paulmelcher

A Review of Visual Technology in 2021

Within its half-open, half-closed status, 2021 will be remembered as a transition year: A melting pot between ending lockdowns, …

PaaS: Photography as a Service

The age of the camera is slowly coming to an end—especially the bulky DSLR and all its associated declinations.

The Fragmentation of Photojournalism

In photojournalism, where and how people get their news matters. A quick takeaway of Reuters Digital News Report 2021 shows that the news market is exploding into a multitude of topic-specific verticals and various mediums at the same time.

The Inevitable Convergence of Social Media, Commerce, and Visual Content

You walk through the supermarket aisle until you face various choices for the product you wish to eat. In the case of cereals, it can be 20 or more different options. You reach out and pick one, which you feel is the right decision based on a well-educated process.

What’s Really Behind Getty Images’ Acquisition of Unsplash

It was so close to the first of April, it sounded like an April’s fool hoax: the gentle freedom-loving all sharing company would be selling to the greedy capitalistic money-making titan. Or, in other words, Getty Images was acquiring Unsplash. The two unlikely partners officially became at the end of April, sending ripples through the stock photography world and beyond.

The Business of Deepfakes, Cheapfakes, and Misleading Manipulated Media

Some speculate that overall fake news could cost the economy $39 billion a year. Quite a market to grab for a savvy tech startup, even at 1%! But while fake news and in particular deep fakes have been accused of wreaking havoc on minds and economy, there is surprisingly only a minimal amount of companies offering tools to combat them.

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.

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, and photo agencies, among many others.

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…

Is Instagram Dying a Slow Death?

All the numbers have been pointing upwards for Instagram. In fact, a recent analysis shows that Instagram will be used by 1 in 3 person, in the US, by 2020. With 400 million active users today, it is the only platform where people exclusively take and share visual content and nothing else.

Future A.I. Will Be Able to Generate Photos We Need Out of Nothing

What will we do with all the data we accumulate from photos? On a daily basis, Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook or Microsoft use highly sophisticated deep learning engines to better understand the content of billions of images uploaded, liked and shared. For now, it is to better serve advertising, but what else can be done?