Whilst conducting his PhD research into “developing a probabilistic approach to appearance-based place matching that tackles this issue of perceptual aliasing”, Mark Cummins and fellow research student James Philbin teamed up to find a way to introduce the technology they were generating to the outside world.
Their solution was to form their own company – Plink – which develops image-driven search engines.
Take a photograph of something with your mobile phone, instantly get more information. Snap a photo of a book cover, get reviews and price comparison. Snap a CD cover, hear it on iTunes. Snap a movie poster and instantly see the trailer. Snap a painting, read the Wikipedia article. No barcodes, tags or markers – Plink aims to provide direct recognition of the object, quickly and accurately, from a database of millions of items.
We’re not the only ones who’ve noticed their potential – Plink was one of the final 20 teams at the Mini Seedcamp in London in April.
Follow them @plinksearch.
Posted in Entrant information, iQ Prize in the news