Image processing technology has become a focus of M&A lately. Pinterest just announced its acquisition of a 2-men startup, VisualGraph, which develops visual recognition tech. By using the tech, Pinterest hopes to better tag out and identify objects in pictures, to enhance its ability to advertise relevant products to the users. For example, if Pinterest knows the girl in a picture is wearing a skirt, it would provide ads on skirts, vs. coats. The two founders are both technical, with experience in machine vision. One is a ex-googler, who built the early version of vision recognition system for Google in 2004. The other founder is a current Stanford MS student, who interned in Palantir, Facebook and Google. The advantage of this startup is its algorithm. It claims that it achieves "8x speed" of object recognition systems and is on par with Facebook's face detection capability.
Another startup that was acquired was LookFlow. Yahoo bought the 5-people team in Oct 2013, for flickr. Yahoo also acquired another image recognition firm, IQ Engines, which focuses on text, object and people detection. LookFlow was founded in 2009 in Mountain View, on deep learning, to help with search.
Cortica, right now, is still an independent company. It was started in 2007, and has raised $7 million from Li Ka-Shing's Horizon Ventures and Venture Capitalist, Ynon Kreiz, as well as a recent $1.5 million from Russian tech group, Mail.ru. The company's key strength lies in its Image2Text technology which can automatically extract the core concepts in images and videos, and map the concepts to keywords and texts. You can find a demo of its tech on its website. The company is promoting "in-image" advertising, which could embed / provide relevant ads associated with objects in images. This could be a very interesting area, given the ads and content organization baed on texts are already mature and we are just starting to exploit the vast number of visual materials available on our phones, internet, TV, and maybe Google Glasses. Turning images into texts is definitely one critical part of the puzzle to make things happen. The key questions include: 1) how good is the recognition and how much limitation there is (assuming it has to be a server-end web app?). 2) whether other tech will catch up and perform better before the company turns their IP advantage into something more sustainable - ads network or else. 3) scale and growth of its monetization.
Cortica has offices in New York, Sunnyvale CA and Isreal. Contacts can be found on their website, and emails are below:
info@cortica.com
jobs@cortica.com
California, U.S.
440 North Wolfe Rd.
Suite WL151
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
Tel: 1.866.972.0972
Another startup that was acquired was LookFlow. Yahoo bought the 5-people team in Oct 2013, for flickr. Yahoo also acquired another image recognition firm, IQ Engines, which focuses on text, object and people detection. LookFlow was founded in 2009 in Mountain View, on deep learning, to help with search.
Cortica, right now, is still an independent company. It was started in 2007, and has raised $7 million from Li Ka-Shing's Horizon Ventures and Venture Capitalist, Ynon Kreiz, as well as a recent $1.5 million from Russian tech group, Mail.ru. The company's key strength lies in its Image2Text technology which can automatically extract the core concepts in images and videos, and map the concepts to keywords and texts. You can find a demo of its tech on its website. The company is promoting "in-image" advertising, which could embed / provide relevant ads associated with objects in images. This could be a very interesting area, given the ads and content organization baed on texts are already mature and we are just starting to exploit the vast number of visual materials available on our phones, internet, TV, and maybe Google Glasses. Turning images into texts is definitely one critical part of the puzzle to make things happen. The key questions include: 1) how good is the recognition and how much limitation there is (assuming it has to be a server-end web app?). 2) whether other tech will catch up and perform better before the company turns their IP advantage into something more sustainable - ads network or else. 3) scale and growth of its monetization.
Cortica has offices in New York, Sunnyvale CA and Isreal. Contacts can be found on their website, and emails are below:
info@cortica.com
jobs@cortica.com
California, U.S.
440 North Wolfe Rd.
Suite WL151
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
Tel: 1.866.972.0972
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