Great product created by very young experts in Croatia
Marko Mihovilić and Saša Škevin.
PhotoMath team in the city of Zagreb.
| Summary. It’s really stunning: the PhotoMath video on Vimeo has very quickly reached 2 million views. Their web page has over 9000 page views each minute, and the iOS app alone was downloaded more than 1.6M times in less than three days in the Automn 2014, becoming the top free app in most countries around the world. It has been created by Jurica Cerovec and his colleagues in Croatia. Their products have recently been shown with great success in London, and they have created enormous interest throughout the world. They open completely new perspectives in education and other areas. |
PhotoMath A Math Tutor in Your Pocket
| Microblink is a software development company that develops computer vision technology for mobile devices. Our customers, in over 30 different countries across the globe, include banks & financial institutions, telecoms, retailers, system integrators, startups and other service and production oriented companies. In 2012 a pilot project was created with the aim to eliminate the need for manual data entry for bill payments. The project grew to a PhotoPay Ltd. which was founded in 2013. After implementation of PhotoPay technology in several major EU banks, it evolved into a much wider scope and in 2014 MicroBLINK Ltd. was founded in London as a mobile vision software company. We make mobile devices smarter and easier to use in different business processes using mobile machine vision technology. From real time recognition of bills, payment slips to barcode and ID scanning technology and reading mathematical expressions – microblink technology is an enabler of better business processes – that save time and improve customer experience. Source microblink.com |
which have created enormous interest throughout the world: PhotoMath, PhotoPay and more.
Listen to his very interesting lecture on the video below, delivered in London in 2014.
Damir Sabol and Jurica Cerovec are cofounders of MicroBLINK, and developers of machine-vision technology for mobile devices, jointly with their colleagues:
PhotoMath can solve any equation in a textbook just by looking at it with your phone’s camera, and will show you how it got to the solution.
| To all PhotoMath users, followers, lovers and haters First of all, we want to thank you all for the tremendous interest you showed for our PhotoMath app. It’s really stunning: the PhotoMath video on Vimeo has very quickly reached 2 million views. Our web page has over 9000 page views each minute, and the iOS app alone was downloaded more than 1.6M times in less than three days, becoming the top free app in most countries around the world. Reasonably, your expectations are high, and we seriously intend to live up to them. Having in mind lots of different articles in the media, we feel compelled to explain some things regarding PhotoMath and our goals in more details.  PhotoMath is an app which uses a mobile phone camera to recognize mathematical expressions. It instantly solves a recognized expression, and displays step-by-step solution.  PhotoMath uses MicroBlink‘s proprietary mobile machine vision technology to automatically recognize text of a math problem. This is one of our innovations: we do very accurate and fast text recognition on a mobile device, without using an internet connection. Ironically, to do very simple math calculations using PhotoMath, we had to implement highly complex math in our image processing and text recognition algorithms. |
PhotoPay – Croatian payment slip demo
| MicroBlink Launches PhotoMath To Solve Math Equations With A Phone Romain Dillet Imagine you are a 14-year-old kid again. You need to do this really difficult math exercise for tomorrow, but have no idea how to do it. What if you could just open an app on your phone, point your camera at your textbook, snap a picture and get the detailed instructions to solve your equation. This is exactly what PhotoMath does. The team is launching this app today at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in London. MicroBlink is a text recognition technology company that has been developing a powerful engine for mobile phone cameras for the past two years. The startup is in the business of selling its core technology to companies who might find it useful. “We are not an educational company, we are promoting our machine vision technology with PhotoMath,” co-founder and CEO Damir Sabol told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. And this is key to understanding what MicroBlink is all about. PhotoMath is a neat little app, but it’s just one potential use case of MicroBlink’s text recognition engine. Before PhotoMath, the company worked on PhotoPay, a service to simplify bill payments. Whenever you receive a paper bill, you can scan it and your bank will automatically pay it for you. MicroBlink licensed PhotoPay to 14 different banks around Europe. So how is this text recognition engine better? First, it works in real-time, meaning that you will get instant feedback on what you are scanning. Second, the company worked a lot on accuracy. While it doesn’t work with handwritten text, MicroBlink believes that the company’s accuracy is simply amazing. Finally, the startup provides ready-to-use SDKs for particular use cases, such as bill payments or equation solving. “We started developing our technology three years ago. Now, our technology is mature enough, so we are going to develop broader usages with it,” Sabol said. The company is based in London and Croatia and hasn’t raised any money so far. But now that MicroBlink’s technology is mature, the startup is now focused on growth and product updates. But I’m sure it will easily find a ton of hopeless students to try out its new PhotoMath app. Q&A Judges: Alice Bentinck (Entrepreneur First), Simon Cook (DFJ Esprit), Aliott Cole (Octopus Ventures), Christophe Maire (Atlantic Labs) Question: This is very neat. It seems like a plot to get a six-year old to finally get a smartphone. The question that I have is whether that’s the basis for a standalone business. Answer: We started in the banking sector, we have 14 banks using our technology. We have developed this technology over the past three years, and we are already making money now in the enterprise space. Q: What is your fundamental breakthrough? A: We created algorithms specifically for mobile devices. We have a product that is called PhotoPay. You scan payment slips. This is the technology that we used to build PhotoMath. PhotoMath goes further when it comes to accuracy and speed. It also showcases our technology. Q: Does the technology work on static images? A: We use video frames. We combine the OCR results of these consecutive video frames. Q: Does it work with handwritten text? A: Not yet. It works but it’s quite a difficult problem. Q: In PhotoMath, does it show the steps to solve an equation? A: Yes, it’s already there. Q: Are you charging for the technology? A: We provide a free SDK, and depending of the monetization strategy of our partners, it’s a revenue share or a license per year. Source techcrunch.com |
PhotoMath, Mireo, etc. (extensive reports, in Croatian)
Tijana Žganec, Saša Škevin and Jurica Cerovec.
The MicroBLINK team. Photo from Netokracija.
Formated for CROWN by Darko Žubrinić
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