Imagga @ 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:
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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.
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Ask how much this will cost and double it to get the real idea of the budget you need to have.
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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.
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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!
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:
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 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
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/
Partnering Photo Hack Day Berlin in the first days of June
Continuing our tradition to partner image-related hackathons, we are happy to announce that we’ll provide Imagga API access and prizes for the competitors in the upcoming Photo Hack Day Berlin hackathon in June 1-2! The lead organizers are our friends from EyeEm.
In addition to awarding API credits and cash prizes, we are planning to announce some amazing news at the end of the event! If you are keen about images, hacking and starting startups – make sure to come around and hack with us and the other great partners of the event:
Photo Hack Day Berlin Sponsors & Friends
See you at the arty Platoon Kunsthalle venue!
Browsing ASOS items based on colors
Since our great experience as an API partner in Seedcamp’s Seedhack about a month ago in London we were quite keen to showcase how what we do can applied in online fashion and retail. That’s why we came up with the idea to pick up one of the most recognized players in the online fashion industry – ASOS, and do some mashup with our color extraction and search API.
And the result is already here! - http://colorslike.me/asos/. The interface is pretty basic currently, but it’s still handy – you can pick one or more colors, provide an image URL or upload a photo, and you’ll get images of similarly colored items (predominantly dresses and shirts) from ASOS. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
One of the first eager testers of the demo got quite inspired and came out with an awesome use case for color search using a picture – “In case someone’s wondering what kind of clothes would suit their cool green Alfa Romeo Montreal - http://colorslike.me/asos/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcolorslike.me%2Fasos%2Fupload%2Fdfa%2F1363004214-923771896.jpg“:
I agree, it really matters to look stylish in your retro Alfa Why don’t you try it and see if it’s going to work for you as well!
Who’s Who In Image Analysis Industry
Recently we published infographic on the current state of the image analysis industry. We do not pretend we’ve included everybody working on that matter but the infographic gives quite good idea what’s on the market and how different companies are approaching the problem of helping out people and businesses better use and organize their image collections.
It’s all about images and video. Over 1B picture are take each day thanks to relatively accessible DSLRs and unprofessional cameras, but mostly because 2/3 of smart mobile phone owners connect to internet on a daily basis, take pictures and share them quickly. Image centric services like Instagram, Pinterest, 500px, Flickr are widely used. The need for scalable solutions and technologies to ease that process of uploading, storing and organizing images is so viable.
There are several types of image automation technologies currently on the market:
- Streaming/Channeling: image feeds from third-party sources on a topic your users are interested in, e.g. “US elections 2012″, “Paris”, “Steve Jobs” via Instagram, Flickr, 500px etc.
- Image editing: end-users are provided with tools to edit images, apply filters, etc. directly in the mobile and/or in the web apps
- Basic image processing (and eventually image hosting): generate (and eventually host) thumbnails, crop images, apply filters
- Template matching: recognize predefined “template” images; useful for recognition of book/CD covers, labels, posters, landmarks; kind of “sexier” alternative to QR codes in mobile apps
- Face detection and facial recognition: detect faces and/or recognize faces of particular persons and face-tag them
- Visual or multi-color search: “offline” indexing of the images coupled with search functionality based on the extracted visual features or colors
- Image categorization and auto-tagging: recognizing various pre-defined categories, concepts or objects present in an image
All this currently available technologies can be integrated in various ways to better serve it’s customers. The most typical are:
- Cloud / Web-service (typically REST API)
- On-premise / Self-hosted solution
- Widget
- Compiled Library (desktop or mobile)
Lets not forget that we need to make money. So far there are several billing options as listed below, but most of them depend directly or indirectly on the number of images processed and/or the processing hours spent and/or GBs of traffic
- Subscription: based on some of the usage factors above, typically monthly recurring payment
- Utility based: typically pay as you go bills based on some of the usage factors above, at the end of each month
- Licensing: typically for ‘on-premise’ solutions and libraries; one-time fee, or annual renewal fee
Here’s short list of some key players on the market (disclaimer: these are just the companies we are aware of. Your startup can also be doing something related to image analysis, we haven’t missed it on purpose. Leave a comment below and we will be more than happy to enlist you as well). The companies are listed in alphabetical order and not in order of significance:
- Blitline – basic image processing; cloud solution; utility based pricing
- Chute – image streaming; widgets; subscription pricing
- Cloudinary (basic image processing & hosting; cloud solution; subscription pricing)
- Face.com acquired by Facebook – facial recognition
- Idee Labs – reverse image search as in their Tineye, mutli-color search; library/cloud; license/subscription pricing
- Imagga – color search, smart cropping, auto-tagging, categorization, similarity search; cloud solution; subscription/utility pricing
- IQ engines – template matching, categorization; cloud solution / library; subscription pricing
- Kooba – template matching; cloud solution; subscription pricing
- Lambda Labs – face detection and facial recognition; cloud solution; subscription pricing
- LTU Technologies – color search, similarity search, template matching; on-premise/cloud solution; license/utility pricing
- Recognize.im – template matching; cloud solution; subscription/utility pricing
- Aviary – image editing; mobile and web libraries; subscription pricing)
- Pixolution – visual similarity, color similarity; on-premise solution / library; subscription
- Kuznech – image search and shopping tagging
Demystifying Image SaaS Solutions (Infographic)
In most cases when people hear we do image processing & analysis, they exclaim “Oh, I see, face detection! That’s cool!” Well, that’s not all we can do, definitely not the most sexiest of the currently available image technologies but by far the most popular. This is why we decided to do an overview of various image understanding technologies, what integration options are available, and what business models are currently used in the Image Software-as-a-Service world. What better way to convey such message than with an image
Feel free to spread the word and share the infographic! If you decide to share only the image and not the whole blog post, please link back to it somehow.
For your convenience, here are links to some of the key image SaaS players: Blitline, Chute, Cloudinary, Aviary, Recognize.im, Pixolution, Imagga, IQ Engines, Kooba, Lambda Labs, LTU technologies, Idee Inc.
If you know or you are part of some significant image SaaS provider that we’ve missed – please, comment here and we may include it in the next version of the infographic
We love your video tutorials for Cropp.me
It's been amazing year for Cropp.me. When we opened it to the public, the cropping tool was featured in TheNextWeb, Gizmodo, LifeHacker and many, many other blogs known and unown to us. People started writing their own reviews, coming up with ideas for additional features, giving us tips on how to improve the service, requesting API access for the cropping. It's really touching when you see tool as small and simple (but smart) as Cropp.me to be so much loved and most importantly - used.
Here's great video tutorial on how you can use Cropp.me. We could not make it better, thank you!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqIXt2WC-9o
Imagga at Photo Hack Day Berlin
It was exciting to be in Berlin for Photo Hack Day 3 organized by EyeEm. The start of the trip was quite challenging – lightning struck the Bulgaria Air plane we were supposed to take for Berlin. At least there was quite good internet connection at Sofia Airport so the 3 hours waiting for the aircraft replacement were not completely wasted. The journey started with a beautiful rainbow over the airport that we managed to fly over. Good sign for what’s to come in Berlin.
Berlin is lovely. Getting around is quite easy. The startup ecosystem is thriving so there are lots of opportunities to network. Straight from the airport we ended up attending Uber barbecue marking the startup’s operations in Berlin. Met lovely new people, all with interesting story and a startup. Need to say that if you have not been in Berlin, you will be surprised how interesting the startup scene is. The spirit of Berlin can be seen in the way people dress, live, talk, interact. It’s a vivid mixture of the modern world with a small hipster touch that can be easily seen everywhere.
And here we are at Photo Hack Day opening, where Georgi presented Imagga APIs. It’s interesting to see some competitors also presenting and partnering the event. This is the third edition of Photo Hack Day organized by EyeEm in Berlin.
The event itself was awesome. Over 150 hackers attended and the crowd was really international – lots of local talent, but also some Americans, French, Norwegians, etc. The API partners had awesome technologies for the participants to play with, including Imagga’s color search and smart-cropping. Right after partners announcements and the hack ideas were presented, there was an instant team formation. Maybe the use of a great service like Hacker League helped people to get to know each other and form teams easily.
Imagga’s APIs were quite interesting to the participants. Almost half of the teams signed up, which is great. Two of the teams actually used the APIs at the end. Our special prize went to Ambeer – awesome idea that uses Imagga Color API to recognize the predominant colors of an image and then add ambient light in the room. It’s awesome that Imagga’s technology that made the magic work. The idea also got $250 in cash and $2500 in API usage from us. The project also won the official 2nd prize of the event, so some additional recognition for Imagga as well.
Even though we were API partners during the event, we couldn’t resist Fotolia’s challenge to hack something with Imagga and Fotolia APIs. The idea was born in a very interesting conversation on the future of micro-stock photography and how Imagga’s auto-tagging can actually be of benefit for the photographers in both saving time for tagging and improving the quality of the tags. So out of that the idea ‘Pimp Ma Tagzzz’ was born. It plugs Fotolia APIs and pulls search results from there. When you select a picture, we display Fotolia tags along with tags automatically generated by TaggRe (this is the fancy name we use for our auto-tagging technology). The words that are present in both tag clouds are colored in gray and the new tags that we suggest are in blue. Some of them are emphasized in bold to show they are considered as top search keywords in Fotolia. The auto-tagging technology is still in production mode and there is room for improvement of the tags’ quality. But even with the current state of the technology it’s visible we can help photographers significantly improve their image ratings by auto suggesting relevant tags.
Visiting Berlin and being part of the startup ecosystem just for a weekend was awesome experience. We will be coming back soon!
Imagga Pitching at TechCrunch Sofia Meetup
To be under the spot of TC is the ultimate desire of any startup all over the world. We all have sent friendly mails to Mike Butcher and the rest kindly asking to consider covering our great startups. Some passed through, some didn’t Hey, we all believe our product/service are game changers, so we never give up. I’ve even spoken to top tire venture capitalist from KPCB October last year, and one of his main remarks were: “If you are not a favorite of TC, you are doomed.”
Good news is TC came to visit. Having John Biggs, TC east cost editor, in Sofia two days ago is big win for the Bulgarian startup community. Many thanks for Ivan from Netocratic for making it happen. We even ended up owning John’s 3D printed head, that’s proudly displayed in our office. Nice reminder to ping him any time something significant comes up from Imagga.
Imagga was invited to present as one of the preselected 7 Bulgarian funded teams (2 from LAUNCHub and 5 from Eleven). Georgi did great presenting Imagga. Some of the questions after presentation were about the competitive landscape and our sales efforts.
It’s great Bulgaria is finally on the map of the TechCrunch and other media covering tech startups. We strongly believe the region is not covered enough and great tech potential is sparsely hidden here and there in the Balkan cities. There’s new entrepreneurship wave arising and we believe Bulgaria and particularly Sofia has the chance to stand out. There is growing startup community, co-working places fill to the brim, startup events almost every night, lots of tech savvy, ready to move out of big corporations guys, and last but not least funding opportunities in the face of LAUNCHub, Eleven and some angle investors.