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Adobe’s Future: Copy, Paste, & AI

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

MacBook Pro displaying island

Adobe’s Future

Adobe has to embrace AI and become an even better fast follower in order to survive & thrive in the future.

Every year at its annual launch fest, the Adobe Max, Adobe announces enhancements to its flagship software products. I keep an eye on photography-related offerings — Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. This year’s product enhancements tapped into Adobe’s “artificial intelligence” technology, Adobe Sensei.

The new “Sensei” powered features will allow Adobe’s software to do Photo Restoration that can eliminate scratches and other minor imperfections on old photographs) and Select People, aka detect a person within a photograph, and then create masks specific to their facial skin, body skin, eyebrow, iris, pupil, lips, teeth, mouth, and hair. There is a massive improvement in the ability to make detailed selections of complex objects — say, the hair of an Icelandic horse. The list of features is long and impressive, but the underlying theme — AI is helping automate complex and repetitive tasks. (Read my column in The Spectator, Why we should learn to stop worrying and learn to love AI.)

Easy hand-drawn selections.

I have been using the new software for about ten days. My workflow hasn’t changed — I use the camera to capture the same way as I always have. My use of color (or lack thereof) isn’t very different. What’s different is the ability to select and mask complex objects — a bird or a tree, for example — and then separate (Read more...)

Adobe buying Frame.io in $1.28B deal

by Mary Ann Azevedo

Adobe announced today it is acquiring Frame.io, a video review and collaboration platform used by over a million customers, for $1.275 billion in cash.

Founded in 2014 by post-production company owner Emery Wells and technologist John Traver, New York-based Frame.io was created to solve the workflows challenges filmmakers faced in their daily lives. 

Today, the Frame.io platform helps creative professionals streamline the video creation process by centralizing media assets, including dailies, scripts, storyboards, work-in-progress, and more, while also allowing for frame-accurate feedback and comments, annotations, and real-time approvals. The company additionally touts faster upload speeds than other cloud hosting services, like Vimeo, Box, Dropbox, and others.

Frame.io has raised $90 million in venture funding over its lifetime, and in November 2019, announced a $50 million Series C led by Insight Partners that included participation from Accel, FirstMark, SignalFire, and Shasta Ventures. Accel led the company’s seed and Series A rounds in 2015.

Cloud video collaboration platform Frame.io raises $50 million, heads to Hollywood

Adobe said the combination of its creative software, including Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing products, and Frame.io’s review and approval functionality would “deliver a collaboration platform that powers the video editing process.” The Frame.io web platform was designed to be a part of its customer’s existing processes, by integrating with non-linear editing systems (NLEs) such as like Adobe Premiere Pro. Such integrations allow editors to upload directly to Frame.io, then organize and share their products both internally and with external clients.

“Whether it’s the (Read more...)

15 years on Twitter

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

“Tweek,” is an aggregation of the tweets I sent out during the week. It is a habit I picked up from Disquiet, a blog run by Marc Weidenbaum. It allows me to remember what I was thinking about during this specific time. It also allows me to correct my grammar and spelling. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, this is just the best of what I have shared with my community.) 

July 14: Well, in terms of product wishlists, my @Photoshop wish list would include a way to boost the ludicrous 2 GB file size limit. It made sense when the cameras had puny sensors. Now five curves + enhanced DNG is enough to zoom past 2 GB. And while we are at it, when will the Visual AI community develop a way to figure out the “sensor dust” problem and solve it by removing dust spots. That alone is worth $10-a-month in time saved. Upsizing of files isn’t that much of a necessity, as is “dust spot removal.”

July 14: Nothing except they are paying attention to those who are speaking to the fact that it was a terrible design decision, and they rectified fast. It is a good thing to see in a company. (My tweet was in response to a tweet from Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman’s comment about Apple tweaking the Safari look-and-feel after massive blowback from the developers.) 

July 14: This is old in terms of the Internet age. It was (Read more...)

Wayflyer raises $76M to provide ‘revenue-based’ financing to e-commerce merchants

by Mary Ann Azevedo

Wayflyer, a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce merchants, has raised $76 million in a Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital.

“Partners” of DST Global, QED Investors, Speedinvest and Zinal Growth — the family office of Guillaume Pousaz (founder of Checkout.com) — also put money in the round. The raise comes just after Wayflyer raised $100 million in debt funding to support its cash advance product, and 14 months after the Dublin, Ireland-based startup launched its first product.

With an e-commerce boom fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, Wayflyer is the latest in a group of startups focused on the space that has attracted investor interest as of late. The company aims to help e-commerce merchants “unlock growth” by giving them access to working capital (from $10,000 up to $20 million) so they can improve cash flow and drive sales. For example, more cash can help these merchants do things like buy more inventory in bulk so they can meet customer demand and save money. 

In a nutshell, Wayflyer uses analytics and sends merchants cash to make inventory purchases or investments in their business. Those merchants then repay Wayflyer using a percentage of their revenue until the money is paid back (plus a fee charged for the cash advance). So essentially, the merchants are using their revenue to get financing, hence the term revenue-based financing. The advantage, Wayflyer says, is that companies make repayments as a percentage of their sales. So if they have a slow month, (Read more...)

What Adobe isn’t telling you about Photoshop for M1 Macs

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

MacBook Pro
Photo by Mikaela Shannon on Unsplash

From the day I first laid eyes on the M1-based Apple’s MacBook Pro, I have been a massive fan of the machine. It is fast. It is powerful. It runs cool. And most importantly, it has excellent battery life. It will be a huge boost for desktop computing, which remains stuck in the past when it comes to applications. And one of those applications from the past I absolutely can’t live without is Adobe’s Photoshop. 

Barring minor adjustments to fix the vagaries of the lenses, I don’t use Lightroom. I was an early convert to the cloud variant of the Adobe Lightroom photo library tool. It offered easy access to all my digital negatives and edited files anywhere, anytime. It didn’t have the bells and whistles of its desktop-based big brother — and since I didn’t need them, I don’t miss them. 

I prefer Photoshop for everything. I like the layer-based approach to editing photos. It gives me much better (and granular) control over my edits. Photoshop was the solitary reason I owned an iMac Pro and a MacBook Pro. My models were packed with memory and top-of-the-line graphic processors, and as a result, I could breeze through my photo edits. 

With Apple ready to switch to its silicon, I decided it was time to sell those machines. What made my decision easier was that Adobe’s Photoshop Beta was spectacularly fast. Even the Intel-based Photoshop performed well on the 13-inch MacBook Pro (Read more...)

Nobl9 raises $21M Series B for its SLO management platform

by Frederic Lardinois

SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the overall goals a team must hit to meet the promises of its SLA agreements, and SLIs being the actual measurements that back up those other two numbers. With the advent of DevOps, these ideas, which are typically part of a company’s overall Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) efforts, are becoming more mainstream, but putting them into practice isn’t always straightforward.

Nobl9 aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build SLO-centric operations and the right feedback loops inside an organization to help it hit its SLOs without making too many trade-offs between the cost of engineering, feature development and reliability.

The company today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by its Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. In addition, Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures also participated, together with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures.

Before starting Nobl9, co-founders Marcin Kurc (CEO) and Brian Singer (CPO) spent time together at Orbitera, where Singer was the co-founder and COO and Kurc the CEO, and then at Google Cloud, after it acquired Orbitera in 2016. In the process, the team got to work (Read more...)