Kodak startup finding different routes down memory lane
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| An example of Deep Visuals' new way to explore collections |
Fronted by Alan Payne (formerly Director of European Research) and Peter Fry (formerly leader of the intelligent imaging group at Kodak’s Cambridge lab), Deep Visuals has developed a platform technology aimed at changing the way people browse and interact with digital images.
The startup’s initial target market is museums and galleries, where its ViziQuest technology allows users to navigate image collections by following self-generated narrative threads. The idea is to make the experience far more engaging and dynamic, but also to give curators the opportunity to show off a far broader sweep of their collections than is possible with a text based search.
Using metadata and a proprietary algorithm, relationships are established between all of the images in a given collection and it is these links that govern how the images are displayed to the user.
The way images are arranged in the browser allows people to easily navigate within and between the themes they find most interesting.
Now, having gained traction in the UK market in recent months, signing up The Fitzwilliam Museum as well as the Scott Polar Museum, Deep Visuals has got its sights set a little further afield.
“We’ve had a uniformly positive response to our product. People have told us that they haven’t seen anything like it before and they would like it. But belts are being tightened in the arts and culture in the UK and we will find out in April whether we can win a piece of the new budgets when they are set.
“UK museums are a rarity in world terms in being free to visitors. Almost all other museums in the world charge for entry which means that even when government spending is cut, they still have a budget. We have been working with UK Trade & Investment to identify other world markets and we are making some good early progress.”
As well as beginning to look more in-depth at the global opportunities in the sector, Payne also believes there is scope to increase the number of products Deep Visuals sells to museums and galleries. He says the company is keen to work with partners already active in the space to increase its penetration.
At this stage in the company’s development, the key challenge, according to Payne , is to take a focused approach to their commercialisation efforts, particularly as “the underlying technology can be applied to so many markets.”
That said, Deep Visuals is comfortable with the progress it is making in its launch market and so is putting out some feelers to establish where to look for the encore. The company is talking to a range of potential customers who own large picture collections, including newspapers. Payne says the response has been good, but stresses that the initial discussions are still at an early stage.
Among the other new verticals the company is looking at is online retailing, where Deep Visuals believes its technology could offer potential customers “ a different journey” through a product catalogue. “Shopping online isn’t so far removed from walking down an aisle in a store, traditional navigation allows only fairly narrow searches”, Payne says.
And Deep Visuals is already making inroads into the education market, where it is working with Anglia Ruskin University and the Scott Polar Museum - through a research grant from EEDA - to develop a system to help school children to understand narrative using images. The system is due to start testing in schools next month.
The fact that Deep Visuals is able to take quite a considered approach to these ordinarily rather pressing issues of marketing and business development is largely a function of the way the company was founded.
When it was announced that Kodak Research was closing the doors on its Cambridge operation, Payne received a phone call from a senior manager at Kodak’s consumer photographic business unit in the US expressing his regret that the project the facility was working on for them would not be delivered.
Having spoken to Fry who was leading the project, Payne rang back the next day to suggest that the pair continued to work on the project through a spin-out company, selling it on the grounds that Kodak would still get the technology but at a much reduced cost. He reports that his hand was “bitten off” and a “chunk of money” - essentially a bundle of contracts to see the company through its first year - handed over to launch Deep Visuals.
Some elements of the tech concepts Deep Visuals has developed for Kodak have already found their way into products, including a method to navigate images which has found its way into one of Kodak’s latest digital cameras and a method for showing montages of images which has been designed into a digital picture frame.
“Having spoken to quite a few other founders of startup companies in Cambridge, it seems we are almost unique in not having to go out and actively look for finance.
“This means that not only have we been able to concentrate fully on developing our business but also, we’ve been able to follow our own vision without any outside interference - we’re keen to maintain that level of control, at least for the time being.”
