Since Israeli startup Gizmoz launched three years ago, people have used its technology to create millions of 3D-realistic avatar heads from photos of themselves. But what good is a head without a body? Gizmoz found a body—lots of them, actually—in a Utah-based company called Daz 3D. The two companies are merging. Existing investors, led by Benchmark Capital, Highway 12 Ventures, and Columbia Capital, are put in an additional $5.3 million into the new, yet-to-be-named company. Previously, Gizmoz raised a total of $12.8 million, most recently $6.5 million in March, 2008 from the venture arm of Docomo, which also participated in the latest round. Daz 3D raised $4 million back in June, 2007, and targeted creative professionals as customers.
Daz 3D co-founder Dan Farr will become the CEO and Gizmoz founder Eyal Gever wil be president. The company will be headquartered in Utah. Daz 3D offers a free virtual studio for professional designers to create virtual bodies for video games, movies, and illustrations, whereas Gizmoz is more of a consumer play which helps people turn their photos into fun, 3D avatars. → Read More
Just days after competitor Gizmoz announced more funding and AIM integration, Oddcast is previewing a new service called 3D Videostar that will let users import their faces into movie clips to replace those of movie stars. There’s no word yet on when this service will be available, but Oddcast has provided us with a few sample videos to get a sense of what it’ll be like (they lose points in my book, though, for not even let us embed them – you’ll have to go here). From looking at these samples alone, the results appear mixed. Some face swaps look quite good while others leave something to be desired. I assume Oddcast will license this technology to movie studios who want to use it as a viral marketing gimmick. → Read More
GizMoz, provider of fun technology that can turn your 2D image and recorded voice into a talking 3D character, is growing up and moving into the Asian market. The Israeli company, which we first covered in December 2006, has raised $6.5M in Series B financing from a round led by DoCoMo Capital, a subsidiary of the largest cell phone operator in Japan. The money and its budding relationship with DoCoMo should help the company provide mobile offerings for consumers in Japan, a country that CEO Eyal Gever calls “a world-leader in mobile adoption.” Gever says that the company plans to provide mobile offerings for both businesses and end users. These will include web-to-mobile messaging, mobile-to-mobile messaging, and a variety of consumer applications like animated talking greetings, video tones, wallpapers, and screensavers. The company will not yet discuss the details of its expansion plans, but we can expect Gizmoz to partner with media companies and mobile content aggregators in addition to mobile operators. Apart from its Asian strategy, Gizmoz has also integrated its 3D avatars into AIM with something called Gizmoz Expressions. AIM users can now upload their photos, create a 3D avatar with them, and assign different animations and behaviors for when certain things are said in chat. The avatars will then sit inside IM windows and add a bit of amusement to conversations. Characters can also be picked from a large collection of celebrities, political figures, etc. for those who don’t want to use their own portraits. CrunchBase Information Gizmoz Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://llnw.jibjab.com/content/player.swf JibJab has obviously figured out that pasting our pictures onto a video is a sure fire way to get a link from us. Here’s the latest, although I still like Gizmoz’s effort a lot more. Nice to see Om Malik doing the moves so soon after his hospital visit. CrunchBase Information JibJab Gizmoz Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://www.gizmoz.com//newsite/widgets/movies/movies.swf Get your own at Gizmoz.com If you like putting yourself into movie clips with JibJab, you’ll like this new product from Gizmoz, too. Unlike JibJab, which takes a still 2D image and moves only the mouth up and down, Gizmoz has developed proprietary technology to create a 3D facial image and includes various expression changes as well as lip syncing. Their basic product, which allows users to create talking avatars, launched in May 2006. Users can now take their avatar image and insert it into a number of video clips. More clips will be added over time, and Gizmoz is also in the process of licensing video from Hollywood movies and other professional content. Founder Eyal Gever actually showed me a clip over a year ago that had my face on a James Bond clip from Casino Royale. I felt pretty cool that day. Gizmoz, which raised $6.3 million from Benchmark, is headquartered in Israel. CrunchBase Information Gizmoz JibJab Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://v2.tinypic.com/player.swf?file=msc207&s=2 Three TechCrunch40 demo pit startups got local bay area television coverage last week – Dancejam (note: I’m an investor), Realius and Gizmoz. It looks like the reporter did the easy thing – a swing by the demo pit to film the best looking startups. Congrats to all three. → Read More
http://www.gizmoz.com/newsite/widgets/partner/tacobell//tacobell_intro_theEnd.swf The ad above, featuring people who applied to be in it via a special Taco Bell/Gizmoz contest that ran last month, was played at the MTV Music Awards this evening. The ad is sort of standard mainstream media stuff complete with carefully diversified (sexually and ethnically) winners, but it’s a great showcase for Gizmoz’s technology (see our launch post for an overview of their 3D avatar product). And congrats to Hunter, Mallory and Obinna, who just had their fifteen minutes (in this case fifteen seconds) of fame. Click on their names to see what kind of audition was needed to win the contest. → Read More
When Nero looked out over the ruins of Rome, he must have seen something like the TV Me! promotion from Taco Bell. The Bell, creators of the Fourthmeal and purveyors of food for the stoned, has an open casting call for customers to appear in its co-branded spots during the MTV Video Music Awards. Before you go get your hair done, however, the casting call is for 3D avatars created using Gizmoz 3D, an animated avatar system that can slap your face onto a stationary body and make you look like you’ve got the dropsy. → Read More
Gizmoz, an Israeli startup that allows people to create realistic 3D cartoon avatars of themselves and embed them on other websites, will be getting a little mainstream attention at the upcoming MTV Music Awards in September. On Monday, MTV, Taco Bell and Gizmoz will jointly announce a new website and promotion: users will go to tacobell.gizmoz.com and create a fifteen second audition of themselves doing anything they like. Taco Bell will select three winners and create a new thirty second spot with Gizmoz technology that will be played at the MTV music awards in September. The site is live now, but all content will be cleared or the Monday announcement (so wait until then to create an audition). All auditions will be publicly available and viewers can rate them. The three winners will be paid and given a years worth of Taco Bell food (hopefully not all at once). Gizmoz is an impressive and fun widget platform – and it’s something MySpacers in particular are likely to crowd to over time. This kind of exposure is great for the company…and we hear that Taco Bell is actually paying them for this, not the other way around. → Read More
I first wrote about Israeli widget site Gizmoz in December 2006. At the time, the company hadn’t launched its product to create personalized widgets using users’ pictures and voice, but they had a working demo. Today, the product launches for everyone to use. Gizmoz is also announcing a $6.3 million Series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital and distribution partnerships with RockYou and Freewebs. These are animated, talking, 3D images that can be embedded on any website. When compared to what Sitepal and others are doing on the avatar side of things, or Snapvine in the voice recording space, it really shines (see, however, Sitepal’s comment in our previous post for a different viewpoint). Creating a Gizmoz takes about a minute and requires a single photo of the subject. Gizmoz renders a 3D image of the photo. Users then customize it by adding hair, body, accessories, clothes, etc., and can also distort the face in a number of ways. When you add your voice, via a microphone or by typing in text that is converted to audio. the avatar adds facial expressions, eye blinks, breathing and lip syncs to the voice. Here’s an example using my photo: http://www.gizmoz.com//newsite/swf/newFlvViewer2.swf The key uses for the product will be to create a welcome clip like the one above, or to create a welcome “voicemail” service where people visiting your site can leave audio messages (like Snapvine). Gizmoz is built on the Flash platform; however, like Flektor, which was recently acquired by MySpace, all of the code was developed in-house by CEO Eyal Gever and his team over the last four years. That will make it an even more attractive acquisition target for MySpace and others. The company has also created a cool personalized demo showcasing the announcement: http://download.gizmoz.com/home/techcrunch.swf → Read More
I first met Eyal Gever, the founder of Gizmoz, at the Israeli Web Tour conference in Palo Alto a couple of months ago. Later that day I saw Eyal again, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. This time he was giving a demo (in the middle of a hallway) to a group of Fox Interactive folks, including their M&A team. I sat in on the demo, which went on for half an hour or more as the Fox people asked question after question. Here’s why they were intrigued. Gizmoz has a Flash-based 3D avatar product that is made from a single picture of a person plus their recorded voice. See Eyal’s MySpace page which has an embedded Gizmoz and you’ll understand why this blows away what SitePal and others are doing in this space. Users start by uploading a picture of themselves or their pet. Gizmoz turns the picture into a 3D model (see image to right), and the avatar can then be customized with a body, clothes, effects (scars, tattoos, etc.) and backgrounds. You then record a message and sound effects, and your avatar is created. The end result has a moving mouth and facial expressions while you talk, and the effect is quite stunning. Eyal calls it “bringing Pixar to the people.” Here are a couple of videos they made with my picture – see here and here. I’d embed these but they auto-play and people would not be happy. Also, sorry for the lame audio, this was done in the hallway at Web 2.0 while I was surrounded by the Fox team. But I want to show what Gizmoz can do based on a couple of minutes of setup. The personalized avatar product is still in private beta. The existing product on the site requires the use of a library face, but can be customized and a personal voice can be added. These avatars can be embedded in websites, and Gizmoz also has a downloadable application that adds these avatars to all major instant messaging services. MySpacers are going to go absolutely nuts over this. Lots of Screenshots below. → Read More
