Turkish startup BeFunky has closed its first round of venture funding from Golden Horn Ventures in Istanbul. The amount raised was $550,000. Previously, the company raised $250,000 in seed capital in January, 2007.
BeFunky launched at TechCrunch 40 last year. Founded by Tekin Tatar and Kemal Ozisikcilar, BeFunky offers two services: The Cartoonizer and Uvatar. The Cartoonizer lets you upload photos and give them a cartoon effect. Uvatar lets you create a more realistic avatar based on a photo. The startup is releasing a newly designed Website today, and upgrading its Uvatar service to make it more automated.
But what I am most excited about is a product in the works called the Video Cartoonizer. It gives the same A Scanner Darkly effect for videos as the Cartoonizer does for photos. We’ve been using a pre-release version here at TechCrunch for an upcoming video project that we are going to launch soon. Here’s a sneak peak at what the effect looks like (from a video I slipped into this post on Kongregate):
video project? tell us more… and lol @jim “twenty-hundred”
wow…splash page when techcrunched. unlucky i guess?
Those effects really are funky.
This reminds me of Riya before Like.com, where they have a technological edge, but are not exploiting that edge to it’s fullest. Will be an interesting one to watch…
Other then the effects, what else do they have to offer once the novelty wears-out?
Jon
http://dreamclue.com …get the message!
Forget when the novelty wears off…how are they going to make money now when it is still novel?
Fun site! hope they comes up with some new features as the time goes
“Forget when the novelty wears off…how are they going to make money now when it is still novel?”
LoL. They already made the money. They got funded 800k for a gimmick.
Bubble2.0 Business Plan=Get funded, throw yourself on a crazy $$$ payroll, you know because you are a’ceo’ and when the money starts to burn out, start another company 2 weeks after the first one hits the dead pool. And repeat…
Money down the drain…
Actually it seems really cool, I think a lot of people with like using this feature of making yourself look more cartoon drawn…. could be pretty cool.
I can already think of about a few youtube videos that would look cool done like the video in the story…
Good Luck to Befunky, like the name too, pretty cool.
uh.. dam that first line should be “people will like” not “people with like”, it’s 8:36pm and I just drank a malt so I got brain freeze right now… My bad.
I bet those googly eyes in their logo is what got them funded.
cooool……ah….
Yeah, I know BeFunky from way back. When they were called Photoshop Filters!! Jeez!
It looks to me that they’re using a variety of commonly used digital image processing algorithms & techniques such as image diffusion , image edge-detection/filtering, Canny/Hysterisis Thresholding filtering and perhaps more.
Jon said…
Other then the effects, what else do they have to offer once the novelty wears-out?
I completely agree here. It seems that these days, everyone is inventing useless web application just for the sake of having something on the web.
Why all the haters?
Cool video tools….I thought video is a huge growth area.
Don’t hate the playa hate the game
Cute, but the Uvatar trademark is ours.
Cool.. but do they need a whole company just for creating cartoon effect images.
Cough *photoshop*
http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com/
Looks like they need to do a lot of work on their rotoscoping technology. That sample video is quite sub-standard to anything you can do in photoshop.. At least not something I would want to pay for if that is their revenue model. What is their revenue model??
what is the point of this site :/
Also keep a good eye on Golden Horn Ventures. I would bet on their bets.
Really splendid work / site - too good
Too bad they didn’t get the domain bfunky.com and lost it to a domain trader.
Though I see several comments, I see this as heading the right direction in providing easy online video editing/enhancing solutions. Sure photoshop has great effects and is a powerful tool. Befunky allows people to manipulate photo or video on the fly and online. It also has an entire ecosystem of consumers using social networking sites and posting photos and videos of themselves. I see it in the same category with Slide and Japanese schoolgirl photo booths.
http://videoabstraction.net/
The more interesting uses are bandwidth savings for videos (since the cartoonized version can use a simpler color palette and better compression).
Like the idea, but as a vector art enthusiast, I can’t appreciate the quality of the result from filters and this. Still kind of cool.
Wow, this post generated lots and lots of comments, both good and bad. I checked out the service for myself, and for the life of me, I can’t see what’s unique or different about befunky. I mean, there are oodles of other sites doing similar things so this must just be a Web 2.0 junk funding round. I wish them all the luck in the world, but yeah how do you make money off something like this?