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August 22, 2007
Cognimatics: From Face Warp To Face Counting
What’s a startup team to do when it realizes that getting its software into smartphones, despite the giddy predictions of market research firms and investment banks, is not the fast track to growth?
The answer, stay lean, don't raise VC, and try another market – at least that’s what Swedish startup Cognimatics is doing.
The four year old company was founded by the same team that founded Decuma, a handwriting recognition for PDAs startup, founded in 1999 that raised VC (probably from too many investors leading to unaligned interests, we can guess) and was sold off to Canadian company Zi in 2004 in an assets sale.
The founders learned a few things from that experience and run Cognimatics as a self-financing venture. A couple still work as professors at a Swedish university.
They first targeted cameraphones as a way to commercialize their cognitive vision tech, which is a geeky term for software that can do useful things with images captured by a camera's image sensors.
Its product, Face Warp, has a design-in win with a mobilephone manufacture and that business generates most of the sales. Its installed base is 50M terminals, Håkan Morän, told us in a phone interview, and the plan is to continue to grow that part of the business.
Face Warp Your Cameraphone Pics (image source: Cognimatics)
Moran is the sales and marketing chief, and joined the founders a year or so ago. In the interview there was no disclosure of the name of the phone manufacture, but your a:c reporter did a little research and learned that SonyEricsson sells its phones with face warp software pre-installed - we assume it's Cognimatics'.
Without the outside money, the startup is very customer-focussed and realized a couple years ago there's demand in retail, selling its patented tech to surveillance camera and display manufacturers for use by retailers that want to know where to position products, and how many people entered the shop or where they went, that is, people and face-counter applications.
This is the market opportunity it is now addressing. It already has signed up customers to apply the tech in electronic surveillance camera and into digital displays. But the company still has no plans to raise outside capital, despite offers, according to Moran.
"Self-financed and organic growth is the strategy for the time being," he said.
A Face Counting package from Cognimatics
Now a retailer can know how many people look at an advertisement for an instore special, for example, and match it with sales. By moving the display around, they can get some numbers to better decide the right location for an ad or what type of ad gets people buying.
We think it is onto a good thing with this retail application. We recall that last year Experian bought VC-backed FootFall for £35Mpre-empting a planned IPO. It was into electronic customer monitoring, which is tracking shoppers. The fact that the company was about to float and that Experian bought it beforehand, suggests that there is some growth ahead for businesses developing this kind of product.
Your a:c euro reporter has seen a lot of startup teams underperform with this kind of computer vision technology over the years, especially research lab spinoffs. But Cognimatics has avoided the security camera market boondoggle, entered the mobilephone one, and is now positioning its technology in another promising one.
Read – Axis camera announcement
View Cognimatics
Posted on August 22, 2007 04:57 AM | Posted to Advertising | Early stage | Emdedded Systems | Permalink
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