The year was 1994. South Africa held its first fully representative democratic election, Netscape Navigator became the first commercially successful web browser. Coconuts Japan re-released EA Sports' MLBPA Baseball video game under the perhaps surprising title Fighting Baseball. Unlike MLBPA Baseball, which was licensed by the Major League Baseball (MLB), Fighting Baseball could not infringe on MLB trademarks, reference the National League or American League by name, or adopt actual team or player names.
Deep learning, a subset of machine learning, breaks down tasks in ways that make all kinds of machine assists possible. With deep learning, you can identify images by machine, i.e., instead of hand-coding software with specific instructions for a task, you train the machine with large amounts of data and algorithms that enable it to learn how to perform the task.
As a technology company, Cloudinary owes its success to its ability to build solutions that address the most critical challenges you, our customers, face. The companies we serve run the gamut of digital businesses—retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality—which, coincidentally, all care about the same things.
Transforming images with Cloudinary is simple, right? You find the ones you want and add them to your URL, building them up and trying them out until they’re perfect. You can then save the transformations that you created as named transformations for reuse. That final step sounds straightforward, but up until now has been a little tricky. With Cloudinary’s slick and new UI, creating and managing transformations through the Management Console just got even simpler. That UI now includes—
As online interactions multiply exponentially, visual media has become the most significant venue for delivering the benefits of what used to be in-person contacts. With this in mind, companies have completely shifted their digital strategies for consumer experiences, taking a media-first approach in how they interact and engage.
Many Cloudinary users desire a UI for tasks like creating text overlays for images, which they then embed on webpages or download for marketing campaigns. Generating such overlays with the Cloudinary Media Library UI involves a bit of a learning curve, especially if they require multiple fonts or text lines, which even experienced users might find challenging to implement.
You likely find yourself continually editing images for enhancement by eliminating flaws and tweaking the overall presentation, typically with software tools. Examples of basic editing are straightening, cleaning, and cropping images, as well as adjusting the contrast, exposure, and white balance. With advanced software like Cloudinary, you can automate not only editing tasks, such as quality adjustment and encoding, but also delivery.
Overlaying text on images is a versatile and effective way in which to spotlight captions, names, copyright watermarks, and such. You can also overlay text over dynamic images (advertisement banners, coupons, greeting cards, business cards) in e-commerce-oriented emails.
“For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.” (Ted Lowe)
We often laugh about snooker (think billiards if you’ve never heard of snooker) commentaries back in the days of black and white television, but for approximately 300 million people worldwide, the seemingly simple task of distinguishing colors is a daily challenge. Color blindness, or Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), affects roughly one in twelve men, and one in two hundred women. That's over 8% of the population - a significant percentage of your potential customers who may be missing vital information or unable to engage fully with your site. Couple that with increasing legislation promoting accessibility and it's easy to see why you should care about color.
User-generated content (UGC) can take many forms, the two main ones being images and videos. Part 1 of this series explains the basics of UGC and its benefits to e-commerce. Here in part 2, we’ll show you how to take advantage of UGC images in e-commerce and to upload, transform, and deliver them fast and seamlessly with Cloudinary.