture.
We will be attending Techrunch Disrupt Europe and also have a stand during the two days. We were here in the spring for Photo Hack Day organized by eyeEm and we were impressed from what we’ve seen. No time for sightseeing again (the cool Bundestag building can wait, it’s not going anywhere any time soon ;-) ) but this is not what we are here for.
We will be showcasing a new exciting project named Sliki that aims to help you better organize your personal photos collections by magically placing them in matching categories. You can sign up for early invite NOW.
If you are in Berlin for Techcrunch Disrupt we will love meet at our stand. Food and drinks are not allowed but we can give you some cool stickers while chating about the exciting image understanding technologies we are developing.
You can find us at the Startup Alley in the Enterprise section. If you like what we do...
so we can present on stage our awesome technology.
Partnering Photo Hack Day 4 in Facebook HQ this April
We are very excited to partner the 4th edition of Photo Hack Day to be held April 6-7 in the Facebook HQ in Menlo Park! 
Photo Hack Day This is “THE hackathon” when we talk about images. The last edtion has gathered more than 350 developers who’ve produced the impressive 72 innovate image related hacks! What better place than that to offer our APIs for some heavy hacking?!? It’s a privilege for us to be among lots of great API sponsors: Photo Hack Day – API Sponsors We do hope to see a lot of creative hacks using all these APIs. We’re offering prizes for all who integrate the Imagga API, plus a special cash prize for the the most creative integration! If you are around make sure to join the party and make some great use our APIs
Imagga is finalist at BkVF startup competition
Balkan Venture Forum is a regional event, aiming at encouraging entrepreneurship on the Balkans and building bridges between the local communities and other tech hubs in Europe and beyond.
Imagga was selected to take part in the startup competition. Our goal was to showcase our progress and also share knowledge and best practices with the other participants of the forum. Georgi did awesome presentation and answered the jury questions straightforward.
We are very happy to announce we were one of the finalists at the startup competition. It’s a small leap towards the bright future, that we envision as game changers in the image analysis. You will be seeing more of Imagga in the coming events here and there.
We also want to take the chance to thank the organizers for the great job. Without the thriving entrepreneurship ecosystem this event would not be possible, so a huge thumbs up for all the bold and sexy Bulgarian entrepreneurs, event organizers and friends. We hope to make Sofia really attractive for other startups from the region and why not make it regional startup hub.
Lessons learned, presentation at WebExpo Prague
Exciting four days in beautiful Prague! We've been invited to participate in The Founder Stories, part of WebExpo 2013, the biggest web event in Czech Republic. It was lovely to see so many young people really interested in design, Internet of things, startups, all things digital.
Georgi and I were honored to be on the stage in the Business Hall telling Imagga's exciting story. We tried to be very practical and share the lessons learned during the years we've been working to shape what Imagga is as company and what Imagga offers as technology. Hey, everybody hates to go to event and listen to product presentations, right?! That's why we skipped how-great-we-are part and talked on how to focus on the product and not spend too much time pursuing fame and money.
Here are some of the highlights of our short speech:
- Be Visionary - Foresee the trends, do not follow.
- Do not waste too much energy to apply for every single competition opened
- Funding is great, but at the end of the day you should deliver your product / service / technology
- Do not over-optimize your company valuation. This may dilute the goodwill of your investors and kill your momentum.
- Don’t want to be always right. This doesn’t prove that you are smart. It only proves you are a smart ass and people get unmotivated to communicate and work with you.
- Location, Location, Location - You know, there is this myth that if you are not an USA citizen, haven’t graduated Stanford and do not have good connections in the SV there are no ways to success for you! There's some truth in this, but not really.
- Create Real Value and customers will find you. Remember customers are your best investors.
- Your only power tool is your execution!
- Work 24/7, be passionate about what you create.
- Help the community - efforts to support the local startup community always pay off - you will be recognized as community builder, people will love to join your team, etc.
- Be ambitious, set your goals high enough, dream big!
It was great to hang out with the Node5 - great co-working place in Prague. Staying and sleeping there was awesome - reminded us of the humble beginnings of all startups and how cool is to be able to share everything with people of the same breed ;-)
@imagga @chrisgeorgiev @georgikadrev had a great time camping with you guys! All we missed was a camp fire and some mash mallows :)— Fredrik Debong (@fdebong) September 22, 2013
Great chats with the local inhabitants of Node5 as well with the invited participants in the Founder's Stories track of the conference. Node5 was awesome host. And did I mention the special treat for all founders that shared their stories - 1 hour scenic trip of Prague in Hammer limousines, 5 in total, what a blast!
Thank you Prague for warm welcome. It's been awesome event and hope to see you soon, why not here in Sofia.