Plinkart becomes first UK Google Mobile acquisition
One major result from last year’s Android developer challenge was it allowed Google to tease out some great android products into the market. So far Google appears to have liked one UK originated
idea so much they have bought the whole company.
Plinkart was founded by two guys, equipped with a Google- friendly PhDs, who decided to take visual search to the next level. Founded on a business model of linking their image database to allposters.com, they were hardly going to become rich off the back of flogging art.
What was of interest to the Goog was their implementation of visual search which hopefully when scaled into Google’s secret sauce could produce benefits for future android imaging products (like Google Goggles) They also were in the process of launching an api which if allowed to come to fruition could be built into a future iteration of android. Hopefully- Google’s aquisition, means that we are one more step closer to having a mobile phone that can understand the images that it is processing- and produce relevant data.
I was fortunate to be at one of the initial pre- ADC Plinkart presentations, where they described that the core algorithms that make up Plinkart could identify pretty much anything as long as it had a database. If this technology is eventually rolled into Google- proper it could produce powerful improvements with Google images and picasaweb.
Google’s core founding goal is to organise the worlds information and using plinkart, will produce some interesting theoretical results particularly when applied to a large image database such as google streetview. A future iteration of Google could be used to find and understand brands such as Tescos and Macdonalds and give an even more accurate classified listing. Add in character recognition and you could potentially build a database of Mexican restaurants in the UK, just by asking the right visual search question.
Traditionally us Brits have always been world leaders when it comes to generating new ideas and inventions. With weather like ours -what else could we do indoors when we aren’t at the pub? In fact you might not even be reading this if our Sir Tim wouldn’t have decided one day to invent the internet.The UK has always been passionate about technology and forerunners in mobile innovation- I think its about time UK government to start paying attention and encouraging the growth of these companies.
Hopefully the PlinkArt purchase will be the first of the next generation of winning UK based mobile companies who can show their worth on the world stage and flourish.
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