Imagga at BkVF startup challenge

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Imagga at BkVF

Imagga will be taking part in the startup challenge during Balkan Venture Forum, that will take place in Sofia, May 21-22. BkVF is regional event that aims to showcase innovative companies to active investors and promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

We believe Imagga’s technology is quite innovative and hope it will be good match for the investors present. During the last couple of months our focus was solely on improving the technology and growing our customer base, so it’s quite exciting to step up on the pitching stage and share our progress.

Going to events it’s great, well, if that’s not all that you do. We will be at BkVF for networking, validating new ideas, getting to know prospective clients and meeting investors. We are also hiring so it will be great match if the best tech developers of the region happen to be there so we can meet and talk.

One of the fist times we pitched Imagga was at Mini Seedcamp London couple of years ago. It’s probably not a coincidence that Seedcamp comes to Sofia exactly during BkVF. Things have changed in the Bulgarian startup scene, and it’s exciting to start, work and innovate here in the region.

Ah, do we party? Yes, see you at the parties, there will be several! ;-)

Imagga partners with Blitline to jointly offer Smart Cropping

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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

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

Blitline + Imagga Pricing Plan

We do beleive this is going to be a great example of co-opetition! :)

 

Come hack with Imagga APIs at Google I/O Extended Sofia

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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

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Photo Hack Day 3

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 palanning 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

Photo Hack Day Berlin Sponsors & Friends

See you at the arty Platoon Kunsthalle venue!

How to implement color search in your website in 30 minutes!

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Our Color Search is pretty easy to integrate in your website – it will take you just 30 minutes starting from scratch! A time well spent, especially if you run an image intensive site. Color search will make your customers really happy :) – they can start discovering items in the colors they really like and maybe return the love by buying some of them.

We have already covered the “why do I need color search?” topic, now let’s focus on the more practical stuff – how to get color search for your site:

  1. First, let’s starts with requesting Imagga API account on our website imagga.com – just fill the short registration form with your name, e-mail, company/organization, and how do you plan to use the API (estimated time needed: 2 mins)
    API request linkapplication form

  2. You’ll receive an e-mail confirming that we’ve received your request and will review it ASAP.Imagga notification email In 5 to 10 minutes you’ll get another e-mail with your API key, secret and server endpoint. Imagga email API detailsImportant: Please check your ‘spam’ folder, as these automated e-mails are often mistaken for spam. (est. time: 10 mins)

  3. The API account approval letter all has all the information you need to kick-start the usage of our color API:

    • links to a zip file with PHP kit, that includes the color API client library and sample code how to index and search among images based on colorImagga email API kits

    • links to the community-supported Java and Ruby kits that are hosted on Github

    • link to the API docs – in case your website doesn’t use PHP, Java, or Ruby you can refer to them and implement the HTTP calls on your ownImagga email API docs

The first two scenarios – if you use PHP and download the .zip, or if you use either Java or Ruby and get the kit – are estimated to take you about 15 mins to download, get familiar with the code, deploy and run them successfully on you test server. In the third case, if you have to do a quick and dirty implementation of the API on your own it’s expected to take about an hour.

  1. Now, you should already have the demo kit up and running in less than 30 minutes (or in less than an hour and a half you if use platform other than the three ones supported out of the box). Now it’s up to you to make use of the color indexing method in order to include all the images from your collection that you want to be searchable based on colors. You typically have to do this once right after the initial integration, and then either on a regular basis, every day for example, or immediately when an user or curator submit an image to your system. Both works fine, and it typically takes less than a second for an image to be analyzed and included in the color index. (figuring out which images you want to index and integrating the code for this in your system typically takes 2 to 4 hours of work)

  2. Providing the right UI for color search is as simple as adding another filter (typically a color palette) to your search interface and filtering the results at the backend using the color search methods in the API. (depending on your needs and how picky you are the right design may take between 2 and 8 hours of work)

    multi-color search

    Multi-color search UI and results

From then on, the sky is the limit. And, of course, you can contact us if you have any kind of issues or questions!

Imagga API kits in Ruby and Java, now looking for your platforms!

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I guess most of you agree that nothing is as motivating as seeing people being enthusiastic about what you do. And that’s why we feel privildged to have some real supporters among you guys!

We are happy to announce that now we have some great community-supported kit/clients for Imagga API in Ruby and Java!

Trying to stick to the MVP approach when launching our platform in the end of this January, we decided that it’s absolutely OK to have only a PHP client and a well written concise documentation that still allows developers integrate the API in other platforms, until we manage to implement multiple platform kits later on.

We thought that if hackers are eager enough to try and use our API it should be OK for them to spend an hour or two figuring out how to make the proper HTTP calls on their own, in their development platfroms of choice. Happily enough, this turned out to be right!

Ruby

Ruby

The first version of the Ruby client was implemented in about two hours by Mart Karu during Seedhack in February! The ColourTag.me team formed during the hackathon was eager to use Imagga’s color extraction and they were using Ruby, so Mart did the ‘hackwork’. He was kind to publish it on GitHub – https://github.com/martkaru/imagga - and to conitue supporting it after that. Big Thanks Mart!

Java

Java (registered trademark of ORACLE)

The Java API kit is implemented and constantly updated by Jakob Vad Nielsen. He contacted us long time ago, when we still haven’t launched Imagga API publicly, and we took the chance to contact him back once we were ready. Soon after he shared that he has implemented and published a Java kit, available in GitHub again – https://github.com/lazee/imagga-java-kit. Big Thanks to Jakob, also for his feature and tweak requests that make a lot of sense, and for being that rapid in keeping the kit up to date with the constant changes we apply to the API!

Now it’s your turn! :) We are currently focusing the majority of our technical efforts to providing more advanced and scalable technology. That’s why porting the Imagga API client/kit to some other platforms unfortunately is out of our very-short-term backlog. But that’s where you can help! Do you feel enthusiastic about what we do and want to try it out, but your preferred platform is neither PHP, nor Ruby, nor Java? You are more than welcome to wrap a client for it and share it with others! Node.js, .NET/C# and Python for example would be very nice additions to our kit-supported platforms. Of course, we will help as much as possible in providing relevant info and support, in addition to the color and cropping API docs that are already there.

We are starting to hire soon, and implementing a tidy kit for Imagga API in a new platform is definitely a plus for those who want to apply. And the good karma should be enough for the others? Please contact us if you think so :)

Hacking the hackathons :)

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It was an amazing weekend last week! Imagga was actively involved in two hackathons happening at the same time in two different parts of the world!

The first one was Startup Weekend Mobile Sofia (Bulgaria), held in Vivacom HQ, April 5-7. Great event with more than 120 participants eager to brainstorm and prototype ideas about the next cool mobile apps. It was one of the best hackathons I’ve been at, not only in Bulgaria but worldwide. A lot of bright people and super productive engineers.

Something that made me extremely happy is that the most of the ideas were globally (and not locally) oriented – something that wasn’t typical in Bulgaria until recently. Let’s hope that this change in mentality will bring the Bulgarian startup community closer and closer to global success.

I took the last chance in Friday to pitch an idea and decided to pitch it as a spin-off project from Imagga, about building mobile app(s) based on our prototype for color search in fashion - http://colorslike.me/asos/. How I pitched it is that we (Imagga) are ready to buy it after the hackathon and/or eventually hire the people ;) Later on it turned out that some of the jury members have percieved this as a very smart move from Imagga (kind of “hacking the system”), but one that decreases the value of the whole project in the context of the event. I definitely don’t agree with that and I’d say our team was very motivated and passionate, because it really believes in the idea, and not bacause of eventual quick cash gains.

Here are we, working on ColorFit.me it two consequtive days, brainstorming and hacking like crazy:

We did an amazing job, pushing prototypes on all iPhone (native), Android (Adobe Air wrapper), and Windows Phone (native). Here is a video of them in action - http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10201211376273646&set=vb.366135283505091&type=2&theater

The team also produced a wonderful presentation - http://colorfit.me/presentation/#/swsofia.

And we won! several prizes: 3rd place based on the jury vote, and 2nd-3rd place based on the audience vote. It’s still a nice perfornace though we think we should have won 1st place in both, and also the special prize from Microsoft for prototyping the app aslo in their platform in less than a day ;)

We are going to decide how to proceed with this in a few days and we do hope that you’ll be able to  have access to the first versions of the apps in the app stores quite soon :)

The second hackathon was Photo Hack Day 4, held in Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, April 6-7. The event went really good, and though we were partnering it remotely, it was quite busy for us -implementing several sugar features and tweaks based on customer demand :)

Happily, one of the teams that requested access to our APIs managed to integrate it in their hack ‘The Roll’, and it was featured as one of the eight honorable mentions in the The Next Web review of the event. Great job by the EyeEm team working on it!

There are a few more great hackathons coming in the next week(end)s – HackFMI and NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2013 – Sofia. What a month for startups and hackers!

Partnering Photo Hack Day 4 in Facebook HQ this April

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We are very excited to partner the 4th edition of Photo Hack Day to be held April 6-7 in the Facebook HQ in Menlo Park!

Photo Hack Day

Photo Hack Day

This is “THE hackathon” when we talk about images. The last edtion has gathered more than 350 developers who’ve produced the impressive 72 innovate image related hacks!

What better place than that to offer our APIs for some heavy hacking?!? It’s a privilege for us to be among lots of great API sponsors:

API sponsors

Photo Hack Day – API Sponsors

We do hope to see a lot of creative hacks using all these APIs. We’re offering prizes for all who integrate the Imagga API, plus a special cash prize for the the most creative integration!

If you are around make sure to join the party and make some great use our APIs :)

AutoTag.me Explained

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More than one billion images are taken every single day, just to be forgotten in thirty minutes. Not because we do not want to remember, but because the available information and especially the visual part of it have intensified significantly. It’s overwhelming, and it’s not going to improve. Who is to blame? Perhaps it is due to the recent boom of smartphones and digital cameras…

This is where Autotag.me comes to help. AutoTag.me is an online tool that aims to extract meaning from every image by automatically suggesting and assigning relevant keywords that describe the colors, objects and concepts represented inside the image.

How does AutoTag.me work?

  1. You upload your images directly from your computer and/or feed the images from your accounts in external services like Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, and Facebook;
  2. The tool automatically suggests some relevant tags for the images. If needed, you can remove some of the suggested tags and add some more manually;
  3. Once you are ready, you can save the tags directly in the images (in their IPTC data) and/or export them to the external services they come from (in step 1).

AutoTag.Me concept

Sounds like magic, right? Actually we are very excited about what we’ve done so far! In the last year we’ve invested a lot of time and resources to develop the core of the technology that analyzes the pixel content of an image and aims to automatically suggest quality conceptual and other tags for it.

Sounds sexy, but we have lots of things to do before you can really enjoy the service. We are currently implementing technologies that may recognize many more types of concepts and objects, improving the relevance and precision of the suggested tags, optimizing the system in terms of speed and scalability, and wrapping the technology in an API, so you can integrate it in your own project.

The impact is going to be BIG! So sign up for our beta waiting list at www.autotag.me

We do believe that auto-tagging can save a lot of our most precious resource – time. If you are for example a stock photographer, this means the time for tagging all these images you’ve taken, before submitting them for sale. And if you are an avid photo lover, this means time for finding the right image in your personal collection of thousands of photos.

Last but not least, we are fundraising for the project via IndieGoGo, so if you think AutoTag.me has the potential to be a game changer, support us by donating or just sharing with others about our great tagging solution  - http://igg.me/at/autotagme/x/2731785

LAUNCHub Investor Day

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Imagga LH Investor Day

It was really amazing to take part of something so significant for the LAUNCHub family – their first investor day ever. Imagga is one of the investees and it’s so exciting for us to be part of the first generation of startups that get funding in Bulgaria.

Bulgaria is still not known with that many great startups, innovation and lots of investment opportunities, but that’s gonna change. I am sure some of the VCs, including Intel Capital, 3TS, Early Bird, EBRD, RSG Capital, and Axxess Capital that were presented at the event believe in that as well.

It was a great pleasure to see our fellow entrepreneurs pitch with passion to get the attention of VCs, angel investors and business advisors. So was Georgi, giving his best during the 5 mins Imagga got on the stage.

Showcasing Imagga Technology on Mobile

I’ll be honest – the event went exceptionally well for us. We were engaged in talks with local and international angels and VCs during the whole afternoon, and we didn’t even manage to eat for lunch :)

We would definitely like to see some more international VCs ready to jump on the roller-coaster after an event like this, but it felt good, damn Bulgarian good!