Learn how Magisto applies artificial intelligence to create polished user generated content from photos and short videos.

Kampel: We have some great partners this year and we have the unique opportunity to bring together two of our partners, Ford and Magisto, to launch what you may have seen called the “Love My City” campaign. And we’ve been back to Detroit for two years and see the passion that Detroiters have and we thought we’d open up a video competition for people to show how they love their city. We had over three hundred submissions from all over the world, from Taipei, London, and then obviously here, New York, Boston, San Francisco. We had over 50,000 people watching these videos and to debut the video and to talk a little about the Magisto technology is Chief Marketing Officer of Magisto, Reid Genauer.

Genauer: Hi, my name’s Reid Genauer and I’m the CMO at Magisto as Josh said and I just wanted to start by saying how happy we are to be here in Detroit, to be part of Techonomy Detroit, and to be surrounded by so many bright minds and so much creativity and thoughtfulness. So if you don’t know Magisto, we’re a company that uses cloud-based artificial intelligence to automate video editing and production for the masses. So we take raw photos and videos from your mobile device and automatically transform them into produced personal movies.

There’s a number of reasons why this is interesting. One is that, really, the adoption of video has been slower than, say, written word or photos, in part because, really, the power of video comes from editing and production. If you were to watch “The Hobbit” unedited it wouldn’t be “The Hobbit,” it would be 42 years of film. And the same holds true for our personal media. So we’re drowning in personal media. We take a hundred pictures at a birthday and four minutes of video and it’s an opportunity that’s lost because that footage ultimately sits in our pockets or our hard drives and the opportunity that is lost is the information, the data, the emotion, the sense of place, that’s shared within reams and reams and reams of personal data. There’s a stat that says 50% of every photo taken in the history of the world was taken last year. And if you think that 9.99% percent of the time these images aren’t shared, there’s a lot that isn’t being said.

So when we think about video storytelling and a visual platform for self-expression in the context of Techonomy, at the intersection of culture, technology, economics, we think there’s a really powerful place for it. So there’s lots of conversations here about sophisticated technologies for managing data and transforming cities, but really the basic building block is information, right? And I think one of the most profound examples that’s often cited of late is the Arab Spring and how Twitter was used to express what was going on. And if you think about video and the richness and the power of storytelling that it holds, to unlock that power for the masses, we think, is an incredible tool for economic growth, for empathy, and for change, for the betterment.

So just to give you, again, for context, we have 45 million registered users across the globe, 180-some-odd countries. We made 10 million personally produced movies last month. So that’s just, I think, the tip of the iceberg. But to bring it back home, so we did partner with Ford and with Techonomy to ask citizens of the world to celebrate their cities. And we did so in part to contextualize Detroit. And we got submissions, as Josh said, from all over the planet. And I think what’s cool, just to, again, illustrate the power, is I haven’t spent much time in Detroit and in preparing, I was looking at these movies and I got a real deep sense of what Detroit was all about from blight to beauty.

So with that, I’m going to share with you the winning video, which is made by a woman named Erin Henigin and she happens to be from Detroit and was at this event last year. So with that, here’s the winner.