Visual 1st names this year’s awards winners

The Visual1st conference was held last week, virtually bringing together imaging industry executives from around the globe to showcase emerging trends and new technology. As part of the event, a four-judge panel evaluated the 39 Show and Tell presenters and presented the following awards

Best of Show – zerolens

In our minds, the Best of Show Award should combine several elements, including significant business opportunities, impact on the market, innovative technology – all well packaged and presented. zerolens was a clear winner in all these areas. We were all impressed by the customer problems they’re attacking, the potential of the market, and the product they’ve developed – and all of that during the pandemic when e-commerce is booming and innovative solutions are needed for retailers to continue to grow.

Award presented by Andy Kelm, Managing Director, Palmarés Advisors

Best Technology – autoRetouch

At Visual 1st this year the trend most widely discussed was the potential of AI for imaging applications. To make the AI truly work is all about getting the details right, as the goal is to mass produce the effect of the AI, which is tough. We chose autoRetouch because they are focused on solving big problems for a growing industry, while their solution is packaged in a nice workflow and offers quite a few features we haven’t seen before.

Award presented by Sami Niemi, Partner, Spintop Ventures

Best Business Potential – Bloom AI

When considering the size of various markets, the online e-commerce market is by far the biggest at $25 trillion. When also considering that 20% of all retailers are online, the solutions that target this market certainly qualify for the Best Business Potential award.

With big platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce making it simple and economical for everyone to move sales online, we really like Bloom’s level of integration and automation in these platforms, the ease with which businesses can use Bloom, and their future potential resulting from network effects generated by the data they collect.

Today’s imaging assets capabilities of Bloom are just the beginning. Future directions such as using computer generated imaging to optimize e-commerce metrics is a very exciting avenue to explore.

Award presented by Marcel van der Heijden, Partner, Fortino Capital

Special Recognition – vAIsual

As the world expands into more visual media the use of synthetic media is expanding quickly. vAIsual’s methodology and approach to how they implement AI in the imaging space is very interesting. By generating their own datasets, they can acquire biometric releases and allow for self-identification, creating a unique and diverse dataset that can be leveraged to not just create synthetic media but to also generate algorithms to understand meaning and  context of visual data.

Award presented by Anna Dickson, Visual Lead, Google Image Search Google