• Israel (Iz) Shalom is the CEO and Co-Founder of GoodOnes, which brings order to the chaos in our camera rolls with AI. Before GoodOnes, Iz was leading Product Management and Engineering teams at Google, Airbnb and Dropbox, and before that, Israeli Intelligence Corps.
• True to the Bay Area cliché, Iz is an avid hiker, biker, camper and photographer with 80,000 photos in his camera roll.

• Arturo completed his Bachelors in Science in Mechatronics Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) in 2012 at Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria, and later received his PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara in Dynamical Neuroscience in 2018 working under Miguel Eckstein.
• During his PhD, his work encompassed themes such as visual metamerism, peripheral processing, visual search and human-machine interaction. He then moved to Harvard University's Department of Psychology to work with Talia Konkle to explore the role of foveation in humans and machines.
• Arturo is currently a postdoctoral research associate at MIT's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines working with Tomaso Poggio on theories of visual representational learning in humans and machines and biologically-plausible solutions to adversarial robustness.
• He has published works in ICLR, NeurIPS and CVPR, and is one of the co-founders of SVRHM.
• Arturo is also a talented Artist.

• Soyoung leads business development and is the co-founder at Twelve Labs. Last year’s Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner, Twelve Labs builds foundation models for multimodal video understanding to make video as easy as text via their APIs.
• Prior to Twelve Labs, Soyoung was at PwC working with engineers at multinational tech organizations to establish processes for adopting new technologies.
• Outside of Twelve Labs, Soyoung spends most of her time either watching videos or making them. 

• Troy is CEO of IMAIGE, an AI platform that personalizes automated multimedia curation and insightful media labeling. Before IMAIGE, Troy helped establish the San Diego Legion, a Major League Rugby franchise, as the founding COO. His experience in crafting engaging experiences allowed him to contribute significantly to the team's growth.
• He established that expertise as a Director at KPMG, a prominent management consulting firm, where his focus on human-centric digital strategy helped organizations optimize and achieve digital transformation.
• Outside of applying AI to solve large-scale problems, Troy dedicates his time to family, creating art and social advocacy.

Gooten. Raising more $. On-demand printing platform and past Visual 1st presenter, Gooten announces the closing of a $11 million of Series A funding round led by existing investors KEC Ventures with participation from INX International, Tech Pioneers Fund, and other investors. This new round follows a $15M round in December 2021.

Gooten says it expects to expand its international capabilities, adding new fulfillment partnerships in strategic markets like Korea, Japan, India, Latin America, Brazil, and Western Europe.

Printbox. Text-to-image-to-print. Printbox launches Masterpiece AI, a solution that enables Printbox customers to offer text-to-image creation functionality. Coupled with image upscaling and enhancement, Masterpiece offers seamless integration with Printbox’s photo print ordering platform (initially limited to canvas prints).

Printbox is going all out with Masterpiece: it offers free text-to-image creation and only charges its customers commission if and when the AI image is used in a print product. 

Shutterstock. AI imagery indemnification. On the heels of Adobe, Shutterstock now also offers its enterprise customers an indemnity option for using and licensing AI-generated images created with Shutterstock Generate.

Shutterstock will fulfill indemnification requests on demand via “human review” (sic) with the intent to protect its customers against potential claims related to their use of generative AI images created and licensed on shutterstock.com.

Shutterstock & OpenAI. Taking their dating to the Next Level – a six-year expanded partnership, that is. Shutterstock will provide OpenAI with training data by granting access to its video, image and music libraries. Shutterstock will continue to leverage OpenAI’s text-to-image generation and allow customers to use synthetic editing capabilities to alter any image in the Shutterstock library.

The companies will also collaborate to bring generative AI to mobile users via Shutterstock’s newly acquired GIPHY platform. 

As of this writing, Shutterstock’s stock jumped 10% after the announcement.

Midjourney. Going weird and panoramic. Generative AI art service Midjourney launches Panoramic Images to add content outside the original image, along the lines of what DALL-E calls Outpainting, Adobe calls Generative Fill and Stability AI calls Uncropping.

And then there is Midjourney's Weird AI (sic), a “weirdness” parameter the user can select from 0 to 3,000. Turn your photo of your friends playing music to one that shows aliens playing music. You get the idea… 

Retro. Private photosharing redux. What are the chances to succeed with a new app that tackles a use case that so many others have tried to address with largely minimal success?

For one, the devil is in the details in how well the app serves consumers’ needs in an easy and intuitive manner.

Also, having founders who’ve made their mark at Instagram deserves our attention – as apparently also drew the attention from a range of early-stage investors.

The result? Retro, a still under wraps photo journaling app that focuses on lightweight features to share your visual memories with close friends & family members. We’ll keep you posted when the app can be checked out. 

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