LDV Vision Summit explores the digital imaging/video technologies ecosystem for startups, pros and investors

Evan Nisselson

Evan Nisselson (@nisselson on Twitter) is a serial entrepreneur, professional photographer and digital media expert since the early 1990’s. He started making pictures with his Nikon FM at 13 years old, and is still taking pictures, though he’s branched out and completely at home in the digital domain. Going beyond photography, his career took him into the world of investing, where he formed LDV Capital, with a focus on digital imaging/video technologies from ‘Capture to Smile,” and B-B SaaS, especially technology focused projects across the whole imaging/video spectrum from wearable cameras, facial recognition, automagic editing software, visual search, imaging enabled commerce, machine vision, robotic imaging and visual sharing.

Understanding that there is a growing digital imaging/video technologies ecosystem which could provide disruptive opportunities for new talent and startups, in 2014 he held the LDV Vision Summit, the first of its kind to be dedicated to this environment.

The success of the last year’s summit inspired him to do it again this year, which will take place in an expanded 2-day format on May 19th and 20th at the SVA Theatre in New York City, dividing the days into first a Technology Deep Dive on Tuesday the 19 and day two covering Business and Products on May 20th.

There will be more than seventy industry experts, visionaries, investors and entrepreneurs from around the world for attendees to hear, meet, and interact with. The program includes over 40 sessions, 2 competitions and is aimed heavily to promote serious networking. For a detailed agenda, click here.

In an interview with Evan, where I asked him about what to expect this year, and why make it a two day event, he offered that last year’s conference, while being a great success with over 300 attendees and 40 international speakers, the technical presentations might have been “too technical” for the business people in the audience, and, conversely, the business talks might not have been interesting enough to the techies in the room.
This year, by dedicating a day to each, there’s more room for expanded conversations, deeper dives into both of these topic areas, and more networking. And speaking to the networking aspect, this is a different kind of summit, where startups can attend with both recruiting talent and raising capital in mind.

LDV VISION SUMMIT 2014: Investing in Visual Technology Panel

Evan was delighted to tell me that over 9 companies who attended last year raised capital since the last summit, including Magic Leap, $542M, led by Google Ventures; Taboola, $117M, led by Fidelity; Narrative, $8M Series B, led by Khosla Ventures, including True Ventures and LDV Capital; Placemeter, $6M Series A, led by NEA; Neon Labs, $4.1M Series A, led by Mohr Davidow; Mapillary, $1.5M seed, led by Sequoia, including Wellington, Playfair, and LDV Capital; Seen.io, $1.25M seed round from Horizons and KEC; Clarifai, funded by Google, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and LDV Capital; and Aviary, sold to Adobe.

Following the idea of this being a summit where it’s not only the goal of having speakers and panels talk about technology and business, it has been set up to create opportunities for startups to meet investors, get introduced to media that can share their stories, and learn the latest in digital tech to monetize their brands and content.

Who should come? Students, tech professionals and artists with computer vision/visualization expertise or interested in the AI space, for example. Marketing professionals who want to learn about the next major media outlets and what will be the new Hollywood; investors and business executives trying to keep up with the ever expanding ecosystem where brands, content, media, and technology are coming together.

For more details on the event, speaker listings, and a chance to still get early bird tickets (with limited availablity) go to: http://www.ldv.co/visionsummit

VizWorld.com wlll be there as well to capture and report from the event visually through a “GRAPHIC JAM” of graphic recorders using digital tools. We’ll be using tablets and other digital drawing devices to capture and synthesize the proceedings over both days, and you’ll find that here and through other social media channels; follow @vizworld on Twitter for more.

Here are some of the digital graphic recordings made during the GRAPHIC JAM from talks last year: