Welcome to our new Photogram blog, an assembly of words, podcasts and videos about computational photography and our AI camera for content creators. We’ve started this blog to give you more detailed insight into the inner workings of our startup and the development journey of the Alice Camera as we gear up for our Indiegogo campaign in October 2020.
We’ve been in touch with you in a variety of different ways over the last twelve months. Either we reached out to you last year for an interview, or you were one of the 1000 content creators who completed our TypeForm surveys, or you signed up via our website when we launched earlier this month, or you are one of our advisors. Either way, it’s been a pleasure to share our progress so far and some of you have become early-adopter deposit holders for the Alice Camera, for which we are very grateful!
Our new blog is going to make our engagement a little bit more personal. It is going to be hosted here on Substack and will be sent to your email no more than twice a week. Before jumping in, we’re extremely sorry and apologise if we’ve signed you up by mistake and/or if you’re no longer interested in what we’re doing. If either is the case then you have the option to remove and unsubscribe yourself at the bottom of this post. Otherwise, we really hope that you stay to learn more about our journey.
What to expect from our blog
Through the various conversations that we’ve had with you all, we’ve understood that many of you had become increasing frustrated with the lack of innovation in digital interchangeable lens cameras, especially in terms of convenience, ease of use, image and video streaming, and on-device editing.
Our team of data scientists, engineers, content creators and photographers have been busy working hard to build the Alice Camera and make it a reality. We are reimagining the camera as a computer designed from the ground up for you. Our idea is to pair the optical systems from a DSLR or mirrorless camera together with the connectivity of a smartphone into an innovative new product to address the dire problems that still exist with interchangeable lens cameras.
During our pre-campaign blog series you can expect us to discuss, vent and tussle with some of these frustrations throughout the following set of blog posts:
Why we are building Alice. We've spent the last ten months building a camera more suitable for the next ten years.
What is a photogram? Recollections into why we decided to call our startup Photogram.
The story behind Alice’s name. An intriguing story involving a poet and a DJ.
The quest for the perfect camera. A struggle so profound that it has baffled content creators for over a decade.
The design of Alice. Reimagining the camera as a computer designed with content creators and vloggers in mind.
What are the benefits of Alice? Six features that makes Alice valuable for you.
AI, Photography and Content Creation. The rise of computational photography.
Using AI to autofocus. Delving into the wonders of deep learning.
Do megapixels actually matter? No. No, they don’t.
Vlogging and the future of work. Why now is the perfect time to build Alice.
The benefits of open source. How we plan to use open source for Alice.
The series is going to be written as a story so imagine that every posts is like a chapter in a book. As we go through our series the comments section will be open for your thoughts, and we’ll be open to any suggestions you might have about future topics and blog posts. There’s a couple of things you could do to help our blog series succeed:
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If at any time you think friends or colleagues might be interested in what we are doing then we would really appreciate it if you shared our blog with them 🙏🏽
A brief overview of Photogram
Photogram is a computational photography startup based at the UCL university incubator in London. We are building the Alice Camera, a novel AI camera, in Britain from the ground up for the 40 million income-generating photographers, content creators, filmmakers, influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers who create frequent digital content as part of the passion economy and the future of work.
By combining professional quality optics with AI-accelerated hardware and computational photography algorithms driven by deep learning we are offering content creators an optical device more suited to our new world of image sharing, live streaming and content creation.
We were founded with the mission to empower creatives with technology and we are building our camera for you. But, before wrapping up we’d like to give thanks and credit to our excellent parters who have understood our vision and helped us over the last twelve months:
Entrepreneur First — made it possible for Vishal and Liam to meet.
UCL Innovation and Enterprise — our startup’s home in King’s Cross, London.
Aetha Design — helping us with the design and engineering of Alice.
Digital Catapult —being part of their Machine Intelligence Garage.
NVIDIA — being part of their Inception Programme.
London & Partners — being part of their Business Growth Programme.
Creative Industries Council — choosing us as one of the Createch Ones to Watch 2020.
Our advisors — we won’t list all our advisors by name, but you’ve been very helpful and valuable to us.
Thank you
Thank you for reading our welcome post. We hope that you’re excited to read more about our story and invite your to join us on our journey :)
Photogram Team
Please make sure to like our Twitter or Instagram accounts to get more up-to-date information on our activity. Feel free to connect with our team if you have any questions.
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