StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 161 CityBrander is a branding and PR company which helps global cities rebrand and reinvent themselves, primarily by expanding the reach of the city to include interesting and important sites in their vicinity. For example, CityBrander defines London as the triangle between Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton. This notional expansion increases the impact of the city on the world stage, while also promoting the development of transport infrastructure to better connect the expanded areas (as a secondary effect). CEO QUOTE " Hemingway says that everything far from the sea is province. I say that everything not included in a global city logically falls outside the global city and has therefore missed the boat. Sometimes people can get very agitated about their local sense of belonging. However, the world does not care about the minutiae of local senitmentalities. " - said CityBrander founder and CEO Cindy Brangelina . City of London (image source: Wikipedi...

StartupRealities No 143 MetaTextbook is an artificial intelligence (AI)-led content producer which creates visual content for electronic textbooks customised to the interests and hobbies of the reader. For example, if a student likes football, most of the images in the physics or geography textbooks for this particular student will be related to football. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING The customisation of imagery makes the content easier to understand and internalise thanks to two key factors: 1) The relevance and familiarity with the images creates a shortcut to existing knowledge in the student's mind; 2) The virtuous cycle of reassurance engendered by familiarity gives confidence to the student that the effort required to learn a lesson is minimal. Aristotle described this process in Rhetoric: " To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people. " PRINCIPLES OF IMAGE SELECTION The company applies the principle of  conceptual metaphors to select or create images ...

StartupRealities No 134 CornerIP is an intellectual property (IP) agency that has developed proprietary image processing algorithms that integrate in strategic locations on photos and graphs the name and logo of a company, so that they cannot be cropped out without detracting from the value of the image. The name and logo blend in with the rest of the image by being organically incorporated into the original photo. CEO QUOTE "You know those stock images with the copyright holder's logos strewn diagonally across the entire photo? Well, we avoid this format like the plague. It's nonsense. Instead, we still position the name of the owner on the image but our AI algorithm picks for it a prime unobtrusive space next to the focus point of the image, usually on a corner billboard, door sign or plaque that appear to be part of the image (see photo below). Thus the IP is protected but the image itself is not mangled beyond recognition," said CornerIP founder and CEO Corn...

StartupRealities No 117 ImagePerfector is a digital imaging company which is developing a voice-recognition driven image-editing algorithm for use by the general public. The AI has the typical features of an image-editing programme, such as Photoshop, but relies on verbal commands and finger contact on a touchscreen to manipulate an image. The algorithm also uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to synthesise elements of images from scratch where stock image databases cannot provide such or where there are copyright restrictions on the use of existing images. CEO QUOTE "Using ImagePerfector is like having a virtual digital assistant. All it takes is give commands and point with your finger on the touchscreen: 'Put an Emirates plane in the sky here. Paintbrush this cloud. Place the Statue of Liberty in the middle of the lake.' And voila! Here is your perfect image." - said company founder and CEO Imogen Perfetto. Image manipulated with Photoshop (image...

StartupRealities No 110 InstaPedia is an online wiki-based encyclopedia which has an Instagram-type reliance on visual information to describe terms and concepts. The images, infographics, charts and simple drawings on InstaPedia are accompanied by brief captions. As in all wiki-projects, volunteers contribute the images, photos and captions to InstaPedia and volunteer editors oversee and improve the content. AUTOMATED IMAGE CREATION In addition to humans, InstaPedia also uses bots to enhance the images and design computer-generated infographics and charts. To circumvent copyright restrictions and increase the availability of images in more conceptual fields in which little concrete imagery exists, InstaPedia's AI algorithms use Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to create new images from scratch. CEO QUOTE " What Twitter is to Wikipedia, Instragram is to InstaPedia. Social media and online encyclopedias are not directly related but their conceptual models of conve...

StartupRealities No 62 BackgroundBillboard is a free stock image library whose photos have unique compositions in the foreground, while a billboard, shop front, signboard or branded packaging is displayed somewhere in the background. The company collects advertising revenue from the companies featured in the background of the photos under an innovative revenue model called #PayPerPlacement. The stock image library encourages free use of its images on blogs, social media and mainstream media and charges advertisers per photo used. CEO QUOTE "If you have an interesting composition in bright colours in the foreground, people who are attracted to this image and want to use it wouldn't really care what is in the background. Yet, the background still gets noticed unconsciously, which allows us to charge advertisers for it. We find GIFs even more popular than static images as several frames of motion or animation can pull a miracle for attracting attention," said Background...