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.
Microstock Expo in 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.
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!
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 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
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!
API support from @imagga at 2am in the morning! Thumbs up! #seedhack pic.twitter.com/iDgOT8C8q6
— sc_seedhack (@sc_seedhack) November 9, 2013
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.
Hanging out with @imagga at @campuslondon #seedhack pic.twitter.com/PC37yWuHnz
— sc_seedhack (@sc_seedhack) November 10, 2013
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.
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
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
We 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
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 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
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.
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 ;-) )