Some of our latest articles on visual tech:
Can Visual Content remain trustworthy?
The battle is on. The forces of truth against forces of deception. With visual AI making it easier to fake visual content, its credibility is at stake. And with it, the income of thousands upon thousands of people worldwide who depend on the credibility of visuals to thrive: Newspapers, magazines, photographers, newswires, webcasters, television news, videographers, journalists, photo agencies amongst many others. The stakes are very high. If we no longer trust our photos or videos, we lose our primary knowledge of what is truly…
The post Can Visual Content remain trustworthy? appeared first on Kaptur.
2019 : The year of the face
It’s been ten years since Instagram launched and not long after, the selfie. It has taken the same amount of time for visual recognition to understand how to read our faces. If anything, 2019 has been the year where faces have taken center stage of visual tech, for good and bad… All of your faces are belong to us The most frequent usage of our faces is facial recognition for surveillance and security. It is has been the most visible because it is the most controversial. Fueled by a competitive…
The post 2019 : The year of the face appeared first on Kaptur.
The ubertification of photography
It made a giant noise as it caught everyone by surprise — $230 million investment in a company providing photo services. After Adobe’s $800 million purchase of French microstock photo company Fotolia, Pond 5’s $64 million investment and Shutterstock’s $76.5 million IPO, it is the highest figures ever seen invested in the photo world, by far. Sure, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion but that was for its formidable dedicated audience, not for its inexistent business model. In the case of Meero, it’s obviously for…
The post The ubertification of photography appeared first on Kaptur.
Leaving one’s comfort zone: What can we learn from the Google Pixel 4?
Let’s say your company has developed very strong expertise that could be applied to other use cases or markets than those you’ve successfully pursued. That makes it very tempting to expand. However, while some companies do this successfully, a large number of others learn through the school of hard knocks that applying their technology to previously unchartered territory is a lot harder than they’d thought. Especially when they move from being a software to a hardware or a cloud company, or v.v. Here are a…
The post Leaving one’s comfort zone: What can we learn from the Google Pixel 4? appeared first on Kaptur.
10 questions to a founder : Generated Photos
While the release of this person does not exist by three researchers created a massive wave of buzz, it never went beyond curiosity. When Ivan Braun and his team launched Generated Photos, the interest changed to concern and apprehension. Generating human portraits via AI was no longer a research paper but a real, viable business. One that can and probably will profoundly disrupt a multi-billion industry led by the likes of Adobe, Shutterstock and Getty Images. While GAN generated images do not come as a surprise to readers…
The post 10 questions to a founder : Generated Photos appeared first on Kaptur.
Photography’s misconceptions
Depending on who you ask, photo prints are up, or down. Depending on where you look, DSLRs are dead, or not. If you ask VC’s consumer photo apps are out, if you ask developers, they are a hot item. The only certitude, one all seem to agree on is that the creation and sharing of photos show no signs of slowing down, ever. What else can we all agree on? Let’s push aside some misconceptions: Photo printing is up: According to IBIS World, the online…
The post Photography’s misconceptions appeared first on Kaptur.
AI imaging news roundup: the good, bad, and ugly
New AI imaging products, research papers and scandals keep popping up – so, I thought it was a good idea to present a roundup of the AI imaging announcements of the last two weeks. Needless to say, there was a lot of commotion around FaceApp but, before we get into that, let’s start with the other AI imaging news. UC Berkeley, the Univ. of Washington, and the Univ. of Chicago: Natural adversarial images. Pictures that are routinely misidentified by AI are known as “adversarial images.” These pictures can…
The post AI imaging news roundup: the good, bad, and ugly appeared first on Kaptur.
Gig Photography market: What’s in store?
I’d like to share a few thoughts spurred by our recently released Building the Gig Photo Economy study, as well as the conversations I’ve since had with quite a few folks using or supplying Gig Photography services. First of all, we live in an era of diminishing stigma against outsourcing household tasks that consumers traditionally have done themselves. Coupled with compelling use cases for deploying gig photographers or photography workers as I wrote about earlier, there are plenty of opportunities for innovative vendors to offer services that make finding, engaging,…
The post Gig Photography market: What’s in store? appeared first on Kaptur.
The solution to Deepfakes
The real strength of deepfakes or alternate images is not that they falsify the truth – we have been able to that since the birth of photography but rather, thanks to social media, that they are completely dissociated from their original creators and thus their intent. When the Soviet government released a documentary, we knew to be skeptical of its content as they were notoriously prone to propaganda or biased information. Today, when we see a photo or video, we do not know its origin…
The post The solution to Deepfakes appeared first on Kaptur.
LDV Vision Summit : It’s in the silence after
After all, it’s not about a specific connection, nor is it about one particular talk or presentation. It is neither about any particular individual that you catch up with or meet for the first time. The real value of the LDV Vision Summit, instead, is the sum of it all. Like a great book you keep on thinking about months after you finish it, the LDV Vision Summit fills you with so much inspiration, so much broad thinking, so much forward vision (no pun intended)…
The post LDV Vision Summit : It’s in the silence after appeared first on Kaptur.
The things that kill themselves
The particularity of the photo industry is its death wish. At its core, everything and everyone in this industry seems hell-bent into destroying itself and, along with it, the whole industry. Take PDN, for example. Long considered the monthly bible of professional photographers with its tall vertical pages, its authoritarian product reviews, and its industry-leading … Read More →The post The things that kill themselves appeared first on Thoughts of a Bohemian.
R.I.P. Rights-Managed
The news crackled and spread like a barrel full of fireworks set on fire by an innocent four years old carelessly playing with stolen matches. First, via an e-mail leak, then by an official press release. Getty Images, the last bastion and great defender of rights managed, was laying its swords down, defeated. It was … Read More →The post R.I.P. Rights-Managed appeared first on Thoughts of a Bohemian.