Prequel, Inc. is a US-based

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and Reproducibility, reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in me ...

company that develops the Prequel

mobile application A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on des ...

enabling editing photos and videos with filters and effects. In February 2021, the app reached number 1 in the "Photo & Video" category of the US Apple

App Store An App Store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the c ...

History

In 2016, the entrepreneur Timur Khabirov and the investor Serge Aliseenko registered a US corporation named AIAR Labs Inc, which was developing AR solutions as an outsourced contractor. Of several proprietary products, Prequel was selected for

beta-testing Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to apprecia ...

as a product focused on editing photos and videos. In August 2018, Prequel was released on the

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

App Store, the launch costing 3 million

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, financed with the founders’ personal funds. The first release included approximately 10 filters for photos and the same amount of effects that augmented images with rose petals, rain and snow, VHS and film reel simulations, glitch, grain, sun puddles, and

lomography A toy camera is a simple, inexpensive film camera. Despite the name, toy cameras are fully functional and capable of taking photographs, though with optical aberrations due to the limitations of their simple lenses. From the 1990s onward, ther ...

. The respective Android app was released two years later, in June 2020. In 2019, the app gained its first popularity in

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, specifically in

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, after the account of the k-pop band

BTS BTS (), also known as the Bangtan Boys, is a South Korean boy band formed in 2010 and debuting in 2013 under Big Hit Entertainment. The septet—consisting of members Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—co-writes and co-pr ...

published Instagram stories edited with Prequel upon attending the 61st Grammy Awards. In 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, celebrities took up publishing photos and videos edited with Prequel. Those publications increased the app's popularity on the

North American North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Ca ...

market. The company is headquartered in

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and employs over 200 employees. In 2021, the Prequel founders Timur Khabirov and Serge Aliseenko launched a venture studio for startups working with artificial, computer vision, and AR-based visual art.

Technical features

The app uses

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

to process the content. Prequel tunes faces on image and video and ties various decorative elements to certain points on the human body and face. The Prequel app uses the

Core ML iOS 11 is the iOS version history, eleventh major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 10. It was announced at the company's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Worldwide Developers C ...

, MNN, and TFLight frameworks to work with the neural networks. Some AI solutions are launched server-side, and some on the user's

mobile device A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physica ...

. A resulting photo or video edited with the app is called "a prequel." The app daily generates over 2 million such prequels, which are published by users in Instagram,

TikTok TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. TikTok is an international version o ...

, and other social media. By early 2021, the app had 440 "collections" of filters, over a half being free of charge.

References

{{Reflist 2018 software IOS software Android (operating system) software Photo software Mobile applications American social networking websites Youth culture Raw image processing software

History

Technical features

See also

References