San Francisco, CA—At this year’s just-concluded edition of Visual 1st, a panel of high-powered industry experts presented the four Visual 1st Awards to the most outstanding among 30 products competing in this year’s show-and-tell demo sessions. Visual 1st is a conference focused on promoting innovation as well as partnerships in the photo and video ecosystem.
The 2018 Visual 1st Awards winners are:
• Insta360: Best of Show Award
• CaptureLife : Best Business Potential Award
• Embody Digital: Best Technology Award
• Pixsy: Special Recognition Award
Best of Show winner Insta360 offers a broad range of consumer as well as professional 360º and action cameras. Moreover, it provides powerful apps for consumers to easily edit and enhance their footage. 
“We spent over an hour reviewing each of the show-and-tell participants. We probably considered 75% of them for one award or another. However, when it came to the Best of Show Award, the decision was remarkably easy. We each answered the question: which product would we most like to use ourselves? And the answer was unanimous: Insta360,” explained Robert Blumberg, an awards judge.
CaptureLife, the Best Business Potential Award recipient, broadens business opportunities for labs as well as professional photographers. It does so by making available to them a variety of digital and mobile products they can offer their clients, in addition to the traditionally offered printed photo products. 
“When looking at the various entries, CaptureLife stood out because of the complete process they offer for business solution for labs, for photographers and for different businesses in the imaging chain. It was clear to see the business case for generating new revenues in the CaptureLife ecosystem!” said Gary Pageau, awards judge.
Embody Digital, the Best Technology Award application, offers 3D technologies to enable the creation of digital avatars for communication and commerce. This includes games, virtual try-on, virtual reality, social media, AI, bots and also natural language interfaces.
Judge Andy Kelm summarized his take on Embody Digital: “We found that Embody Digital stood out among a very competitive group of technology-oriented entrants. Not only is the Embody technology novel and innovative, but we also found it is extremely timely given the significant interest and investment going into AR and VR. We see a wide range of commercial options from skins and emotes in gaming platforms to B2B opportunities like Amazon Sumerian. We look forward to seeing what the Embody Digital team does next.” 
Pixsy, the winner of the Special Recognition Award, offers photographers and other photo rights owners a set of tools and services to counteract illegal use of their intellectual property.
According to Marcel van der Heijden: “Protecting the rights of media owners is a costly and complex process that today that is only done effectively by large organizations. Pixsy has turned copyright protection into a scalable, manageable, accessible and ultimately profitable process. This applies to individual and small business content creators. The Special Recognition Award is for the company’s tireless efforts to make copyright protection possible for everyone.
Visual 1st Awards Judging Panel
Representatives of the high-tech media, intellectual property as well as investment communities composed the judging panel. This year’s judges were: Andy Kelm, managing director, Palmarés Advisors; Robert Blumberg, managing director, Soquel Group; Marcel van der Heijden, partner, Speedinvest; and also Gary Pageau, editor of the Dead Pixels Society.
For a complete list of the companies who competed for the 2018 Visual 1st Awards, visit visual1st.biz.
