Herbert Bay and Till Quack, the founders of kooaba, are in demand these days. The two young entrepreneurs have just returned from a business trip to Spain. Beforehand, Bay participated in the premiere of the new Swiss TV show “Giacobbo/Müller – Late Service Public”, and shortly after, Quack appeared on “Konsum TV”. In the TV show “Start-up” on Swiss television kooaba was one of the 10 winning teams, giving the same performance as in the business concept competition “Venture 08” and in a comparable competition of the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne. It seems as if the business concept of Bay and Quack of the ETH’s Computer Vision Laboratory was a runaway success. In Bay’s opinion, it is the “appropriate idea at the right time. At the moment, our working hours are mostly very long but we knew right from the start what lay ahead for us.”

During work on their theses at the Computer Vision Lab, Herbert Bay and Till Quack developed complementary tools for object recognition by means of photographic images. The resulting algorithm is so exact that even cut off pictures and ill adjusted objects are still recognizable beyond doubt. This technology in combination with the mobile phone camera was presented successfully to the public for the first time at the 150th anniversary of the ETH Zurich. Bay and Quack decided to start up a business, joining forces with Luc Van Gool, professor at and head of the Computer Vision Lab.

The whole world on your cell phone

A little more than a year later, the public can convince itself of the business idea behind kooaba: With the cell phone camera, users can photograph a film poster, then send the image by MMS, Email, or the specially developed kooaba Client, to a specific destination address, and then a short time later, can download onto their cell phone display trailers, film reviews, the current cinema program, and the necessary telephone number for seat reservation for the film of choice. It is a kind of Google for the cell phone with the difference that a query does not have to be typed in by using the small keyboard but can be started simply by photographing the object of the query.

So far, this service only works with current film posters. During the next few weeks all film posters ever published will be added, followed by DVD covers, CD booklets, and the first historic buildings of the city of Zurich. “I am convinced that kooaba has a huge potential”, says Bay. “All objects of interest can basically be integrated into the system, from artwork to wine labels, or details of an object of interest”.

Besides this search engine, this new enterprise offers two products especially for the advertising and publishing industries. Enterprises like Easyjet and the music label EMI are already making use of it by offering their customers additional services such as ring tones or the participation in contests if they take pictures of their advertisements and then send the photograph to a certain number. The same applies to “20 Minutes”, a free newspaper magazine in French-speaking Switzerland where readers could win an object for real, when photographing its photo in the magazine. For Bay here lies the future of marketing: The customer feels less and less motivated to react to an advertisement sent as a text message. Our offer on the other hand is visual, hence its appeal to our young and urban target group. And the advertiser gets a nice report from kooaba, with invaluable statistics about consumer interest.”

Expand abroad and develop the databases

The concept of linking the cell phone camera to the Internet, and thereby making the immediate surroundings “clickable”, is not completely new. In Japan, where already today more people access the Internet using their cell phones than via the PC, ID or 2D barcodes are widespread. Whoever takes a photograph of such a code and sends it to the corresponding enterprise has access to further information on the Internet. These codes frequently interfere with the market appearance of a brand, or, for example, in a magazine, the space for it is just not available. Kooaba avoids these problems by turning the image of the advertisement itself into a link on the Internet. All the same, a barcode is just another pattern that can be recognized. “Our solution is the perfect addition to the barcode system. While the barcode is some kind of URL – that is, a direct link to specific information – our technology resembles rather a search engine”

Japan serves as an example for Bay when he is talking about target markets: First come Germany, Great Britain and Spain, and very soon afterwards Japan. “For kooaba, Switzerland is an ideal test market”, says Bay. “It has demanding and critical cell phone users, and the market size is manageable. But for relevant growth we will have to gain a foothold abroad very soon, too.” First contracts with clients in neighboring countries have already been negotiated.

According to Bay, the short-term targets for 2008 are as follows: meeting the parameters of the business plan, diversifying the customer portfolio, and further extending the databases. For Bay, possible technical limitations could arise only from the scale of the database, because the more images are stored in it the more the system is susceptible to failure. But even in this respect Bay remains optimistic because with Luc Van Gool and the Computer Vision Lab at his side he has strong partners. They will help to further and promote the technological advances of kooaba. In return, the innovations of the ETH Lab can be widely applied and tested. A perfect symbiosis between science and industry.

Conference – The Internet of Things

The hyperlinking of objects in the real world to relevant contents on the Internet is one of the markets of tomorrow. The same way as information can be retrieved on the cell phone, it is possible to verify information on the authenticity of products. New potentials arise through this hyperlink not only in supply chain management, but also in the retail trade, in industrial production or in health care. “Internet of things” is the first conference which brings together academia and industry. The conference will try to address both opportunities and risks (data security, privacy) equally. It is organized by Friedemann Mattern, Professor at the Institute of Pervasive Computing, and Elgar Fleisch, Professor for Information Management at the ETH Zurich, in cooperation with the University of St. Gallen and the MIT.

When: 26-28 March 2008
Where: Swissôtel, Zurich

www.the-internet-of-things.org

Links and references:

• The start-up enterprise Kooaba
• Computer Vision Lab of the ETH Zurich