CogniSign’s award winning image search technology solves the ‘images and video are black boxes” problem so evident in a wide variety of Consumer Internet and Mobile applications. CogniSign’s technology extracts visual meaning from the arrangement of the pixels themselves, by using highly innovative and novel computer vision technology, to both find similar content and to decipher the subject matter of the image.
CogniSign’s image search technology platform has many key innovations that allow the best performance in search, ecommerce, and mobile marketing applications targeting image-oriented content, and it has the scalability needed for the vast and highly distributed Consumer Internet and Mobile environment. Just as Google perfected its search and advertising model based on finding similar but not identical text based content in a highly scalable manner, CogniSign achieves the same goal with image-oriented content. Text associated with a particular image asset can be considered as well. This patented ability to consider both visual and text information (which could even be a speech transcript in a video file) creates a level of precision in search, ecommerce, and mobile marketing applications that was previously impossible.
During the recession now ending, visual search applications continued to be launched with surprising speed and frequency. Apple launched Faces and Places in iPhoto, Google launched their new Google Goggles product, and Microsoft’s visual search for Bing was showcased at TechCrunch 50. It is clear that market demand is growing for image based products and services for a wide variety of Consumer Internet and Mobile applications. Our technology platform will set a new pace in image based content discovery, search, and ecommerce, and mobile based localized applications will be especially important. For example, in 2010 CogniSign signed a six figure Engineering Contract to deliver an image based Mobile Marketing application to one of the Top 5 youth fashion brands in the world. This brand will be promoting camera phone contests by encouraging young people in America, the U.K., and Japan to snap photos of their older designs on the streets – and use image recognition technology to ID the product and provide the latest information on that product’s newest design back to the photographer! This visual search feature is part of a comprehensive highly branded mobile app. which is in the final stages of QA before being launched on both iPhone and Android platforms on three continents.
In general, the mobile market for search, advertising, and ecommerce is a huge emerging opportunity. People want to take pictures with their camera phones and get information about similar or related products or services without a lot of typing on a mobile device, and snapping a photo of something to drive these applications is both easy and fun. As mobile devices are more and more trackable by location using both GPS and ecommerce transactions (via mobile based payments), this may become the platform with the hottest and most dynamic growth during the next five years.
Because of these incredible opportunities in the mobile market, we are submitting our 2011 TiE50 Nomination in the Wireless category; however, we would also be extremely pleased to be presented as a TiE50 Finalist in the Software or Internet (Cloud Computing) categories.
CogniSign’s core technology is protected by U.S. Patent No. 7,489,804, five other Patents Pending, and numerous trade secrets.