Technology
Presti uses GenAI to replace expensive photo shoots in the furniture industry
If you’ve ever bought a settee online, have you ever ever considered the houses you see in the background of product photos? When it comes time to launch a brand new collection, furniture brands typically spend a small fortune on photo shoots. It’s a tedious and expensive process, since it’s hard to move furniture around.
That’s why a French startup called PriestFounded in November 2022, uses generative AI to transform a single product image into a practical lifestyle photo. The company just raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by global investment firm Partech, which also includes several angel investors.
“We picked up the phone really quickly and talked to 50 potential users,” Presti co-founder and CEO Nabil Toumi told TechCrunch. “And they all said the same thing. Creating product visuals was a very long process, it cost a lot of money, and they didn’t have a simple solution for creating those images. At the same time, it was really the most important asset for brands to create a unique identity and sell online.”
Presti puts it this manner:
Involved in this:
Initially, Presti didn’t limit its focus to furniture corporations. However, the startup quickly realized that furniture corporations face some particularly difficult problems.
“They had to rent a nice house for the photo shoot, they had to transport the products — so they had high logistics costs. And these photo shoots were planned months in advance and ended up costing them hundreds of thousands, even millions of euros a year,” Toumi said.
At its core, Presti uses Stable Diffusion XL as its base model. It has been trained and modified to perform particularly well for product images in the furniture industry.
At first, the team tried using the regular Stable Diffusion XL. But they quickly realized there have been some issues. “The sofa would have legs added to it, and the back would be distorted,” Toumi said. Similarly, getting the perspective right was difficult. For example, the wall behind the sofa had to be parallel to the sofa.
“At the same time, something that’s really important is the dataset that we trained our model on. We currently have over 75,000 images of ultra-high-quality furniture images in our industry that we can use to train our model to strengthen the learning process for the specific use case, for these types of images,” Toumi said.
Presti didn’t want to stop at generating backgrounds. Customers also can add accessories. For example, if you happen to’re generating product photos for a brand new sofa, you may add pillows. These pillows will forged realistic shadows on the sofa, so that they won’t seem like something added in Photoshop.
Similarly, furniture brands typically have several variations of the same model with different textures and colours. While it’s still a piece in progress, Presti hopes its customers will give you the chance to swap materials using its tool. As a result, it should be much easier for corporations using Presti to release latest products.
On the other hand, freelance photographers won’t like the latest product. And whether the creativity and originality of other expert individuals who might work on a physical shoot, akin to on-location stylists, will be completely replaced by machine-generated backdrops—without the resulting artificial lifestyle images looking a bit the same—is an open query.
Although Presti works mainly with mid-sized furniture corporations, it also has a strategic partnership with Maisons du Monde, one in all the largest furniture retailers in France. In addition to Partech, other investors in the startup include Maxime Brousse, Thibaud Elzière, Julien Hirth, Abou Laraki and Rémi Lemonnier.
Technology
US medical device giant Artivion says hackers stole files during a cybersecurity incident
Artivion, a medical device company that produces implantable tissue for heart and vascular transplants, says its services have been “disrupted” resulting from a cybersecurity incident.
In 8-K filing In an interview with the SEC on Monday, Georgia-based Artivion, formerly CryoLife, said it became aware of a “cybersecurity incident” that involved the “compromise and encryption” of information on November 21. This suggests that the corporate was attacked by ransomware, but Artivion has not yet confirmed the character of the incident and didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s questions. No major ransomware group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Artivion said it took some systems offline in response to the cyberattack, which the corporate said caused “disruptions to certain ordering and shipping processes.”
Artivion, which reported third-quarter revenue of $95.8 million, said it didn’t expect the incident to have a material impact on the corporate’s funds.
Technology
It’s a Raspberry Pi 5 in a keyboard and it’s called Raspberry Pi 500
Manufacturer of single-board computers Raspberry Pi is updating its cute little computer keyboard device with higher specs. Named Raspberry Pi500This successor to the Raspberry Pi 400 is just as powerful as the present Raspberry Pi flagship, the Raspberry Pi 5. It is on the market for purchase now from Raspberry Pi resellers.
The Raspberry Pi 500 is the simplest method to start with the Raspberry Pi because it’s not as intimidating because the Raspberry Pi 5. When you take a look at the Raspberry Pi 500, you do not see any chipsets or PCBs (printed circuit boards). The Raspberry Pi is totally hidden in the familiar housing, the keyboard.
The idea with the Raspberry Pi 500 is you could connect a mouse and a display and you are able to go. If, for instance, you’ve got a relative who uses a very outdated computer with an outdated version of Windows, the Raspberry Pi 500 can easily replace the old PC tower for many computing tasks.
More importantly, this device brings us back to the roots of the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi computers were originally intended for educational applications. Over time, technology enthusiasts and industrial customers began using single-board computers all over the place. (For example, when you’ve ever been to London Heathrow Airport, all of the departures and arrivals boards are there powered by Raspberry Pi.)
Raspberry Pi 500 draws inspiration from the roots of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit organization. It’s the right first computer for college. In some ways, it’s a lot better than a Chromebook or iPad because it’s low cost and highly customizable, which inspires creative pondering.
The Raspberry Pi 500 comes with a 32GB SD card that comes pre-installed with Raspberry Pi OS, a Debian-based Linux distribution. It costs $90, which is a slight ($20) price increase over the Raspberry Pi 400.
Only UK and US keyboard variants will probably be available at launch. But versions with French, German, Italian, Japanese, Nordic and Spanish keyboard layouts will probably be available soon. And when you’re in search of a bundle that features all the things you would like, Raspberry Pi also offers a $120 desktop kit that features the Raspberry Pi 500, a mouse, a 27W USB-C power adapter, and a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable.
In other news, Raspberry Pi has announced one other recent thing: the Raspberry Pi monitor. It is a 15.6-inch 1080p monitor that’s priced at $100. Since there are quite a few 1080p portable monitors available on the market, this launch is not as noteworthy because the Pi 500. However, for die-hard Pi fans, there’s now also a Raspberry Pi-branded monitor option available.
Technology
Apple Vision Pro may add support for PlayStation VR controllers
According to Apple, Apple desires to make its Vision Pro mixed reality device more attractive for gamers and game developers latest report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The Vision Pro was presented more as a productivity and media consumption device than a tool geared toward gamers, due partly to its reliance on visual and hand controls moderately than a separate controller.
However, Apple may need gamers if it desires to expand the Vision Pro’s audience, especially since Gurman reports that lower than half one million units have been sold to this point. As such, the corporate has reportedly been in talks with Sony about adding support for PlayStation VR2 handheld controllers, and has also talked to developers about whether they may support the controllers of their games.
Offering more precise control, Apple may also make other forms of software available in Vision Pro, reminiscent of Final Cut Pro or Adobe Photoshop.
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