Oxford Entrepreneurs Google Success - Plink Art Interview

The greatest achievement of our Incubation Centre tenants so far is the $100 000 award Plink co-founders, Mark Cummins and James Philbin, received from Google for having the most downloaded application in the "Android Developer Challenge". (Android is a new mobile phone operating system by Google.) James and Mark recently submitted their DPhils in information engineering, in which their academic focus was on their Plink technology: an elaborate computer vision algorithm.

Perception is a powerful ability for a machine to have, and Plink have already established some incredibly cool ways to capitalise on it commercially. If you download Plink onto your mobile phone, for example, you can snap pictures of myriad objects -- like artwork, a DVD, a book -- and then Plink will lead you to information about the objects, such as who the artist is, the film's trailer, or where you can buy the novel. Plink generate revenue from this by taking a cut of a sale when their software had directed a user to the online merchant.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Oxford
• SUCCESS (magazine)
• Business
• Entrepreneur