Anyone who has worked on images knows the titan - Adobe Photoshop
Used by experts, pranksters and hobbyists, Photoshop gives you immense control.
You can darken or lighten complexions, change backgrounds, introduce fresh objects and do much more.
The photo 'retouching' that used to happen in studios decades ago had skilled artists physically restore old prints and faded photographs.
Studio artists now use Photoshop or GIMP if the business is oriented towards open source and does not want to pay for expensive licenses.
Of late, there's a trend of one single feature in Photoshop becoming a plugin or a product all by itself.
RemoveBG, for example, removes the background that people have been photographed against and a new background can be added. That's it. One of the problems with removing backgrounds was cutting out the irregular edges around hair. That used to take a long time in the early versions of Photoshop.
Now, it's just a single click.
Cleanup has launched recently - the promise is that it will remove objects, people, text or defects from pictures.
Instagram started a billion dollar business with nothing more than fancy filters to be applied to digital photographs - and that was enough to get millions of people hooked.
It's quite an evolution - from black and white to color to digital to transformation of images. Then, the setting up of companies that simply store and transmit images for ecommerce sites, like Imagekit. They serve over a billion images a month.
This was a change few saw coming - and how it will evolve is anyone's guess.
Update: The speed with which AI is changing these short-lived business models is to be seen to be believed in 2023
Photo Courtesy: Reynier Carl on Unsplash
In business, nothing is a 'sure thing'
You can have a great track record.
And be a stock market favourite without a pause for years.
Spend months on projections that play out elaborate scenarios.
And then, find that things don't go according to plan, or even close to what was predicted.
Zillow is a well-known listings site for homes in the US.
And they had built enough market credibility for a plan that seemed simple on the face of it.
Buy homes available on the market using AI to determine the best options, make the necessary improvements and sell it for a sizeable profit.
It has been done by smaller operators who could manage a few homes a year and they earned much more than a commission on broking.
So far, so good.
They raised a war chest of $450 million from hugely interested investors.
There were even articles in the media that Zillow would drive up prices for everyone with this move. Like brokers slowly but surely kept prices going up in the high demand neighborhoods.
The company moved aggressively ahead and bought up available homes across the country in a massive spree that lasted for months.
Then, all of a sudden came the announcement that Zillow had paused purchases. A few days later, that they were letting over 2000 people go.
And they're writing down purchases of over $300 million.
What just happened?
In a market where the demand for houses goes through cycles, Zillow found that managing everything from buying to refurbishing to selling took a lot longer than estimated.
On a small scale, it looked like a massive business waiting to be tapped.
But then, the gap became too hard to bridge during the pandemic. The 'sure thing' became the impossible.
Telegram tries old style advertising targeting on its channels.
Even the holdouts seem to have switched gears.
Telegram is now open to brands advertising on specific channels with over a 1000 members.
But they don't allow external links or tracking.
So how does it work? In the good old way, by contextual targeting of the channel and ads limited to 160 characters.
That is a hard to sell proposition.
It's not enough to get through to 18–25-year-olds. You need to be able to target 18–25-year-old profiles who play a certain set of games, visit Starbucks twice or thrice a day and live in a particular geographical area - just saying. It is a lot more granular than that.
Facebook has spoiled the game for general purpose advertising where the audience is loosely defined and served.
Apple put the brakes on them by preaching privacy. But going back to advertisers spending money hoping for a connect with a small percentage of viewers is over.
And digital platforms only have themselves to blame for having defined audience segments so narrowly. They're stuck in a groove that gets deeper by the day.
Telegram has also raised the entry level for brands by setting $ 2,000,000 as the minimal spend per year. And if advertisers don't spend the money in the time contracted, they don't get a refund - at least that is what one of the comments states.
The attraction, of course, is that base of over 500 million active users. But clients who spend millions of dollars are a lot more demanding.
Telegram may have to climb down from a high horse to make this work.
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