 Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Saakyan. We are still on site at COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software for our second annual partnership with them. We are now speaking to Hans Hartman. Hello. All right. How are you? Thanks for coming on to the show. All right. Pleasure. Really appreciate it. I'm very excited to be talking about all things photography, video, collaboration, innovation in this space and the future of it. It was really cool when I learned about Hans. Hans has spent the last seven and a half years as the president of Suite 48 Analytics, doing user and market research practice for photo and video industry. Also six and a half years as the chair of Visual First, which is conference promoting innovation and partnership in photo and video ecosystem. And I also was first, when I approached Hans, was just like, why hasn't there been a conference in the photo and video space yet? There's so much innovation and collaboration to come that can come from that. So I'm very glad that you've been producing this. We're going to explain that links in the bio. And we're going to end up getting to that in a little bit. First, Hans, we need to talk about your journey. How did you even get interested in photography and video in the first place? Right. So throughout my career, I've either been involved in electronic publishing or photography. And I guess the very first job was for a Photoshop plug-in startup developer way, way back. So we added sort of painterly creative effects to Photoshop images. Interesting enough, that was already artificial intelligence before it was even called like that. So we called it neural brushes. So you had a very painterly artistic effect that you could apply to your photos. Who are you with this? This was early 90s. So that far ago. And then I've worked for a company called Life Picture, which was an early Photoshop competitor. The CEO at the time was John Scurley after he left Apple. And we did quite a bit of innovations on competing with Photoshop, primarily how to work with very, very large images. In many ways, which you see in Lightroom, non-destructive editing, that kind of stuff you could already do there. We introduced the concept of layers. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. Layers was such a good, important advancement in the field. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine without, you know, world without layers in editing programs. So in any way, so I've worked over and on for software companies, went back into electronic publishing, and then say seven years ago I started this research company. And that was just when smartphone photography became real. So around the time you had the iPhone 4, which was just about the right quality of camera that people felt. Hey, you know what, if I take a photo with my iPhone, it's actually worth sharing. In particular, initially, you know, the photos were so-so, but then they used, you know, a filter app, like Hipstimatic was their first one, and then very soon after that, Instagram, so you did like a pastel kind of tint to your images, and it looked like artwork and it was worth sharing. And of course as the iPhone, and then later the Android phones became better in their photo capture capabilities, the filters were less essential in order to make it worth sharing. But so around that time there was a lot of disruption, and that has, you know, sort of the mobile photography. And that has been going on and is in different versions still going on. It's really disrupting how people take photos, how they share photos, how they enhance the photos, how they create products, you know, photo products and order that from your phone. So there's a lot of disruption going on and it has been going on in a very short time frame. Yes, I want to ask you a bunch of different things. One of the things I want to ask you is that it was so interesting learning about photography being 200 years old. And when first looking at these photographs that were taken, just the crazy amount of work that had to go into even just one photograph being captured, and now the digital photos that we take everywhere, all the time that they're stored. Like you said, now they have to be enhanced less because as the exponential technology has gotten better and cheaper, the lenses have gotten better, the processing has gotten better, now the camera, the photos are more easily able to be uploaded and like you're explaining with the software, all of the different techniques and strategies. Tell us about this kind of like this big history perspective on how you've seen the last 30 years, you were kind of indicating it, but really give us that long perspective. Okay, depending how old the audience is and how long they've been following this, but if you are relatively new, if you've been born and raised in the digital era, it's almost hard to imagine how film photography worked. And the most important thing there is, after you took a photo with the film camera, you couldn't view your photo. So you had to buy, well, you should have bought a film to begin with, otherwise it wasn't a photo, but you needed a film developed, then you need to be printed and only then did you see how that photo turned out. And that was obviously a cash cow for companies like Kodak and Agfa. So in those days, people were very selective in when to take a photo because every photo you took cost money. Now it's free and basically hard disk space is almost free. Cloud storage space is so cheap, it's almost virtually free. So we're living now in an era of abundance and abundance photography, which is fascinating, that whole change. I think another thing, but there's more from an industry perspective, that's interesting in that longer view of where things came from and where they're heading is that sort of before 1990, all the innovations in the world of photography were done by imaging vendors themselves. So they invented, you know, the basically film, then you got flexible film, 35mm, then at some point you could shoot in color. There were very popular cameras like the Hipstimatic or the Instimatic from Kodak. But all these inventions and all these changes that they accomplished came from within the imaging industry and around 1990, and that's sort of when I started doodling in this space, the imaging industry adapted and was changed rather quickly and a lot of disruption going on, but the innovations came from outside the imaging industry. So it was no longer the Kodaks and the Agfars and the cannons or the Nikons that changed things. They adapted to changes outside the industry and the very first one was basically a program like Photoshop coming to the world. So certainly you could enhance these digital photos in many ways and what was even more important with Photoshop is you could also do your color separations. So if you wanted to go to a real print job, not digital print but the CMYK print, you could separate your colors in a program like Photoshop. So there was a beginning of the desktop revolution but it had a tremendous impact on the imaging industry. So that was one major change. Then you had other various changes over time. We already mentioned the smartphone, which has just unbelievably, has been unbelievably destructive and disruptive, I would say. And democratizing? Democratizing everybody could afford having a camera and everybody actually has a camera in their pocket at all times. That's almost as fundamental change as what I said earlier. You no longer had to pay for every photo you take and you can immediately see it having a camera in your pocket. No matter where you are, what kind of gathering, at least in the Western world and big chunks of the non-Western world, almost everybody has a camera in their pocket. And hence people take photos like there's no tomorrow, in that sense. So that was a change. The smartphone and the phone industry basically made changes. Then you've seen things like AI that also came outside of the imaging industry, mostly in the academic world and now certainly, even though you might take thousands and thousands of photos, you have AI to auto-classify or auto-tag images so you find the right images through a click of a button, so to say. AI is being used for very smart photo enhancement. So even if you don't quite know how to put the settings in or how to change single photoshop, there are quite a few very innovative applications out there based on the AI, so the click of a button, I have a beautiful photo. So there's a lot of changes, a lot of disruption. The internet, it also seems like a token, but the fact that you can share your photo with the entire world and that all the major communication networks, I mean the Facebook, the Instagrams of the world, Twitter, all of them have a lot of photo tools built in. And again, that was also a change that was not in the imaging industry but has had a big impact on the imaging industry. So lots of things have happened and are still happening. In particular, I mean here at the conference, the speech I will be holding later, the three areas I want to zoom in on is this AI in many different use cases, AR. And so that's also a very fundamental crazy thing that the smartphone camera is now becoming the most important AR viewing device. I mean initially people when the AR came out, it's going to be goggles and that's all too cumbersome. Now it's, you know, you pick up your smartphone, you look at something, you get shopping information or you can visualize what an IKEA chair will look in your own living room, you should just look at your living room like that. So that's yet a thing that's really at the beginning of a lot of change that these smartphones are becoming the viewing device for AR. And then the very latest that I'm very fascinated by is as recent as, what is it, four or five weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, certainly were three, four very high-end smartphones with really beautiful cameras, expensive also, but they all now have also a time-of-flight depth center in the back of the cameras. And we already know a little bit with the iPhone X and XS where they also have a depth sensor on the front of the camera so you can have really fancy, nice-looking AR effects on your face. Now you get all these high-end cameras and they can measure the depth and then the placement of any sort of artificial object in your environment that you, the real environment that you're viewing through your phone is very, very precise. So AR will get a tremendous bump once these high-end smartphones are actually coming to market. Yeah, the history you just walked us through so cool that just having to, going from not being able to see the photo after you first staked it, having to go get it developed, all the way to, yeah, Kodak collapsing because it's not unable to innovate and there's so many reasons now that there are these R&D departments at the company so they can stay innovative rather than fall and then all the way to the democratization of the photos and now the application of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, depth sensing is so fascinating. One of the things that is starting to maybe make more sense to me now is that when biology developed vision capabilities it was a massive evolutionary step and then when we then developed a second vision capability that was so democratized, our ability to just take photos and store that for free basically, video store that for free basically, that is now just very recent in our ability to capture everything moment like that and now we're adding these cameras to robots and to all of the automation technologies and AI that exist and all the sensors and all of the Internet of Things era and so now the cameras have gotten so good with the depth sensing and everything and we're slapping them on top of all the robots so this is, it's a revolution of perception for the digital space as well. And that last element of, we call it internally we call it heuristic imaging so the fact that if a camera or a system understands what's in that image you can build certain rules to immediately act upon instead of it going to a human and says okay, somebody who looks like grandma is crossing the street in my car, I better slow down that kind of heuristic algorithms can be made as self-driving cars but there's a lot of AI based visual implementations in robotic engineering, etc. You have all these sensors and you have computing I mean that's the other element to it it's not just that the cameras are getting better but you have, the cameras are in a device that is so computing wise, so powerful I mean it's the same as most computers were two, three, four years ago, if not better already so these are power beasts in terms of being able to compute all kind of things and apply algorithms and even learn on the fly so everything is happening in real time now because that device can handle that and it can talk to internet of things kind of devices whatever, you know, you see somebody in front of your house or the camera, you, the camera sees something in front of your house and sends you a text like it seems like grandma is coming by or whatever, I mean there's so much you can do Yeah, in the application of both image and video classifying for the purposes of doing things as simple as just like Google images and being able to just click on an image on a person's face this is probably a good time to then ask you about Suite 48 because now it's been seven and a half years of you building this out and doing all the video and photo research on industry analytics so teach us about what that's been like You know what's interesting, so we have an annual conference and until last year we called it Mobile Photo Connect it's a mouthful but you know we were a startup and we didn't want to build our own brands so we thought why don't we describe in the name of the conference what this is all about so we had the word mobile in there and we had the word photo in there and connect, I think that's still an applicable term but both other terms mobile and photo we as an industry have already moved beyond that so mobile is almost no matter what you do mobile is part of anything like in the first internet era people call themselves we are an internet company well everybody should be at least an internet company otherwise they're probably out of business so everybody has an internet strategy and that's the same with mobile now so the word mobile we took out of the name of the conference and then the second thing was photos which is also interesting because you don't have just photos obviously video and video is growing pretty rapidly also being made easier in particular with the video editing and being able to handle large files blah blah blah so video is important but then you have this whole range of what we called Fodio, P-H-O-D-O between photos and videos I mean you have the Instagram boomerang animated gifs I mean you name it there are a lot of formats that are in between because that seems to be something that really attracts at least certain segments and certain demographics that needs to be super short needs to be a little bit cooler than just a photo so you have all the photos so anyway so we got rid of the term mobile we got rid of the term photo mobile was a given and now the conference called visual first which goes back into the philosophy that so much communication now even in a Twitter or a WhatsApp in messaging apps or in an Instagram the communication starts with a visual and that's why all these social networks and messaging apps have a big camera button right there so you instead of you send a text and say oh by the way why don't you illustrate it with a photo and add a photo to it which you can still do but that was sort of in the past how people do it now often communication starts with a photo or a video and you might add a text to it I can send you a quick 10 second video through the message platform and you can get a significantly more data from that of how I feel emotionally through my face facial expressions you have sound so you can have a voice or whatever music that illustrates your point better so in an era where everybody is bombarded with text and information having something that is by its nature visual and even visual with movements or with sound a lot of people gravitate towards that kind of communication so it's really a visual first era that we're moving in now that the phones are better and the connections are better 5G is around the corner and it's like completely instantaneous whatever you want to share I like the transition to visual first that's good because you're right that even the show for example is through video format as well as through audio format for those that are just listening and not only that way are we going across more platforms and impacting potentially inspiring more people but at the same time those that want the sound along with the visual the emotional cues all that kind of stuff can get it through that way so you have the visual first then what does it look like to do Hans and Alan turn into three-dimensional holograms within the augmented reality sphere is that like a next visual second is that the next could be I think we talk about a bunch of really disruptive, very drastic changes already I think this whole notion that very soon no matter what you look at around you you could have it's almost like you have a website that flows along with what you're seeing so you have extra information I might look at you and I know that often with technology innovations the first generation isn't quite right and people are never going to work like Google Glass or something cooler, easier, less disruptive in the sense of distracting to people but if I can look at you I've never met you before and somewhere in the corner of my eye I can see you there's a face identification look it up, LinkedIn or I met you at some conference I forgot when and where and immediately I'm just looking at you oh, yeah, this conference at this date oh yeah, that's the guy or he's looking for a job that's what LinkedIn is so the fact that you can sort of look around you and there is this extra layer of information or it could also be fun boring, it could be creative not necessarily I want to learn but I can enjoy myself I think AR it's still going to struggle around the form factor holding ad hoc a smartphone that's not ideal certainly it's not I mean you still have to hold it you cannot drive at the same time glasses are still a little strange yeah, the goggles in particular are still that's really a big step because you're really sort of removing yourself contact lenses are potential that could be one there's a company called Wayray that does a very interesting thing by being able to project it on cars, window screens and then the driver will see some information of what is in front of the car also warnings if a car is too close to them and then the passenger may actually see some other stuff like hey what to do, where to shop music is over here you don't want to distract the driver from that stuff so using screens I think screens are sort of an underused way of doing AR but there's still a lot of startups and established companies are trying to figure out what is the right device but as innovation often goes it's not quite perfect and it's sort of a lame first attempt people say it's not perfect but it's good enough maybe we all said that I've had some discussions with my colleagues from Germany in the past when MP3 came out as an audiophile for war there is compression in it but I can hear the difference and whether they really could hear it I doubt it but often good enough goes a long way if it's easy, if it's cheap if it can get to 8 billion people like that so you know smartphone AR I think has definitely a future but having something in the window of your house you look outside to your yard and you see a bird whatever you don't even have to hold something in front of you that's a big part of the future is making the most frictionless ways to get the information and the least clunky ways, the most beautiful ways, these are very important pillars of the way we design our future technology Hans I want to ask you our sort of trek with memetics, with memes it used to be a very, very hard thing to get a letter across the country and then it became okay, it's not so hard you can send an email across the country and now it's the person that has the millions and millions of followers or subscribers or whatever can launch off these messages to millions of people around the world in just flash so that sort of memetic dissemination trajectory teaches about the importance of that in this visual first realm well, ultimately it's about the content so what is that person trying to convey but given that if a message is visual, it applies to how people perceive information, so a visual first of all it's better notice advertisers have known that forever but something with visuals in it, photos and even more so video it is being noticed it's also better remembered than just text based information and like I said earlier we already overloaded with information, so it's better remembered and there's also statistics that if you get something with a visual in it, you're way more likely to share it on Twitter or other format so that's just the nature of and the power of visuals so that in combination with somebody having something useful to say I mean that that becomes a very powerful and to some extent a viral thing that lots of people pick up on that but ideally to you know to be successful as a communicator to a large audience you need to have elements of all of those but being visual is almost obligatory unless you have like a really cute text only I guess if you're the president of the United States your tweets are being noticed if it's text only but everybody else better be visual and attractive yeah it's interesting how much more data can be can be passed along to others with a with a video component to it but you're right then depending on the level of prominence is also a another thing if you have lots of clout you can deliver just a text message that gets to lots of people which is can you even have typos in it and he manages to do that too that is interesting now what is the with what you're doing with Suite 48 and with Visual First you've been giving us some of the ways that you've been analyzing but what is one's process like you and your teams how do you analyze especially the these new generations because when you grew up with technology is different than when I grew up with technology which is different than when a 10 year old is growing up right now with their technology you've never not had technology like the smart phone and the laptops and stuff so yeah so how do you analyze the different visual arts as well as the generations it sort of depends what kind of research we are doing some research is really focused on particular solution areas or particular markets like right now we're doing a big study around the gig photography enablers what I mean with gig photography somebody sort of makes a buck on the side because they're like taking photos or editing photos you don't need to be a photographer but there's a lot of enabling services now that if you say like you're an Uber driver or listen as an Uber driver I have a couple of hours Thursday afternoon like to make some extra money they can be engaged to do a photo shoot somewhere it could be a school or it could be whatever sports event or sometimes even like real estate photos so anyway that's a study we're doing now but they're focused not so much on the gig photography him or herself in this case I just want to have a good understanding of what kind of innovative Uber like solutions are out now so that's basically a matter of talking with a lot of vendors in that space and a lot of these service providers and try to understand how they're differing how they're different what kind of problems they tackle or not so that's more of a qualitative study like literally having a pool of photographers or videographers in a city like San Francisco that are on the platform that potentially get a ping when the little wedding event pops up and the ones that are available Tuesday afternoon can go out and capture that that's an example of a service so in that case I'll talk with a service provider the example comes to mind that you describe as a company called Sweet Escape interesting enough they are based in Indonesia that's where they started they have 2,000 photographers all over the world also major cities in the US and that's exactly how it works they have a birthday event coming up actually that's what the founder said when I interviewed him the founder said many startups first try to solve their own problems but he's really a photographer or has always been a photographer and always into it but if he goes to the whole birthday event he's never in the photos himself so I say I want to have an easy way for this event that I normally take the photos with I try to participate and also be in the photos so he founded this company but anyway going back to your earlier question how do you research it in this case I interview a lot of the service providers or app developers and try to get a good sense of what they're doing and their vision about the market with other studies and do surveys and get a quantitative idea we haven't done it yet for gig photographers but that could be one and then we have survey questions sometimes the end user research is done through focus groups which is a way smaller group of people you interview but more in depth so depending a little bit on the topics and the questions we try to get out of it it's either quantitative to end users or qualitative to end users and if it's more the providers the developers then it's usually interviewing a lot of people and get some sense of what's going on and then I love the I love the idea of interviewing obviously you're good at it thank you and I'm sure then you have as well become very good because when you're trying to go in and talk to the different like the cutting edge of the fields gig economy around photo and video and doing the interviews then you're understanding what different niches are being filled across the world in these fields and then this follow up question is when you're looking at all of the data that you've taken and around okay they're filling this niche this one's going really broad this one's going into a niche these different ways of approaching it what do you do with that analysis? do you then teach that to industry, to research and development firms? most often the direct what a couple of things actually but most of the direct result of doing all that research around a certain question like in this case a gig photography most often that results in a research report and that's what we sell so that's our way of monetizing knowledge a lot of other sort of ongoing or ad hoc knowledge about what's going on in the industry goes into our free newsletter which in the end it usually it leads to something either people end up being or buying a report or they end up attending our conference but that's more it's a bi-weekly newsletter where we sort of look at different trends in the industry and news there and then another way that we monetize the knowledge is often that we then have panels around certain topics at our own conference so we've had really early on when AI just came out of the academic world and got into image recognition and vision we had panels we had a panel very early on with the first image recognition vendors and one of them is actually now what is Amazon recognition recognition with the K so they were acquired by Amazon yeah so we've covered a lot of topics also and have had panel discussions around topics that we also did research on so we could push it a little bigger or a little deeper in our Q&A at the conference so people can sign up for the newsletter for free they can purchase the reports that you provide and then the conference visual first happens in Oakland it's actually in San Francisco in the Presidio very nice old offices building correct Presidio is so gorgeous, so annual it's October 3rd and 4th October 3rd and 4th and then now give us these themes putting together both I'm interested to see if these are similar when you're putting together the reports and when you're putting together the panels at visual first are these similar themes like you said the gig photography what are some of the themes? some of them are so with gig photography because that's a big study right now I'm almost sure we'll have a panel around that and other panels we haven't done specific in depth research on how it's on everybody's mind in that ecosystem of imaging vendors like for instance a topic because quite a few of the imaging vendors are in the photo print space whatever a snap face or a shot of fly these kind of guys often there is a topic around how can you monetize photo engagement by adding a print button in an app that might not have been on people's mind like hey I'm going into the app to order print but if it's an easy sort of suggestion why don't you order a wall decor product of that photo so that's a topic if the user experience was a little bit more frictionless that if there was a prediction of oh this is maybe the first time you've taken this photo with your family in this beautiful area of a new place maybe you want to order one for the home in a print exactly and that requires quite a bit of you know education also to an industry that has always done it in certain ways and in certain ways they're still doing it similar to before the smartphone era like hey collect all your photos come to my app download an app so you're already committed to doing something and the problem with that for these vendors is if people are really saying okay I want a photo book of 32 pages if you then sort of come into the picture as a vendor then people start doing price comparisons also and in that particular part of the photo industry there's a lot of discounting and order now so then you're in you know in a competitive bidding thing and prices go down but you know like one of the companies that have also showed this solution at our conference they built a solution that hey you know what in January if you want to have all your photos that you have shared on Facebook in a photo book literally you do it on your smartphone it's a click click click and you have a whole photo book laid out all the duplicates are automatically removed so if you market that on Facebook people are not because it's a pretty unique solution maybe there's one or two other ones out in the world they're not going to do price shopping right so they say okay well cool then I have my whole life in a book for those who care about that you'd be surprised how many still care about it and are willing to pay money for and other ones other fields you have panel ideas these types of areas yeah and it's a good question so sometimes it's the direct result of research and my partner we have a lot of ideas about based on that research what should be done or should not be done other things are sort of emerging and then it's actually also interesting to put a panel together so right now I'm very intrigued by these latest smartphones that have depth sensors on the back companies like Niantic have both the Poke Pokemon Go sure they can have a way better AR experience maybe it has particular implications for shopping I don't know yet so that's interesting to maybe have a couple of camera vendors and a couple of app developers like are you really going to use these depth sensors now because they're not quite clear I've spoken with enough developers like what's that going to be but potentially if it is as impactful as the iPhone 10 was with the front-facing depth sensor it could it could be very interesting so having people to maybe where you need to be in the museum or in the grocery store with the depth sensing yeah or like the IKEA app I put my furniture here but it's really precisely located instead of sometimes it's really almost a realistic object it cannot quite be in the plant box but it needs to be in front of the plant box if you have a depth sensor you avoid that kind of artifacts so that's the minimum of what I can imagine but I bet you there are a lot of innovative app developers who are thinking this through now and also on the camera side the biggest ones with depth sensors are Samsung and Huawei I've already had some conversation with them and you know it's all not that crystal clear so that's an interesting panel to see what the impact will be and having those people and have a conversation in the audience about that topic yes yes what is this next you know if we ended up doing this transition from in many ways of photography to a video photography does it seem like it's going towards a sort of an augmented depth reality of sorts that that's kind of the next and I just I hope that there's a lot of I hope that we do things like guide young people and adults towards like knowledge we guide people towards science you know guide people towards world peace right these types of things and not towards conspicuous consumption and all these other kind of crappy things that are in many ways just ruining a human experience so tell us about what you think that I said and people start eating organic and all that stuff well that's a very difficult question any technology can be used in many different ways and almost any technology can be used for the better or the worse as you know with AI in general not necessarily in the imaging world but you know AI can solve really world problems in a big way and make whatever I mean you talk about the environment AI can use resources way smarter all of that is all good but there are also discussions with particularly the big five tech companies where employees are actually writing to the CEO you know it's now used by the Department of Defense or it's going to be used in missiles and you know that's all very hard to tell beforehand and that's almost with any you know face recognition is great because I can take better photos because the camera understands there's a photo in it and it automatically applies to settings face recognition can also be used in cameras that the government or a government in particular China I hear a lot about and you're being recorded all the time and every step is in a government database and that you know but that has always been like that right I mean all innovations even before digital computing it could go in different ways so I think the best you can do is be alert about certain you know ways that people are using the technologies unfortunately I think once technology has really been invented the genie doesn't go back in the bottle I mean that's that's I think the that's not going to help and it's not going to work either so you need to think more about yeah who do you sell this to and who are you not willing to sell this to or regulations I think what Silicon Valley more recently around AI has learned that and privacy and security all these debates is Silicon Valley in a way has been a little arrogant in thinking or we can self regulate ourselves but we're all driven by greed and making money so that's not going to work either but you need to have a government who actually cares about the right issues who would regulate instead the ethical evolving of humanity to the point where it becomes easier to deal with some of the pressing challenges that we're facing is something that we frequently discuss on the show I want your perspective on a crazy industry deep fakes so what do we what do you see what do we think is best to do when it's indistinguishable if the president of a country actually sent out that video or not or if it's completely digitally synthesized there are even images that are completely artificial and they look like a regular there was some forgot which university the research project on that well that's actually you asked earlier what are potential topics at the conference if it's not clearly based on a research project that's another topic I'm toy to really have there like we have some interesting people to potentially recommend I'd love to hear about it yeah I don't know it will be a combination of I think the trick is probably to incentivize developers or technology companies to tackle that problem because it's not obvious that's a problem they can make money from and unfortunately that seems how it works people go they develop technologies because they think there's a market for it very few just choose the topic and the problem out of the goodness of their heart so but if there is some setting that it really makes sense for them to identify deep fakes I wouldn't be surprised that there are ways of really tackling it I do know that you know blockchain is actually interesting as a solution for when one photo is identified player A sells to player B that can be totally verified that there was no middleman and nothing has changed but the problem is more that photo A and the owner of that is that was that already a good photo or the original photo to begin with or not so blockchain could be part of the solution but it could be other AI based solutions all the way at the beginning that you do some kind of pixel analysis this has to be an artificially altered photo I don't know or maybe it may only have to be trusted if it comes from the source from the person's account so nobody could post some video of ONS only you could post videos yourself and that would be the only trusted and that's relatively easy nothing is easy but I think if it comes from a trusted source then I think blockchain has a lot of potential to authenticate the origin of the photo and make sure that in that transaction nothing weird is going on there and we are also really at the beginning of using blockchain in the imaging industry so that's another potentially disruptive thing that happened and it's also a great idea to get people paid along the way as you have this decentralized digital ledger that people can get paid along the way for making the contributions to the image or to the video in a very accountable and transparent way another thought that I think to ask you about is the future of images and video with drones yes this is another probably interesting field we've seen some crazy good drone videography of capturing rhinos stampeding through the savannas this is the best rhino we've been it was crazy I had to get on all fours to give you the real actually it was two years ago at our conference at that time it was at the end of October we've done a little earlier this year or we're going to do a little earlier but that was literally maybe ten days after these enormously destructive fires in the wine country it was not last year before and I don't know if you've seen it but there was a drone photographer who went there and he shot photos from high above, this was in Santa Rosa where completely destruction but here there was still a house there so he shot with his drone a total moon-like landscape and then there was a postal worker in his little truck who went then to the very few mailboxes that were still standing and he was finishing his route the videographer he went all over the place in terms of national media so we were very pleased there was a local guy to have him at the conference talk about the power of videography in this case it's another fascinating area how powerful they can be when I saw the first time I broke up he also has very beautiful music around there it's a combination of the visuals and this poor postal office worker who did something that was totally useless but that's what you had to do anyway there was a pleasure hearing them from the videographer but motivating him going there he could have licensed that video to a getty or one of the stock photo for a lot of money but he just wanted it out there because he thought it was a personal story to share that's interesting when the creators can make a decision if they want to publish on their own platforms or license out to others then the whole creative commons things very interesting our videos are creative commons so people can take the videos and do talks over them or repurpose them on their channels the whole purpose is for the content to get out as far as possible for educational purposes to not be pay walled so then a global spiritual awakening that we feel when we see photos of earth from space from the ISS from satellites we can map certain parts of the earth and see things like the four station patterns or all different types of Pacific garbage badges or whatever it may be that we're viewing resource extractions there's so many ways of doing this what have you seen in the satellite photography videography I'm following I was going to say it's too far from my home it's too high in the sky and partially because the way we the market is already pretty big as it is and we are ultimately more focused on consumer photo and video use so even drone use actually the biggest drone use is commercial and agriculture commercial I sort of know about it but I'm not following that closely because you don't follow so much you're on the object that 4 billion people have in their pockets that's enough so this is interesting as 8 billion people get the devices then it's a whole new conversation on the global consciousness and then where it goes with maybe a couple billion people getting that augmented reality whatever it ends up going to next any last thoughts about the industry maybe some of the things that you can explain to us a little bit that we didn't get to touch on in this last part would be just on the software side of things how interesting it is to have seen something like layers first enter into the scene and now we have the premiere and the final cuts and we have the really strong light rooms and photo shops that are sketches that are really able to get these gorgeous videos and images out there so maybe tell us a bit on the software side as well yeah I can think of many things that might be of interest but you know in the beginning of this interview we talked about the second job that I had in the U.S. was done with live picture and talked about layers but I think what they did first and I really sort of a theme that is through my thinking about visuals in general is the fact that you could make changes to the photo and they were stored as algorithms so they were not applied yet to the pixels so you could work with very very large files and then in the end you could say okay now render at this resolution or that resolution so the idea of doing things with photos or videos that can still be applied to many different kind of outputs, formats or forms so keep everything in keep all your options open while you're working on things I like that a lot it could end up being only use it as a small resolution on a smartphone or a big screen talk about what's next there also the 8K video is around the corner so you better start shooting at a resolution that once that really takes off it can be also displayed on that 8K video it's like gigantic in terms of the sizes of the files that are applied so that's I guess that's one concept of what I've always found pretty important I think the other thing about this whole industry is it's so interesting to see, I sometimes work with startups like two guys in the Ukraine have a crazy idea, brilliant brilliant engineers and they come out with an app and some of them have done amazingly well and then they are struggling and talking and thinking about technology similar to somebody who's part of the canon or the Nikon or the Fujifilm corporation so you see because a lot of barriers to entry to become a developer and there's so much you know source codes available the computing power is in the sky basically I use AWS or something similar to that so you can as a startup you can be very powerful if you come up with the right idea and the right implementation at the right time which is all very hard to do it all three of that but small companies have been amazingly successful and some of them have gone also well I mean probably our biggest success story I mentioned earlier the company called Orbeus that wasn't acquired by Amazon but we also had a company I liked them a lot and they were actually from the Ukraine they were a little bigger maybe 20 or 30 people at that time but they were the ones the first ones that if you take a selfie you know you can have crazy real-time effects in the video like steam is coming out of your ears or something like that so they showed it to us in our conference in October they were still in beta and then in June Snapchat had bought them for $150 million and that's really what Snapchat lenses was and Snapchat did really really well for the longest time the only way that Snapchat was monetizing it's earlier on which was through these sponsored lenses as they call them they have advertising in other areas of their app so they actually made that money back seemingly quite quite fast anyway I like working with startups and developers who have crazy ideas and this was a thing that just came out at the right time and then Facebook had to scramble and they bought not a company for also a lot of money that did something similar to that because everybody felt these were real time AR effects real time AR effects and so I like that it's crazy how you can't let your competitors get the next edge thing that all the people want to use without you getting and developing it yourself to stay up to pace maybe we need to ask you this as well and just this idea of geopolitical scale do you see any visual you know the big visual differences across countries you gave that example of the company in Indonesia but it's always seemed like Japan is always at the cutting edge of technology and stuff it used to be yeah teach us I think Japan has been associated with traditional digital cameras Canon and Nikon Fujifilm is also headquartered in and these companies in the DSLR mirrorless high-end camera space have you know they've struggled to keep being relevant so I definitely don't think Japan is the power house anymore as it used to be China actually if you talk about it should depends a little bit what area of imaging you're looking at but if you talk about cameras there's a lot of things happening in China with more the cheaper cameras surveillance 360 a lot of 360 vendors including Insta360 which is sort of the largest now with their cameras in areas of image recognition I would say it's Israel and Russia Ukraine a lot of companies came from there or are based there so it varies a little bit poor application area but I I think in general going back to the Japan question I mean I think the high-end traditional digital cameras are still doing quite well there because there's a culture that quality matters more than price and even if quality means that there's a fair amount of learning and manual action required I mean people still do that and it's a little harder here yeah it it depends on the other end of Fujifilm they came out with something that has been a tremendous success first in Japan particularly among teenagers what they call their Instax cameras so they are like the old Polaroid cameras in many ways but it could also be digital and basically you take a photo and you print in real time and lo and behold the people who do that are kids and teenagers because they want to have a physical print to somebody else and like all teenagers if you have kids or grandchildren or whatever people hang photos on the walls but that was actually if I would have that's why I need to particularly I need to be very careful of putting cliches on well these countries develop more these things I would not have thought that a Japanese camera company would come up with something that is digital and retro and is a runaway success with teenagers I would have never thought so and they are runaway success because the Instax printers from Fujifilm they by themselves sell about the same number of units as all mirror or interchangeable cameras meaning the mirrorlers and DSLRs and they sell more than all from all vendors all point and shoot cameras so that was a tremendous success who would have thought that that retro would come back and I think internally they didn't think it would be that big of a success either and you pointed out so you need to be careful with labeling correct and you pointed out Israel is at its own edge Russia is in some ways in Ukraine that there is different pockets of visual technology edges that are across the world okay great this has been super fun super enlightening likewise don't throw my hand I'm really happy to hear that thank you for coming on to the show really appreciate you a lot we greatly appreciate you all for tuning in thank you so much we would love love love to hear your thoughts in the comments below everyone let us know your thoughts in the comments below also let us know about what your thoughts are in terms of just sharing the message around the community around the world get more people talking about what it's like on the camera photography video ages all the things that we discussed check out the links below to Hans's work also check out the links below to Kofes and support the artists and entrepreneurs that you believe in everyone support simulation below as well and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thanks for tuning in and we will see you soon peace