The quick facts

• You will get access to the recognition of media covers (CDs, DVDs, Books, Movie Posters). That’s close to ten million items (!)
• We offer a service in the cloud, i.e. you don’t install anything locally
• You access the API via REST (essentially standard HTTP)
• FREE with up to 50 requests per day
• Sample code for Java, Ruby, PHP, Objective C available
• We have a new developers section on our web-site with more details

We can’t wait to see what people create, here are some things we would like to see ourselves:

• clients for mobile platforms other than iPhone and Android
• something with Twitter
• something with Facebook
• use the webcam
• a (mobile) movie guide (snap pictures of movie posters…)
• recommended reading (for book covers)

But more than these ideas we would love to see stuff that we didn’t even dream of.

Essentially, you can build your own Google Goggles or even cooler apps! And we take care of the geeky image search algorithms for you.

So, check it out!

STU members can find all STUcard partner companies in the free quarterly published STUmag. The publication is more than a catalogue of rebates but a trendy magazine for students with a circulation of 265′000. It offers insight stories about trend sports, language schools and other interesting topics people from 15 to 30 care about.

In 2010 STUmag is going a step further. They partnered up with us to make their entire magazine interactive. Using our image recognition application kooaba for iPhone and Android STUmag readers can now snap a picture of every page in their favorite magazine to explore, share and remember it.

Advertising clients such as language school provider Yalea.com used kooaba to make their print ad interactive and extend it with content on the Internet. A picture of it with kooaba is enough to get additional information about their offering directly on the reader’s smartphone. They included links to their website to find out more about their language school in Costa Rica, to their YouTube channel to get an impression about Argentina or to Facebook to become fan of their partner magazine VeinteMundos. Try it yourself and snap a picture of this page with kooaba!

After nearly 20 years in the research labs, Augmented Reality is taking shape as one of the next major waves of Internet innovation, overlaying and infusing the physical world with digital media, information and experiences. We believe AR must be fundamentally open, interoperable, extensible, and accessible to all, so that it can create the kinds of opportunities for expressiveness, communication, business and social good that we enjoy on the web and Internet today. As one step toward this goal of an Open AR web, we are organizing AR DevCamps technical sessions and hacking opportunities in an open format, BarCamp style.

Together with ETH Zurich, we will lead a session on the use of visual (natural) features for Augmented Reality. We will also have a special announcement for developers.
The registration link for AR Devcamp can be found here.

Furthermore, co-located there will be a special Mobile Monday (“Hands on AR”) with an Augmented Reality tour through Zurich (starting at 4 pm).
For the first time, we will show an augmented reality prototype to the general public. It will be an application running on Android phones, with features similar to the ones we announced in this video a little while ago:

So, come and join us to see a glimpse of the (augmented) future. (Registration link for Mobile Monday is here.)

Note: This is a repost from our CTO's private blog. We thought it might be of interest to the startup crowd, which reads our blog.

Running kooaba now for a couple of years a few tools turned out to be handy. Let’s just assume you start a tech company with at total of six coworkers (3 engineering, 2 business development / marketing , 1 management). Here’s a setup that might work, for your convenience and your business plan including approximate cost.

Google apps

Get the power of gmail and Google Calendar for your business. What I like in particular: gmail with IMAP (accessed via Apple mail). Also, Google documents, to collaborate on documents and creating surveys. (Most used at kooaba: spreadsheets). The standard edition should be fine in the beginning.

Cost: Standard edition: FREE. / Premier: 6 x 50 = 300 USD/year.

Basecamp

The breakthrough tool for project management brought to you by 37signals. We use this for general project management, sharing docs, messages, etc. for all team members independent of role (sales or engineering). The Basic plan should be fine.

Cost (Basic Plan): 12 x 24 = 288 USD / year.

Skype or Yammer

We use Skype chat within the team throughout the day. Faster than email, but less obtrusive than talking to somebody or phonecall. (Why this is important? Ask Joel (Human Task Switches Considered Harmful) , or read Getting Real). Plus, obviously you can call clients, partners etc.

Cost: FREE.

Salesforce or Highrise

Salesforce is the tool of choice to manage your sales and customer contacts. What I like in particular is the web-form integration, which lets you create leads directly from contact forms on your web-site. You can really just use the Group edition, and this should be fine fort he beginning. Alternatively use Highrise from 37 signals. Is simpler and nicer in the UI, but it has less (no) features when it comes to tracking revenue etc.

Cost: 3x17x12 = 612 USD / year. (https://www.salesforce.com/smallbusinesscenter/editions/)

Trac + agilo

For software development, trac has been a popular tool for quite a while. Subversion integration, integrated WiKi make it irreplaceable for us. Since we switched to Scrum, we were also looking for a tool which supports Scrum and integrates with trac: we found it with agilo. There is a free and a pro edition.

Cost: Free / 4 x 10 x12 = 480 USD/year.

Amazon web services

Amazon web services are really the coolest thing since sliced bread. Just outsource all your computation needs. Now, how much you need obviously depends on what kind of business you are in. Let’s assume you run some kind of web service, The first year you may need some 2 web server instances, one database, and some 500GB of storage. (I wrote another post on how you run an image search engine like kooaba on amazon web services).

Cost:
2 reserved small instances: approx. USD 2000 / year

1 RDS database server (large instance) : about 2000 USD /year

500 GB S3 storage with some in/out : approx. 1000 / USD year

Total: about 5000 USD a year.

Google Analytics / web-site optimizer

Everybody knows what good (Web-) design is. So everybody wants to add his/her 2-cents. Let the numbers speak instead. Using A-B testing you can try several variations of your website, and measure what works best. Google web-site optimizer is a tool which helps you to do just that.

Cost: Free

Mailchimp

E-mail marketing campaigns and newsletters made easy. The coolest feature is in my opinion RSS integration, so you can publish your blog-posts to an e-mail newsletter, too. How we use it at kooaba: we have a dedicated category “Newsletter” on our blog, which has also its own RSS feed. This is attached to mailchimp. Whenever you post some stuff on your blog, you can decide whether to send it to put it on the newsletter or not simply by adding the post it to the Newsletter category or not. Settings at mailchimp allow to send the collected new blog-posts only once a week or month for instance.

Cost: There is a free plan which should be ok in the beginning.

Wordpress

Talking about blogging: Wordpress is an awesome and easy-to-use tool to publish your blog-posts. Even better, with its “Pages” feature you can use it as a Content Management System for your complete web-site. And it’s free, too!

All in all you end up with about 6600 USD a year (5000 computation and 1600 for „tools“).

So, start signing up.

Next Monday one of the most important mobile industry events starts in Barcelona: The Mobile World Congress.

We’re especially looking forward to demonstrating our Interactive Print solution to MWC attendees as part of the Mobile Augmented Reality Showcase. It will take place at the Courtyard on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 between 5pm – 7pm. The atmosphere will be very informal and the “speed dating” format will be used. This means attendees will find a gold colored sash and that person will demo their product for a few minutes, getting then a chance to talk with people in a Q&A. Then there will be the sound of a bell or whistle and people will move to another demonstration. You can find more information about the event and showcasing companies on mwc2010.mobi/ar_showcase/.

If you’re around, we would love to meet you!

Perfetti Van Melle are currently running an exciting campaign called “For Diamond Whiteness” to promote their new product Mentos Kiss.

They choose printed flyers as one of their lead communications medium. To create an interaction with their brand they partnered up with us to kooabaize their flyer.

Consumers are asked to snap a picture of the Mentos flyer with the camera of their mobile phone and send it to kooaba in order to have the chance to win very attractive prizes such as a trip to the MTV Europe Music Awards 2010, an Apple iPhone or a Nintendo Wii video game console. Once the image has been recognized by kooaba’s recognition technology, the consumer enters the sweepstake.

If you like our campaign please vote for it on XIPAX. We appreciate it!

Every single page in Blick is kooabaized. This means readers can snap a picture of any page they’re interested in using our smartphone app. Once kooaba’s image recognition technology finds the corresponding digital version of it, readers can easily comment or recommend the article to friends using email, Facebook or Twitter.

If the reader signed up for a kooaba account all these pages will automatically be stored in his personal kooaba library. Bookmarking in the real world becomes reality and the pages can be easily accessed anytime. This can be handy if you want to remember certain articles in order to read them at home on the big screen, keep them for reference, or share them with friends.

Besides sharing and remembering (storing) pages readers can explore additional content on selected stories which have been enriched with videos, images or links to other relevant articles on websites.

Ultimately static print ads become interactive and offer a unique digital channel to the publisher, advertisers and the readers.

Pages which contain additional content are marked with the kooaba logo. To help the reader discover the added value.

Please find below some impressions from today’s issue:

A snapshot of ANY page with kooaba is enough to explore (additional) content, share the story with friends and remember it.

You can find more information about our partnership in the German press release, the full page article about the service on our library and a “how to” video on blick.ch/kooaba.

Hint: Simply snap a picture of Blick’s frontpage with kooaba to get additional images of today’s Blick girl. It even works off the screen.

Red Herring’s Global 100 list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Google, Yahoo, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.

“Choosing the best out of the previous three years was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed down our list from 1,200 potential companies to 200 finalists.  Trying to get it down to 100 companies was a task upon itself.  The top 100 companies who were chosen should be extremely proud, the competition was difficult.”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the greatest business opportunities from around the world.

Multiple Results

Many images on media covers are used for different editions (e.g. for the regular album, the extended japanese version and the limited collector’s edition). Or they are used for related products (e.g. for the soundtrack, the DVD and the movie poster). With Multiple Results it’s now possible to explore all editions and products which share the same packshot once you took a picture of one of them with kooaba. You can see an example in the video below with the soundtrack of “Quantum of Solace”. Or try it yourself and snap a picture of Coldplay’s album cover “Viva la Vida“. You will be surprised how many products share that image – not limited to music!

Login Status Display

You can use kooaba’s visual search for media products and interactive print magazines and newspapers right away and without entering any login details to explore additional related information about them. Although you miss a great part of our solution if you don’t have a kooaba account: our handy online library. This is where all your search queries and related information are stored for later reference and where you can share your explored products and articles with your friends. We developed the Login Status Display feature to tell you if you’re logged in every time you start kooaba on your iPhone. This way you don’t have to check your settings if you’re unsure if you entered your login details.

Please have a closer look at both features in this video:

And…

kooaba also got faster and better! Recently we deployed a significantly faster version of our core engine, plus larger index.

Please let us know what you think of the new features!

Btw. It took Apple only six (!) hours after the submission to approve our latest update of the kooaba app. We like that.

Besides many great new extras inside the magazine, iPhone and Android users with the kooaba app can snap a picture of any page inside the magazine they’re interested in. After the image (we call it “Smart Visual”) is recognized, kooaba finds the digital version of the article the user took a picture of.

After this process the mobile application leads the user to a result page where he can explore, remember and share the article.

Let us give you an example with the article about IT milestones of the last 10 years on page 19. Once you took a picture of it with kooaba you can:

- Explore additional content about the story

(e.g. watch a video about the first iPod presentation by Steve Jobs back in 2001 right on your mobile phone)

- Remember it
(e.g. because you want to download Firefox as an alternative to your existing web browser when you’re at home)

- Share that page with friends
(e.g. send them a link to the article by email and point out that the iPod is among them)

Now grab the latest CHIP issue and try it. And by the way, there’s a great article (1/2) about kooaba in it.