A thousand new apps on Aviary's Photo Editor SDK in a week.

Aviary’s SDKs have been powering photo editing in thousands of apps, and for millions of users, since September 2011. In that time, our developer ecosystem has grown to over 7,000 partners. In March this year almost 80 million unique people edited their photos on Aviary’s platform across that ecosystem.

We talk with developers a lot - and they love the ease of integration, the quality of the technology, and the intuitive photo editing tools that Aviary can provide for their users. We’re proud to work with these developers; and to have become an integral part of their apps and business. But there's always more we can do... and are doing. 

We launched a big upgrade to our SDKs last week.

In just one week, more than one thousand new apps have signed up to join our ecosystem! (1,181 as of 9pm last night, to be exact ;)

That’s super exciting, especially as we’re now also offering developers monetization opportunities - though our IAP and Branded Content / Native Ad models, which get distributed along with the SDK. 

What’s even more exciting is the diversity of apps that are integrating Aviary’s photo editing SDK. From commerce apps, to social apps, to lifestyle apps, to creative apps, to messaging apps… it’s clear that we’re long past the point where photo editing is just about turning an average picture into a good one. Photo editing – especially on mobile – is now about enhancing visual communication across many use cases between billions of people across the planet.

The charts below provide an overview of the 1,000+ new apps that have joined Aviary’s ecosystem in the last 7 days.  

As we’ve seen consistently across the last Quarter, the number of new Android apps being built on Aviary’s SDKs is outpacing the number of new iOS apps by 3 to 2. Although iOS apps dominate the current make up of our overall ecosystem, the rapid growth of Android in that mix is startling.

Meanwhile, while new Android developers are still building a lot of photo editing and creation apps, our new iOS partners are more diverse – with social networking apps that include photo editing now accounting for almost a quarter of new apps built on Aviary’s iOS SDKs.

We'll post an update to this a month from now - and analyze additional trends we're seeing. 

But if you’re a developer who needs kick ass photo editing in your app right now – come and grab our SDK right here.

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Announcing a MASSIVE UPGRADE to Aviary’s iOS Photo Editor SDK

Great news for developers! Today we’re releasing a MASSIVE UPGRADE to our iOS Photo Editor SDK. You can get it right now, for free, right here.

It’s never been easier to integrate the world’s favorite photo editor into your app – and you’ll be in great company when you do. Huge social services like Kakao and Tango use Aviary’s SDKs to power photo editing in their apps, alongside retail giants like Walgreens and Sephora, photo-industry juggernauts like Photobucket, not to mention thousands of hit indie developers such as PicStitch – the collage-maker king. In fact, more than 7,000 developers now partner with Aviary to give their users a magical photo editing experience – thanks to an SDK chock-full with Aviary’s intuitive tools and a never-ending supply of cool photo filters, crafty stickers and fantastic frames.

We’re constantly capturing feedback from our developer community to help shape our products. This new iOS Photo Editor SDK is a perfect example of that approach. Here are just a handful of the highlights packed in to this new release that you've asked for and your users will love:   

• All new modern UX/UI – completely aligned with Apple’s new design language.
• Customizable look and feel – so you can make the editor fit perfectly into your own app’s aesthetic.
• Leverages all the latest Apple technologies – including 64-bit support.
• Fully updated set of photo editing tools – including an all-new text overlay tool with multiple fonts.
• Internationalization – with support for 23 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Bahasa Indonesia.
• Reduced SDK size – along with many more technical optimizations for better performance.
• A basic version that’s feature-rich – and completely free.
• New monetization options – including access to Aviary’s Premium Content Network, which offers a revenue sharing plan on IAPs and exclusive brand campaigns.

If you're a developer who builds cross-platform, remember Aviary also has killer SDKs for Android and Web too.

Aviary’s iOS SDK, including all-new text overlay tools, a modern UI/UX, support for 23 languages and much, much more.

In aggregate, Aviary’s SDKs have been used to edit more than 10 billion photos in the last 12 months. That equates to a lot of happy developers and a lot of happy users. We hope to make many more people even happier with this new iOS Photo Editor SDK. Go download it now.

- Team Aviary

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Photo Hack Day Japan Recap

On February 22-23rd, Aviary brought the 5th Photo Hack Day all the way around the globe to beautiful Tokyo, Japan. This year’s event was hosted by our good friends at Mixi with help from our amazing sponsors: Mixi, Shutterstock, gettyimages, 500px, Leap Motion, Amazon, Mashup9, Recruit, Imagga, EyeEm, Pux, XLoudia, Sendgrid, Zenrin, FlashFoto and Adobe.

We kicked the weekend off right with a pre-party Friday night, sponsored by our friends at Shutterstock. The excitement was palpable as Japanese hackers and API sponsors mingled and plotted, preparing for the main event.

Saturday was opened up with a keynote address by Shutterstock, followed by a round of API presentations by our generous sponsors, Japanese and Western alike. Any language barriers were broken down by a team of incredible translators from our friends at Mixi. Big shoutouts to Nozomi Yamawaki and Vishal Nayak!

The next 24 hours were a blur as more than 120 hackers, sponsors, and translators turned copious amounts of fried rice, sushi, beer, chuhai, and green tea into 23 inspiring hacks!

Hacks were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness originality, and overall real-world value of the application.

And now…the winners!

1st Place: Back to the Future (300,000 JYP)

Team: Theeraphol Wattanavekin, Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, Thiti Luang

Back to the Future is a visual learning app that allows you to "walk through time” via an interactive interface. It utilizes a Leap Motion controller to simulate moving through history and reveals the visual evolution of people, places and things over the course of time. You can try the app here.

2nd Place: Before The Filter (200,000 JYP)

Team: Benjamin Watanabe, Antony Tran

Before the filter is an Android app that teaches would-be photographers the fundamentals of Photography. It introduces the user to a variety of topics, including composition, techniques for taking food photos, landscape photos, and even selfies. It also provides "training wheels" in the form of grid and template overlays in a custom camera interface to teach the user about proper composition. After a photo is taken with the app, it provides tips for editing the photo (using the Aviary SDK) based on the style of photography the user is in the process of learning. Finally, the user can share their before and after photos to show their progress. Most impressive, the hack is already available for download in the Google Play store. Check it out yourself.

Additional congratulations to Benjamin and Antony for winning Best Use of Aviary’s API!

3rd Place: VOCA Getty (100,000 JYP)

Team: Atsushi Onoda, Hiroshi Kanamura, Shinichi Segawa, Yasushi Takemoto

VOCA Getty is an innovative photo dictionary app that uses images sourced from Getty Images to help users learn a language visually.

The judges also came out with 2 honorable mentions that received Lomography cameras from our good friends at Sendgrid! Congratulations to Yabu Kiyohide (薮 キヨヒデ) and Yuya Matsuo (松尾勇也) for Na･Gu･Ri･A･I and Akira Muramatsu for Smile Motion!

Thanks again to our esteemed panel of judges, Rick Martin (Writer/Editor, The Bridge), Tobias Peggs (CEO, Aviary), Wyatt Jenkins (VP of Product, Shutterstock), Naoki Sadakuni (Country Manager, Pinterest Japan), and Takafumi Nanao (Technical Consultant, Mixi) for overcoming the challenges of whittling down 23 amazing English and Japanese hacks to just 3!

For a complete list of API and Event prizes, check out the PHDJapan Winners list, and for a list of all of the hacks presented, take a look at the PHDJapan Submissions list. For more photos of the event, search for the #PHDJapan tag on Twitter. We’ll be adding some of our favorites to the Photo Hack Day Facebook page.

Congrats again to all of our winners, and thank you to our amazing sponsors who contributed more than $15,000 in cash and prizes! We had a ton of fun at PHDJapan, and we hope to see you at the next one!

Cheers,

Photo Hack Day Team

Aviary Says ‘Hola’ to Latin America, Firefox and Telefonica

Welcome to the family Firefox OS!

Over 70 million people around the world use our tools every month on iOS, Android and the Web - and we’re thrilled to work with Mozilla to bring the magic of Photo Editor by Aviary to the Firefox Operating System.

What’s more, one of the largest telcos in the world - Telefonica – is a great supporter of Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform, so we are especially excited to be part of an ecosystem that will help meet the tremendous demand we’ve seen from consumers in Europe and Latin America!

So now that Aviary is available for Firefox, here’s how you get it:

• Already have a Firefox OS device? Simply download the app here: https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/aviary?src=featured
  
  
• Looking to upgrade to a Firefox OS device? Telefonica’s latest devices – the new ZTE Open C and ZTE Open II – will launch this year and have Aviary pre-installed, giving Telefonica subscribers something special straight out of the box.

From the basic rotate and crop tools all the way to professionally designed filters and magical auto-enhance, Firefox users will find a robust set of editing tools to quickly and easily make their photos beautiful.

We’re confident these tools will go above and beyond, but we’ll also be enhancing these tools in the coming months – like adding more content and sharing options – to best tailor our app for this new platform.

We’re thrilled to bring Photo Editor by Aviary to Firefox OS and you can be sure we are constantly listening to your feedback. So have any comments? Questions? Let us know!

We hope you love it as much as we do!

Cheers,
​Team Aviary

Kon'nichiwa from Photo Hack Day Japan!

Kon'nichiwa from Tokyo!

Six of us from Aviary HQ in NYC are happy hacking in Tokyo this weekend - as we host Photo Hack Day Japan.

This is our 5th Photo Hack Day - and our first international event. We’re running the event in partnership with our good friends from Mixi, one of Japan’s largest social networks (and a long-time Aviary SDK partner).

It’s about time we took Photo Hack Day international. Last year 600 Billion photos were taken by people all around the world. And many of those were taken, and edited, and shared thanks to apps and apis and services made by people at his hackathon. Over 100 people are at the event, either hacking on new apps or offering developers help with their APIs – including folks from Shutterstock, Getty, EyeEm, 500px, Amazon, SendGrid, LeapMotion, Pinterest and more.

We are all part of an incredible global community of developers that are all obsessed with photos. Bringing that community together is why Aviary started Photo Hack Day in the first place. Japan is more obsessed with photos than anywhere else on the planet - so Tokyo is the perfect place to host our first international event. 

The idea is simple: to bring like-minded people together - to have fun for a weekend, to experiment, to hack, and to invent new ways to for people to create, edit, share and communicate with photos. As I tap out this blog post, I can see some really cool apps being created in every corner of the room. We’ll post the list of winners once the judging has happened later today.

- Tobias 

A Valentine's Day Case Study: Universal Pictures' Endless Love

Late last summer, we introduced Aviary for Advertisers - a new way for brands to connect with millions of people taking and sharing pictures on their smartphones . Today we're showing results from one of our most engaging campaigns to date.

Unlike ads in Instagram, which promote a brand’s own photo content in the stream, native ads in Aviary share branded editing tools that allow audiences to make their own creative photo content. With this one-on-one approach to brand interaction, we've found that advertisers are able to achieve exciting and impactful levels of audience engagement, as well as generate the kind of audience positivity that generates brand affinity. We've also found Aviary campaigns outperform display ad CTR averages by many magnitudes (Aviary's average CTR of 4.5% vs display advertising's 0.1%), marking another big win for native ads vs. traditional ads. 

Universal Pictures' Endless Love "Photo Valentine" Campaign is still live in Aviary (these results mark performance between the dates of Jan 21 and Feb 10), so for a closer look, download our app before Feb 16.

Case Study:  Universal Pictures' Endless Love "Photo Valentine" Campaign

Campaign Overview: Aviary users were invited to unlock free photo editing tools to create Endless Love "Photo Valentines."  Using branded filters, frames and stickers - including film-inspired word art, embellishments, filters for adding a "warming glow", and a photorealistic sticker of leading man and teen heartthrob Alex Pettyfer - users transformed their "selfies" and other pics into sharable valentines.

Campaign Objective: Increase awareness of Endless Love among key demographic of younger female smartphone users during lead-up to film release

KPI(s): Engagement, CTR

Performance Window: Jan 21 - Feb 10

Unique Audience (US): 16.4mm

• Exposure: 21.8 million
• Clicks: 1.3 million
• Conversions: 600k
• Engagements: 7.3 million
• Saves: 900k
• CTR: 5.8%
• Click-through Conversion: 49.1%
• Overall Audience Conversion: 3.6%
• Average engagements per user: 12
• Average Engagement time per user: 36 seconds
• Overall Engagement time: 376,292 minutes

The Endless Love "Photo Valentine" campaign was created by Millennial Media and Aviary, in collaboration with ignited and Universal Pictures. All campaign traffic was organic.

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Announcing Photo Hack Day Japan!

We're excited to announce that registration is open for Photo Hack Day Japan! This year's Photo Hack Day is a collaboration with our good friends at Mixi and will be hosted at their headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. More details below:

Who: Our friends, old and new, in the photo space
What: Another full weekend of photo-centric awesomeness!
When: February 22-23rd, 2014
Where: Mixi Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan

This year's PHD promises to be an exciting event with more than $15k in prizes, and a ton of amazing API's and Sponsors:

mixi
Shutterstock 
500px
GettyImages
LeapMotion
Amazon
Mashup Awards 9
Recruit 
Imagga
EyeEm
SendGrid
Xloudia TV
Pux
Adobe
Zenrin Datacom

Sign up for the event here: http://photohackdayjapan.peatix.com/

Big News from Aviary: 10 Billion Photos Edited!

We hit a massive milestone today. People all over the planet have now used Aviary to edit 10 billion photos!

At Aviary we strive to inspire people to play with their visual world – by giving them the magic to re-imagine, reinvent, reshape, and share what they see. Whether that happens in our own mobile apps, or in partner apps using Aviary’s SDK, it’s now happened 10 billion times.

It was only last March that we announced our 3 billion milestone. That first 3 billion took us 18 months to achieve. Acceleration to 10 billion over the last nine months has blown past all our expectations – and that growth has been driven by three main factors:

• 70+ million monthly active users. More and more people are using Aviary every single day. Our own-brand app, Photo Editor by Aviary, grew like wildfire this year – and now has over 20 million MAUs. It was also recognized in Apple's and Google's "Best of 2013" lists, as well as in The New York Times’ Best Apps for iOS 7. But the biggest indicator that we’re doing something right is the hundreds of thousands of four and five star user reviews - you’ll find over 500,000 of them in the Google Play store alone!

• 7,000+ partner apps. New apps and services launch every day that have integrated Aviary’s SDKs – meaning our photo-editing platform is now available across a huge and diverse partner ecosystem. So whether you're creating a cool photo collage in PicStitch, or designing personal greeting cards in Sincerely’s Ink, or messaging friends with photos in Tango, or designing gorgeous websites with Squarespace, Aviary is there to help you effortlessly create hugely impactful images.

• 74% of the world has Aviary’s SDK. Developers in 143 of the world’s 193 countries have downloaded and integrated Aviary’s SDK. To serve all our global partners and their users, we offer many localized options – including support for over 30 languages. Meanwhile the different Filters, Frames and Stickers we create for people to enhance their images reflect the norms, styles, visual cues and iconography of many different cultures. The photo phenomenon is diverse and global – and we have to be too.

As we look forward, what most exciting is the fact that a new visual lingua franca has emerged. Unquestionably, photos have become the communication language of the global mobile generation. We are long past the point when photo editing was just about turning an average picture into a good one. Photo editing is now about enhancing visual communication between billions of people across the planet, in a way that embodies the full richness of emotions, feelings and inspiration. It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that a picture is worth 500 words. Editing that picture with Aviary adds the other 500 – and doubles the impact of the final image.

So A BIG THANK YOU to everyone - whether you’re an Aviary user, developer partner, brand partner, or just a friend - your support, feedback and enthusiasm drive us forward every day. Here’s to the next 10 billion edits!

(And if you want to help us get there faster, we’re hiring.)

Cheers,

Team Aviary

Constant Contact Integrates Aviary to Streamline Image and Email Creation

Constant Contact was built to help businesses create and grow customer relationships in today's socially connected world. In a nutshell, they make it ridiculously easy to design, share, and track email newsletters / campaigns on the fly. 

As fast as users can create emails, they can now edit their images just as easily within the platform We're excited to announce that Constant Contact has fully integrated our Web SDK, giving users the power to quickly add a creative touch to their images with one-click auto enhances, a wide range of text & font tools, frames, and more. 

Our editor sits nicely inside their existing file manager, which is an excellent example of how our creative tools can be added to your workflow in a non-disruptive way. We look forward to seeing future newsletters that've been retouched with Aviary's editor. 

To see other email marketing companies using Aviary, check out Mailchimp and Emma. If you'd like to add Aviary to your app, check out developers.aviary.com. Our editor is 100% free to use and implement, with a few purchasable upgrades to spruce up your integration. 

Want your website or app to be spotlighted? Hit us up at partners@aviary.

Create Your Own Endless Love Photo Valentines

Who's excited for February 14th? For anyone counting down the days until Endless Love hits theaters, we have a special treat in Aviary: Photo Valentines! 

Make your own beautiful, sharable #EndlessLove photo valentines with limited edition filters, word art and frames available in Aviary for iOS, Android and some of your favorite Aviary partners. It's all free thanks to our pals at Universal Pictures, and they can't wait to see what you create.

BONUS: Crushing on Alex Pettyfer? There's an, um, Alex Pettyfer for that. Look for the photorealistic sticker of Alex in the Valentine pack, then add that hottie to your selfies -- #winkwink.