Ian Parnes and Brad Folkens explain how the difficulty of searching on the mobile led to the creation of Camfind; a mobile application that returns results for anything you snap an image of, ranging from a lady’s handbag to a live animal. Ian mentions the interest they have received from companies to integrate their product into their own platforms, mainly retail for product matching, price comparison, but also stock photography vendors or even applications for the visually impaired. Brad explains how valuable their app is with over 11 patents filed; how it always returns results (successful image recognition 100% to a varying degree of detail); what their revenue model is and how their $5M funding will help the product develop. The third founder, Dominik Mazur, was mentioned but not present at the interview. Find them on Twitter as @camfind.

Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

2:21 “..we saw the need for something called mobile visual search to be much more improved upon…Google Goggles essentially the same thing but the problem with Google Goggles is it never worked…it would never be above 10 or 20% accurate…”

2:59 “..we went about developing an image recognition platform that gives an answer 100% of the time instead of only 10 or 20% of the time and then it became a useful product…”

8:00 “..the exciting thing about contextual search advertising is, as Google realised, it captures the person’s intent at that very moment; so while I’m interested in; you know the 30 seconds I’m interested in BMWs, throughout the day for example, that’s the golden moment where BMW can advertise and capture my interest…”

  Tech Talks Central interviewed 37 ICT professionals at the Mobile World Congress 2015, the Health & Wellness by ECHAlliance and the Heroes of the Mobile Fringe, events that ran through March 1st to March 4th in Barcelona, Spain.