|
BeReal & Voodoo. Acquisition. Along the lines of Mark Twain: “The report of my death was an exaggeration” – turns out to be a €500M exaggeration, in BeReal’s case. BeReal has been acquired by mobile apps and games company Voodoo for €500M. BeReal, which has more than 40M active users, gained popularity during the pandemic by sending users prompts to have them post what they’re up to within a 2-minute window and share these unfiltered visual updates with known friends & family. Despite its early success, BeReal has been struggling to grow its user base, and was looking for a buyer as it was running out of funding. To the rescue: Voodoo!
From Cloudprinter: Devastated Ukrainian book printer needs equipment. During DRUPA Ukrainian book printing business Printing House "Factor Druk" was hit by a Russian missile attack, killing 7 workers, injuring 21, and destroying 50,000 books, while leaving Ukrainian schools without essential materials for September. Factor Druk is responsible for around 40% of Ukraine's book market. The company lost 1000-square-meter of their facility and equipment on May 23rd. Check out the equipment they urgently need and connect with Cloudprinter if you could donate any.
Adobe. Tone-death redux. These are sensitive times for creative professionals, who – to some extent rightfully – fear that GenAI tech could threaten their livelihood. These are also times in which Apple and Adobe have shown a remarkable lack of sensitivity toward their loyal customers (see our last issue: Tone-death #2: Move over Apple, it’s Adobe’s turn).
What’s the newest lack of sensitivity coming from Adobe? Showing Photoshop users a new 'Updated Terms of Use' pop-up that they're forced to accept. The new small print contains some seemingly alarming lines, including one that states "we may access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review".
The predictable result: upset Photoshop users expressing their anger all over the internet, followed by Adobe’s defense in two subsequent blog posts (here and here) in a timespan of 4 days – after the PR damage was done – claiming that its legalese doesn’t many that anything has fundamentally changed. The two key messages are that Adobe says it "does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content" and that it will "never assume ownership of a customer's work."
Oh, and then we had Adobe Stock forded to remove a collection of AI-generated images in the style of Ansel Adams’ landscape photography after Ansel Adam’s estate slammed Adobe for its conduct.
Time for some proactive photographer sensitivity awareness training?
Cara. Fed up with Instagram? Artists unite. Artist-centric social network and anti-AI social platform Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts. Cara is built specifically for artists and is going out of its way to distinguish itself from Instagram and EyeEm by not using public posts to train its generative AI systems. Founder of Cara is Jingna Zhang, a renowned photographer who has fought on behalf of artists, recently winning an appeal in a Luxembourg court over a painter who copied one of her photographs, which she shot for Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam.
Pika. Raising $ for video app. Who says there’s no more space for new video apps? Two 20-some female founders, just a year after dropping out of Stanford’s PhD program (dropping out being the fashionable road to success in startup land), raised a whopping $80M for Pika, its GenAI video app startup, bringing total funding to $135M.
Twelve Labs. Raising $ for AI video tech. Another case in point: congrats to Twelve Labs, our 2022 Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner and last year panelist, which just raised $50M in Series A funding to fuel the ongoing development of its industry-leading foundation models for various video use cases, including multimodal video understanding.
The Dead Pixels Society. Print Production Networks webinar. Hosted by Gary Pageau of our Visual 1st media partner The Dead Pixels Society, this webinar will discuss pros and cons of online print product networks and review the offerings of several of the leading platforms in this space. Confirmed vendor participants are Cloudprinter, HelloPrint and Gooten. When: Wednesday, June 26 at 11 AM - 12:30 PM EST. Tickets are $9.95. More info and purchasing.
Leica. Leica-fying your iPhone camera. Leica announces Leica Lux, a new iPhone camera app that lets your iPhone mimic Leica’s cameras and the style and bokeh of classic lenses. Leica Lux’s freemium version comes with 5 Leica Looks and one lens imitation. Unlocking all the color profiles, software lenses, and pro-oriented features, such as manual exposure controls, costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. The camera app was developed in conjunction with smartphone grip and camera app developer Fjorden, which (as was now announced) Leica acquired back in December.
Smartphoto & TopFanZ. Going gifts. Belgian e-commerce company Smartphoto group NV announced the €1.1M acquisition of TopFanZ, a European merchandiser for the sports and entertainment sector. This follows Smartphoto’s 2021 acquisition of Frucon² NV, one of the online European web vendors of personalized gift packages.
HP & Canva. Visual communication & printing. HP and Canva announced a strategic partnership to provide Canva’s 185M monthly users unique design-to-print services by utilizing the global network of HP Industrial Print and HP Large Format to drive volume to HP-equipped Print Service Providers, while HP becomes one of the first Canva Enterprise customers, enabling teams to effortlessly create impactful visual content and enhance internal collaboration at scale.
IMG.LY. Plug-in platform. Visual 1st platinum sponsor IMG.LY, developer of photo, video, design editing and creative automation SDKs, introduces a plugin platform for its CreativeEditor SDK. This platform makes feature development much easier, and adds one-click features like background removal or vectorizers, smart design tools like QR codes or subtitle generators, as well as deeply interactive features, such as generative AI for text and images.
| 
