The 2019 Visual 1st Award winners are:
Best of Show award: Bellus3D
Visual 1st Best Business Potential award: GotPhoto
Visual 1st Best Technology award: Skylum
Visual 1st Special Recognition award: Generated Photos
The Best of Show award winner, Bellus3D is a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup founded in March 2015 to create and drive the next generation of 3D face scanning hardware and software technologies. Its CEO Eric Chen is co-inventor of Apple QuickTime VR and holds 16 US patents.
Awards Judge and smartphone imaging expert Mike Chang commented, “One of the least forgiving use cases of personalized imaging is face scanning, as the user will immediately notice when their face scan is not perfect. Bellus3D has done an impressive job in providing users a 3D face scanning solution by simply using their smartphone. In addition to the technology demoed, we were also really impressed by the variety of markets and use cases Bellus3D is pursuing for their 3D face scanning products.”
Best Business Potential award winner, GotPhoto is a Germany-headquartered workflow platform provider for volume school photographers. Its web-based tools automate admin and sales tasks, allowing the photographer to spend more time behind the lens rather than behind a desk.
Awards Judge Anna Dickson, Visual Lead, Google Image Search at Google commented, “GotPhoto shows that mature industries like school photography can be successfully disrupted when offering innovative tools and services that enable gig photographers to serve their local communities.”
Best Technology award winner, Skylum is a Ukraine-headquartered developer of AI-powered standalone and plug-in photo editing software, including its flagship product, Luminar 3.
According to Awards Judge, Robert Blumberg, Managing Director of the Soquel Group, “We were very impressed by Skylum demoing how to change an image background through a few clicks, which everybody knows can be incredibly difficult to do in a program like Photoshop. We look forward to seeing what other easy but powerful features they will add to the next version of their Luminar software!”
Visual 1st Special Recognition award winner, Generated Photos is the company behind the recently launched 100K Faces Project, a repository of 100K artificially created photos available as free headshots for non-commercial use. Generated Photos has built its dataset by taking and tagging 29K+ photos of 69 different models, and by using StyleGAN to construct its machine learning dataset to generate face photos from scratch.
Andy Kelm, Managing Director at Palmarés Advisors, commented, “We were impressed by the technology and the original imagery approach Generated Photos has developed to artificially generate facial images. We were also impressed with the company’s business potential, which includes disrupting the modeling and stock photo industry by offering these images for free, generating usage analytics, and new, unforeseen opportunities with this significant new category and era of algorithmically-created content.”
The judging panel for the Visual 1st Awards is composed of prominent representatives of the hi-tech media, intellectual property and investment communities, whose endorsement is so critical to app developers. This year’s judges were:
Andy Kelm, Managing Director, Palmarés Advisors
Anna Dickson, Visual Lead, Google Image Search, Google
Mike Chang
Robert Blumberg Managing Director, Soquel Group
