Microstock Expo in Berlin 2013

Microstock Expo Berlin 2013

It’s our second visit to Microstock Expo - the best European event for stock photography. We visited the first year the conference was organized and all the lectures were extremely insightful.

Stock photography is slowly changing. Not only professional cameras are quite accessible for the masses but the rise of the smart phone photography gets even more people excited about the possibility to make money even with photos shot with not so good cameras as current mobile phone cameras are.

There were couple of lectures that were quite relevant to what we are up to currently in Imagga.

One of the most interesting topics during the conference was the keywording. What was striking for us that most of the people from the industry do not actually believe the keywording can be really automated. The human touch still plays significant role in determining the key words that best describe an image. It’s probably needless to day we totally believe there’s room for automation in the keywording. Obviously we have the difficult task to convince partners that we can really be of help with technology like automated tagging.

MIcrostock Expo Berlin

One of the most practical keynote speeches was done by Luis Alvares from Stock Performer, a platform for micro stock analysis. They’ve done quite extensive analysis of the words that sell well and once that are quite widespread but actually do not sell well at all.

Overall - great event with what of potential partners, so we are excited we were part of it.


Python API client and Color Search in Instagram

We are excited to have our API available for out-of-the-box development in one more major platform – Python!

Python

Ivan Penchev was enthusiastic to port the PHP client in Python and no sooner said than done – here it is https://github.com/ivanpenchev/imagga-py.

In no time Georgi Kostadinov put it at work, and what a better way to try it than prototyping basic tool that searches among recent Instagram photos based on colors, using Imagga Color API. He was kind to publish his code as well: https://github.com/gkostadinov/Instagram-Color-Search-Python.

Instagram Color Search

Instagram Color Search prototype

Thank you guys, you’re awesome!

You can try our APIs by applying for trial account at www.imagga.com. Currently we have PHP, Java, Ruby and Python clients for our APIs.


SeedHack, hacking with hackers in London

Georgi @ Google Campus for SeedHack

Imagga took part at exciting hacking event - SeedHack 4.0, that was organized by SeedCamp in Google Campus London. Over 100 hackers from 17 countries participated and formed 16 teams. Imagga was one of the proud partners of the event including BBC News Labs, EyeEm, Imagga, Facebook, Getty Images, Google, HarperCollins, Nokia, Thomson Reuters and Stupeflix.

It’s quite busy month for Imagga - full with exciting events. Before going to London for SeedHack, we were in Berlin for Techcrunch Disrupt Europe, in Dublin for WebSummit and then back to Berlin for Microstock Expo. Georgi and Georgi (our CTO and super talented ninja-developer) attended Seedhack and presented Imagga APIs. It was quite exciting as it happen to co-occur with the soft-launch of our new categorization API. We love developers and hackathons are totally the right place to be! Hackathons are hot for us not just as opportunity to spread the word about our APIs but to also hack and take active part in the events. We stay during the night, and we love it!

It’s always great to have people excited about your product, specially developers. Lots of people came to talk to us. Actually five out of sixteen teams requested accounts and will further evaluated the APIs. One team integrated our auto cropping API, one team integrated the auto categorization API and a team played with our stock image search. In return we took advantage of the uber-cool Adnroid testing farm in Google Campus and tested our newest and greatest image organization app Sliki (sign up for early invite). More on Sliki to follow in separate blog post, you will love what it can do for your personal photos.

Partnering to events is great, but we are hackers as well and couldn’t stay with crossed hands and just watch how other participants are having fun. Getty Images challenged us if we can distinguish between horse and donkeys and we’ve been busy adjusting our classifier to take the challenge. It turned to be quite successful.

It’s interesting that 3 out of 5 short keynotes were actually about images. It’s obvious images are playing key role in helping out startups communicate it’s idea. More than that, image intensive startups are growing in number and we believe this is great fit for our image analysis APIs.

Literatrip

It feels great when a team utilizing your technology wins a prize. LiteraTrip won 2nd and they used our StockPodium search API.

See the projects that actually presented Sunday

  • Quicklearner – learning languages with pictures
  • Afterhours – shows you where the next bar is that is still open
  • Literatip – connecting people and places to their books
  • Moodmusic – play music to your mood
  • Sokrates – memory game for kids with audio and visuals
  • Braintrainer – brain trainer app that connects sport images with music
  • Tunez – music discovery app that combines user generated videos with 20s audio tracks you to share and discover music
  • destionationopen.com –  curated travel search with open destinations
  • Picit – easily attach pictures out of the web to your mail in a browser
  • OFDB – platform for aggregated soccer content
  • OppoZeit – shows two sides of a news story
  • Appp – helps users engage with content using various APIs (Facebook, Getty etc.)
  • Crowdmash – mixing content of an event to brands
  • Triber – visualizes and quantifies relationships between people and their follower using Twitter API
  • 3D Model of BBC Content by William – shows pictures of news content in a 3D model
  • Model Equity Calculator for Founders with Option Pool Expansion – helps founders to value their company and calculate equity

More on the event you can find on SeedCamp blog.


We are hiring

We are hireing

Hey, we are hiring! Currently we are looking for a computer vision ninjas, excited to work in a startup company and take the challenge to be overloaded with lots of dev work and pivoting.

Computer Vision/Image Analysis Ninja

Compute Vision Ninja neededWe are looking for people with strong understanding of algorithms and data structures,  willing to dip into complex computer vision problems, patient to test and implement them in our image analysis core set of technologies.

The skills it will be cool to have:

  • strong research capabilities, knowledge in the field of image analysis
  • willingness to solve complex algorithmic and computer vision problems within time constraints
  • The ability to think and work independently, study real-life problems, and find elegant solutions to them
  • Self-motivation and self-organization, balanced with the ability and desire to work in a team
  • Strong programming skills in C/C++
  • Strong knowledge of algorithmic programming and data structures
  • Experience with computer vision (preferably OpenCV)
  • Experience with SVN and Git
  • Experience with Informatics competitions is a big plus
  • Experience with MATLAB is a big plus
  • Knowledge of parallel processing/computation or GPU programming is a plus
  • Experience with mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS, or Windows Phone is a plus
  • Basic web development skills is a plus

We do not offer much. Imagga is not so great place to work – you will work non-stop, no social benefits, we have small and not so cozy office. Just kidding!

Pls, apply! don’t be shy, show us what you can at jobs[at]imagga[dot]com (no Euro format CVs will be considered, be short and show us your work and experience)


Autotag.me New Video

AutotagMe Video

AutoTag.me is an online tool that magically tags your images and makes them easier to organize and find! We’ve been working hard on the technology part that allows the actual photo tagging automation. We’ve seen great interest in the technology and  believe there’s great potential in auto-tagging – saving time and money, more discoverable image content, more precious moments visualized and well preserved.

AutoTag.me helps you tag your images so you can later organize them without the hustle and bustle of manual tagging.  You will be able to submit your images from sources like Flick, Dropbox and Facebook or any given image or folder on your hard drive. Then our service will automatically analyze the pixel content of the submitted images  and come up with tags that describe the concept, the composition, the objects and the colors found in each of the images. You can then add easily add or remove tags and save the text set within the image itself or export it to some popular online photo service.

Watch our short video to see what to expect. We are very excited about Autotag.me and can’t wait to see you using it and returning some valuable feedback.


Imagga at BkVF startup challenge

Imagga at BkVF

Imagga will be taking part in the startup challenge during Balkan Venture Forum, that will take place in Sofia, May 21-22. BkVF is regional event that aims to showcase innovative companies to active investors and promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

We believe Imagga’s technology is quite innovative and hope it will be good match for the investors present. During the last couple of months our focus was solely on improving the technology and growing our customer base, so it’s quite exciting to step up on the pitching stage and share our progress.

Going to events it’s great, well, if that’s not all that you do. We will be at BkVF for networking, validating new ideas, getting to know prospective clients and meeting investors. We are also hiring so it will be great match if the best tech developers of the region happen to be there so we can meet and talk.

One of the fist times we pitched Imagga was at Mini Seedcamp London couple of years ago. It’s probably not a coincidence that Seedcamp comes to Sofia exactly during BkVF. Things have changed in the Bulgarian startup scene, and it’s exciting to start, work and innovate here in the region.

Ah, do we party? Yes, see you at the parties, there will be several!


Imagga @ leWeb 2013

Chris & Guy Kawasaki

leWeb is one of the biggest and oldest European event for entrepreneurship. It’s always been well attended by entrepreneurs from all over Europe and beyond. More than that, people the startupers admire - we read their books and blogs - are actually speakers at leWeb. And they keep coming every year. After Techcrunch Disrupt Belin and Web Summit in Dublin, leWeb wasn’t in our program for this year, but Chris won a free ticket from Invest in France and that was a good sign we should attend.

It was exciting to be there and see the French way of doing events. It’s relaxed but at the same time quite exquisite. Techcrunch Disrupt has the hipster flavor of Berlin, Pioneers Festival enjoys the most luxurious venue being held in Hofburg Palace in Vienna, WebSummit pretends to be the biggest event in Europe, while leWeb is just French, and it’s French in a very good way - extremely good food all day long, comfy lounge zone to meet people and charge your devices, the best lineup of speakers ever.

Best events are not just what happens on stage, but also the networking. With parties every night leWeb offers lots of opportunities to meet people. Well, meeting investors was quite a challenge as they were kept in a VIP area just above our heads (a bit irritating to segregate and make it so visible even during parties ;-) ). Do not ask how we ended up there... friends ;-)

Need not to say we spent most of the time networking, not just during parties but during the day as well. Well, couple of the speakers were must listen as these guys are setting trends and always have so much insight on the whole ecosystem so we decided to better sit and listen.

One of these people we really enjoyed listening was Fred Wilson. He was invited to speak about what’s going to happen in the next ten years but instead he shared 3 big trends he’s interested investing in:

  • Transition from bureaucratic hierarchies to technology-driven networks. Think Twitter vs. classic newspapers, YouTube vs. cable tv, SoundCloud vs. traditional music labels. We are in the early stage of that trend, but it’s happening not just in media, but hotel reservations (AirBnB), creative (Kickstarter), learning (Codecademy, Duolingo)
  • Unbundling - deliver much more focused services vs. the old model of newspaper with business pages, culture, sports section. This is already happening in banking, education and entertainment.
  • Smartphones - people are more willing to sacrifice their laptops rather than smartphones if they need to choose one. With the phone you can do things you can’t with your laptop and there will be way more great applications to utilize mobile. Great examples are apps that are disrupting taxi service (Uber), payments (Square), dating (Tinder)

He stated he doesn’t look at technologies but in trends, that will have behavioural and social impact. Of course mobile, big data and machine learning are hot technologies but it’s not technology itself, but it’s practical implementation. Can’t agree more working on elaborate machine learning technology such as Imagga’s image auto-categorization.

You can watch Fred Wilson’s video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU

Another much expected talk was Guy Kawasaki’s - a legendary role model for the Bulgarian entrepreneurs. What a precious moment to have the chance to chat for a minute with Guy and get his best selling book The Art Of The Start signed by him.

Chris_Kathleen_Stephane_leWeb

leWeb was eye-opening experience. Lots of contacts to follow up, great time networking, inspiring speeches and memorable meetings with awesome people. Special thanks to Stefan from LAUNCHub for hosting us and being the perfect guide for cool places in Paris (experiencing Uber on his account was awesome ;-) )


Imagga @ WebSummit Dublin

Georgi @ WebSummit Dublin

It’s been busy October & November taking part in events. After quite productive Techcrunch Disrupt Berlin, Georgi and I went straight to Dublin for WebSummit. Boy, it’s a big event. A lot of things happening at the same time so if you are not prepared with good plan what to see, who to meet, you might be lost in the crowd.

Imagga took part in Alpha, special display program for startups. To be honest, it felt very impersonal. Each startup had just 1 meter of display space, no chairs, really bad Internet. On the top of that the room was way to hot. Startup life to the fullest! The bad things is we payed for that experience. Couple of lessons learned:

  • when they call you and say you’ve been pre-selected as one of the few very promising startups from the region, do not get over excited. It simply means they want your money. Specially if you have fundraised and published that in Angel List.

  • Ask how much this will cost and double it to get the real idea of the budget you need to have.

  • If they promise there will be over 1000 investors attending this means nothing if you do not get invited to the special VIP event for these very special bread. Do not expect an investor line in front of your booth, specially when there are over 2000 startups presenting, lectures in 3 different rooms and so much going on.

  • go to parties and make sure you do not drink too much - this is where you meet all kinds of people and can really pitch them on neutral grounds over beer or whiskey. This is the most important part of the event, seriously.

That’s the negative part. Of course it was awesome event and we met lots of interesting people. Lots of interesting cases that we didn’t think of, some new possible partners really interested to plug in our image understanding APIs. Even more exciting, on the second day, when we were not exhibiting, we decided to go around and meet some interesting teams. It was big surprise lots of time we ended up answering questions on other companies' booths about Imagga image analysis technology. Of course we were polite enough to go and ask questions about other people's projects, but that just happened.

We didn’t have time to listen to the exciting speaker lineup but one -  Elon Musk, founder of Space X & Tesla and Enda Kenny, prime minister of Ireland. We were there to listen to Elon Musk, and were quite impressed by his humble attitude and very visionary ideas he shared with the audience.

You can see the discussion with Elon Musk on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adnjfOlYpCA

If you stopped by and talked to us, thank you. If you stopped by, but we were busy talking to somebody else, drop us a line and we will be more than happy to see if we can be of help.


Imagga partners with Blitline to jointly offer Smart Cropping

We are excited to announce that starting today we are partnering with Blitline, one of the best and most lightweight and easy to integrate image processing services in the cloud!

Blitline& Imagga

Our cooperation starts with the opportunity for Blitline users to take advantage of our smart-cropping, as applied in our cropping API and cropping tool Cropp.me. The guys at Blitline have produced a very easy to understand example why Imagga’s smart cropping is better than just center cropping:

How Imagga smart cropping works

Imagga Smart Cropping as explained by Blitline

Funny enough, the idea for the cooperation came a month ago from an existing user of Blitline who approached us and asked if we can provide them with the same seamless integration that Blitline offers for regular cropping, but with our smart cropping, or ideally – can we offer it via Blitline? No sooner said than done! We got in contact and things simply worked out.

Now Blitline users who subscribe for the special Blitline + Imagga plan have access to the imagga_smart_crop function for their image processing pipeline. The pricing sticks to the pay-as-you-go model (per cropped image) plus a very low monthly subscription fee.

Blitline Imagga Pricng Plan

Blitline + Imagga Pricing Plan

We do believe this is going to be a great example of co-opetition!


Come hack with Imagga APIs at Google I/O Extended Sofia

Google I/O 2013 in Sofia

We will be partnering with Eleven for Google I/O Extended Sofia event. It’s exciting you can not only see live the great sessions during the event but also do something – write a bit of code may be

We will be facilitating specially designated hacker’s corner at SOHO, where you can stop by and hack for an hour or a day. It’s up to you but feel welcomed to stay as long as you wish and start making your great ideas into working prototypes. If you do not have an idea but feel like coding, here are some ideas we come up:

  • Picture mosaic of images, that form any national flag. You can use Imagga Color API and Google Images for the collage creation.
  • Guess what’s on the picture – use Imagga Crop API to find the most prominent part of the image and blur it. Then serve the blurred images so people can make their guesses.

These are just two ideas to help you start hacking. We will be more than please to help you with our APIs for some other great ideas connected to image manipulation that you might have.

For the most diligent there will be in-kind price of $500 in commercial API usage. Eleven, who’s hosting the event is offering wildcard for live interview for their next investment round.

More about Imagga APIs and how to hack using them can be found here – http://imagga.com/api/docs/

Even more detailed information:

We will be extremely happy to see you at Google I/O Extended Sofia and specially if you stop by the hacking corner. Most probably there you will find some Imagga team members, but if you need more information or if you want to reach out, pls, email to info@imagga.com or send message to Georgi – https://plus.google.com/u/0/110303707514543533758/