Category:
Personal cloud
Platform:
Cloud
Solutions used:
Automation
of organizing
photo memories
Searchable
memories in photo
collections
Funambol is the leading provider of white-label personal and business cloud solutions worldwide with approximately 40+ deployments around the globe. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, Bay Area with a global development center in Pavia, Italy. The name Funambol comes from the Italian word “Funambolo” which means a tightrope walker, an artist who balances courage and risk.
One Media Hub (OMH) is the product for consumers developed by Funambol and marketed by multiple mobile operators. It provides personal content back-up and management as a service, which is aimed at making consumer’s life easier by collecting their memories (images, videos, music, documents) and auto-organizing them by different categories: events, flashbacks, visited places or by objects in the image.
One Media Hub offers compelling online backup for personal consumers files and is agnostic with any mobile phone platform or operating system. You can purchase its services through one of its partners, usually as a “BASIC” package with a nominal amount of online storage and a “PLUS” version offering unlimited storage with premium features for a slightly higher monthly subscription. Please note that pricing and service name can vary depending on the operator and how OMH is packaged.
The Challenge.
People take many pictures with their smartphones, and over time these become part of their most important memories. Once the number of images reaches a few hundred images, it becomes difficult if not impossible to find specific pictures to show to friends. This raises the question:
How can a person search images without needing to scroll through an entire library?
Usually if a user wants to find all pictures with his or her pet in them just by typing “pet”, it would not work since none of the images are tagged. However, this can be solved using sophisticated computer vision algorithms to recognize objects in pictures. For it to be efficient, it also needs to be cost effective and time efficient.
The Solution.
To avoid the pitfalls of building and operating complex computer vision algorithms, Funambol evaluated different image recognition services offering instant deployment. OMH selected Imagga's APIs because of the high quality/cost ratio and ease of integration into the Operators' backend infrastructure.
The Impact of using Imagga APIs is twofold: Technically, it adds a great feature to the product, allowing users to search their photos by themes and terms easily. Commercially, Imagga enabled OMH to add valuable features to the “PLUS” package.
Implementation
From a development standpoint, Funambol connected Imagga API's within a day by using Imagga's documentation. It was easy and detailed enough to quickly understand how to integrate it into the OMH infrastructure. Imagga's API is now a module that processes uploaded content to the cloud and extracts metadata information that users can then use to search their photo libraries. Thanks to the SaaS approach, the implementation was affordable and predictable both in costs and scalability. Quickly after the deployment, OMH also saw users using the search box significantly more, which dramatically increased customer retention.
“ We are our memories and some of the most precious ones are our photos. However, having thousands of pictures without being able to easily search for them is useless. With Imagga we give users’ control of their digital memories. “
Stefano Fornari CTO and VP of Engineering at Funambol
Tagging for Personal Photo Organization.
You can implement our API for free (up to 1,000 calls a month) to test it within your application.