Here’s a preview of our first novel API in StrongSteam. We’ve been working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for a while, we set ourselves the task of matching a noisy photograph of some text to a pre-seeded database of entries. If you follow my blog you’ll already have seen our example iPhone app for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London (developed in collaboration with Kasabi):

Now rather than having to re-label 10,000 Latin plant labels with QR codes Kew can now use our matching technology on their existing labels to enrich a visitor’s experience of the gardens (and it turns out that a lot of visitors have iPhones and use Kew’s official app).

With our API we can do the same kind of task with photos of plaques from the London Science Museum where we match against 836 entries scraped from the Science Museum website. In the following video we match against text from the information plaque of Old Bess (née ‘Beelzebub’) in the Energy Hall:

This is just a preview, we’ve sent the Python & cURL API to some of our alpha users and will be inviting more in over the coming month. Here are some more OCR videos and here’s a work-in-progress demo of our image matching (using PhoneGap on an Android):

If you’d like to get access to our RESTful cloud-based computer vision APIs please sign-up on our StrongSteam homepage. Soon we’ll be adding raw OCR (with co-ordinates and font size reports) and image matching (particularly for stuff like brand logos and beer labels).

We’re super-keen to hear about your use cases and needs – please send me an email (ian AT strongsteam.com) and tell me what you need. We used to work on these problems in my consultancy (Mor Consulting), now we’re working to make our IP more available to all.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m very chuffed to say that our 2nd AI/Data/API meetup will take place next Wednesday 4th April  7pm at the Santiago MakerSpace at Avenida Italia 850 (map). The HackerSpace is a 15 minute walk south/east from the CMI office, just off of Bilbao.

UPDATE we’re meeting at 7pm (not 7.30pm) and we have an extra speaker – Skype co-founder Ahti Heinla will tell the “Real story behind the Skype success story” in an extra 30 minute slot. Here’s the Meetup announce with full details. Remember to Attend if you’re coming and do UnAttend if you realise you can’t make it later (the numbers are limited).

The event is free (but bring cash for the specialist beer – see end of this post). Our four speakers will talk for 15 minutes each:

• Ian and Kyran with StrongSteam with live demos of optical character recognition (OCR) and artwork recognition mobile apps (angellist)
• Tim of BackYardBrains – “Curious about how your brain works? With the help of our friends the humble Amazonian cockroach, we will teach you the electrical properties of neurons.” – will include demos and hardware you can buy (angellist)
• Ashley of PaperHater will give a live demo of their receipt/paper scanning and OCR application and talk about how they created a spinoff
• Javier Gramajo of SQMOS will give a live demo of their augmented reality Android app (angellist)

StrongSteam and BackYardBrains are Round 2, PaperHater is in Round 3 and SQMOS are staying in Santiago after Round 1. Stick around after to learn about the hackerspace and drink Ignacio’s specialist beers.

The Maker/Hacker Space is the first in Santiago, here’s some news about their launch and they have a circuit building workshop  on 6-8th April. In this space you will find:

• 3D printers
• Robots with legs and robots that fly
• 8 bit computers
• Pinball machines
• Dirty work space (CNC lathe and other construction equipment)
• Lots of creative equipment that you can use to build electronic, mechanical, art and music things if you choose to become a member

Ignacio Correa of ClubCervezas will bring along specialist Chilean beers (to buy) – he took us on a beer tasting night in Bario Brasil a couple of weeks back and introduced us to a whole range of lovely local beers (300 microbreweries!) that we hadn’t tasted before. Bring some money if you’d like to try unusual and hard-to-find Chilean beers (my pockets will be stuffed with cash).

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

It has been a pretty nutty couple of weeks. PyCon a week back was ace, we signed up some clients and partners for StrongSteam and got offered investment. David Kim was good enough to interview me so I got to demo our OCR for text recognition and image recognition APIs via some mobile demos – check out the second video on David’s Enthought post.

Last night we got featured on Jason Calacanis’ and Tyler Crowley‘s This Week In Startups (@twistartups), via StartupChile. This was a bit nuts. I pitched earlier in the week for James (@jameskennedy) and Tyler’s (@looglalanguage) BizCamp pitch contest, we won the ‘best 4′ competition and that gave us a pass to be featured on the show. A competition was run yesterday here for 20 other companies to pitch to get a 5th place on the show. Once the show started I was up second.

Check out the video below at 0:19:00 to 0:32:00 to see me pitch and then at 1:05:00 to 1:07:30 to see the three judges decide that StrongSteam was ‘best bet for investment’. Being judged was fun. Focusing on giving our users what they need from our API is more our focus for now.

A few days before I was submitting the second month of reimbursement paperwork for our StartupChile placement. Emily has written a long piece on this already.

Below you can see my pile of paperwork – for each transaction (few big purchases, some contractors, some travel) I have a full audit trail that starts at the receipt and ends, via banks and credit cards, to a bank account in my name, with proof that I own that bank account. For contractors I include a full contract too. This proof is required, this is the ‘price’ of giving up 0% equity under a government scheme. It took 8 hours including my meeting with my account executive. They haven’t reimbursed this round yet, assuming they don’t reject anything (which is far from guaranteed) then this only costs 8 hours (last month cost 2 days). If they reject stuff then maybe I’ll invest a total of 10-16 hours.

Something that’s painfully obvious from yesterday’s pitching and today’s BizCamp is that pretty much all of us here lack t-shirts with our name, logo & strap-line. I could really have done with t-shirts at PyCon, I pitched to 100+ of the 2,300 delegates but got on stage in front of them all once – if someone had seem our name and noticed ‘AI’ or ‘computer vision’ then I bet they’d have come over for a chat. Lesson learned.

I’m also going to give a shout out back to Moo in the UK for their cool little business cards. So many people here don’t have any cards yet, this is such a mistake. Everyone needs cards, I’ve used Moo for years, I’d vote you go via them and get the mini cards and  a plastic case (they’re robust, mine is >2 years old and is still fine).

Finally – Vivek Wadhwa kicked a bunch of us up the arse two nights ago and again last night talking about self-mentorship (given that there is no formal mentorship out here). I’m going to be organising a group who want to self mentor such that we can meet regularly (maybe every week), set goals, be held accountable and basically focus on getting ready for demo day in 2 month’s time. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

For now this is nearly the end of a crazy 2 months. Tonight I’m going to get a take-out Chinese and settle in front of a movie.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

As ever with a startup – there’s always too much to do and the game is all about juggling burning balls whilst figuring out which shouldn’t be dropped. We’re rather busy here.

Yesterday Emily and I finished the paperwork for our first reimbursement round at StartupChile. This is the part of the process that gets the most complaints from the startups here. We spent 5 hours yesterday preparing our first £5k or so for refund (flights, visas, first month’s rent, various expenses). All going well we’ll get 90% of this money back in a few weeks. Quite possibly we’ll have missed a massively important but otherwise minor detail somewhere and the admin team will reject up to 90% of the receipts (which can be resubmitted in a month) – such horror stories abound from Round 1.

The future expenses that we’ve already paid for like my trip to PyCon (next month) and flights can’t be claimed yet as I’ve yet to attend – we can only reimburse for definitely-spent money. The argument is that we could refund a future plane or conference ticket having already claimed it here through StartupChile, so getting ‘money for nothing’. This means I’m carrying another few thousand pounds of expenses that I can’t refund for at least another 6 weeks. Ho hum. Cashflow is king, I’m glad we had reserves when we flew out here.

Emily notes that the next application round opens soon, I know that Round 3 starts to arrive in a week’s time. I hope everyone who is already here updates the wiki so the obvious newbie questions that we asked don’t get repeated all over again!

Talking of PyCon – I’m pretty excited to be teaching High Performance Computing 1 this year. I’ve made some updates from last year’s course and I’ll get to tell some stories this year as we’re using this tech in StrongSteam. Getting to catch up with Travis (numpy originator), Fijal (numpypy in PyPy) and others will be rather awesome. I’ve also accepted a teaching position for EuroSciPy in August.

StrongSteam continues to develop. We’re still not taking on alpha users, we’re focusing on our first client from London until the end of March and then we’ll invite people to come play with our first bit of tech. In April we release our first iPhone app – it’ll let you take photographs of Latin plant labels at botanical gardens, we’ll then match them using Optical Character Recognition and vision techniques to a database of plants and give you information, pictures and videos (via WikiPedia, GeoSpecies and BBC:Wildlife) in return. We’re working with Kasabi (data partner announce) as our data partner.

Everything is backed by Python, our third member (Balthazar Rouberol @baltorouberol) joins us this week and he’ll wrap the client API as a Python package so we can start to distribute it to users who have joined our announce list (see our homepage).

We hope to expand this tech to make a similar app for use at the London Science Museum – getting videos and schematics for all the wonderful devices at the Science Museum direct to the smartphone seems like a wonderful way to enhance a trip (Steam Engines puffing! Babbage’s machines calculating!). We’re really excited to see what devs can do once they can reliably match text from labels, plaques and information cards – despite noise, distortion and obstruction – to a database of matching entries. This should make for some fun mobile apps.

I’m also preparing to declare myself as ‘tribe leader’ for Data Mining here at StartupChile – this means our Data meetups will gather more of the Return Value Agenda points (the points you have to get to qualify for the $40k grant under the programme), it’ll also give me more reasons to go open doors at the local telecomms companies.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

This Thursday at 7pm our StrongSteam will run a friendly pub meet around:

• Data mining
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Robots
• Hackerspaces

The goal is to bring people together from StartupChile and the local community who are interested in the above subjects. The meeting is just a pub meetup, if there’s demand then I’ll organise speakers for the next one.

The locations is Bar Lastarria, 70 Lastarria, Santiago (map). Here’s a photo:

Confirmed attendees include:

• Junar
• RobotsChile (local hackerspace)
• howsociable.com
• backyardbrains.com (the neuroscience guys)
• loogla.com
• credii.com
• Sqmos.com
• veryseriousgames.com

Here’s the official announce.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

A few days back we signed our StartupChile contracts, now we’re official. Apparently our ID cards are available but there’s no word on bank accounts yet. The admin rolls forward but it is a bit boring now. The feeling here is still very positive, we’ve gained some Return Value Agenda (RVA) points by meeting with the local university and StrongSteam runs its first event this week (next post).

In StrongSteam we’ve made progress – we’re now working with Kasabi on an optical character recognition project on Latin plant labels, they have large plant data sets which we’ll marry up with a user’s experience whilst walking around places like Kew Gardens. We’re being interviewed by the BBC on this shortly.

Behind the scenes I’ve extended the python-tesseract wrapper with a nicer access class, shortly I’ll post that to github. It makes it really easy to get characters and co-ordinates from scenes. Image processing tools will be available via StrongSteam to make the task easier.

For March I’ve also bought my PyCon tickets to run my High Performance Computing class. I had no idea it’d take longer to fly from Santiago to Santa Clara than Heathrow to Santiago! It is 20 hours north vs 18 hours west.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’d better log our first few days before the crazyness of signing up to the programme kicks off on Monday. Emily (my fiancée) is also blogging for her TinyEars StartupChile project.

We arrived safely on Wednesday after 18 hours of travel – BA treated us well (reasonably comfy seats and reasonable food). We were hustled into a taxi at the airport (at a rather pricey £45) but got delivered quickly to our rather nice apartments in swanky Providence.

We’ve had three nights of parties now, first with Jon and Anna (so lovely to catch up!), then lunch with Emily’s madrina Johanna (@J_Angulo) and on to meet our padrino Fernando (@fdelsolar), and finally two Phase 1 leaving dos last night. Pisco and rum seem to flow from all bottles. We seem to have found a nice Pale Ale too and London Pride has been sighted in bottles. We got to meet Fernando of SQMOS, the data guys of Junar and Tom of Rentalita (Tom’s Santiago tumblr) along with a whole bunch of others, some of whom are shortly off to travel South America.

Yesterday we climbed San Cristobel (photo) and met a Llama (pronounced ‘yama’). Today we had a nice run along the river at Tobalaba and Kyran has pointed out some other running sites.

Tonight we have another dinner, Sunday we chill (a touch, and prepare a demo), then Mon-Thurs are sign-up days, government ID card days, bank days and demo days all rolled into one lump. The week after we ‘officially’ start on our projects (even if we have launched StrongSteam to our first users already!).

Wifi tip – in the business district there are lots of StarBucks, these have free wifi when you buy coffee.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

This is a quick update – we’re flying tomorrow to Santiago for 6 months of the StartupChile project ($40k funding, no equity, hundreds of projects flying in from all over the world). If you’re interested in taking 6 months to build your own project I’d suggest you take a look at applying to the next round.

Kyran Dale and I are flying out to build our StrongSteam AI and data mining toolkit (its a cloud API with local language bindings). We have our first client and we launched the alpha API to our first testers a couple of days back. Once we’re in Santiago we’ll add some more testers, expand the API and deliver our first project, then after March we can really ramp up the creation of data mining APIs for people to play with. We’re excited to be in talks with a few people about releasing the alpha at a couple of hackday events, it’ll be really interesting to see what people do with our optical character recognition, image matching, face detection and image manipulation tools. If you’re interested in trying out the Python API then do sign-up to the mailing list on the homepage.

Emily (my fiancée) is also heading out with her TinyEars iPad app, she’ll build a child-friendly app that’ll help kids learn to read out loud by using speech recognition to spot errors in their speech. She’ll be looking for testers with iPad 2s and young kids who are learning to read, do get in touch if you’re interested in the testing.

We had a fab sendoff at the Northern Lights a few days back, cheers to all who came along

Finally – I’m a bit honoured to have been selected as a teacher at PyCon in the US in March, I’m running a half-day tutorial on High Performance Computing based on my tutorial at EuroPython. We’re using a bunch of these ideas in StrongSteam, it’ll be great to run the tutorial again.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Earlier in the year through Matt Weston a group of us met, funded by the Innovation and Growth Team, to start a peer-group for a set of four (wait for it…) new businesses. The group was successful – and for several of us it led to the realisation that our plans at the time weren’t right. Emily and I were working on SocialTies as our project and trying to find a business hidden in the app, we decided against it and looked to other ideas.

Here’s what we’re working on. I hope it’ll encourage a few other folk to think about building new businesses.

The IGT funding dried up and so we now meet informally, our projects are:

• Chris has the t-shirt brand MightyHumble (twitter)
• Jacky has her recruitment-training firm Rise with Precruitment
• Jo and Will are building Bookish for selling crafted books and literature
• Emily is building the TinyEars iPad speech-recognition educational platform out of RadicalRobot
• With Kyran Dale I’m working on our StrongSteam AI and data mining web API out of Mor Consulting

I mentioned that I’d do a little write-up before we leave the country, Chris sent me this blurb about MightyHumble:

mighty humble is a small organic clothing company that believes in creativity, good design and responsible business.  We collaborate with hand picked creative talent to produce unique products using the most ethical and environmental sound materials, manufacturing and suppliers we can find. Our 100% cotton t-shirts are ethically made, certified organic by the Soil Association and manufactured solely using sustainable energy generated from wind power. We envisage our collection as wearable art which enables us to bring the work of some incredible talented people to a wider audience.  For mighty humble business is not just about turning a profit.  Experience has taught us that there’s more too it than that!  We believe a business can (and should) be a creative, fun and positive force.

Jo describeds Bookish as:

the home of unique literary gifts, typographic loveliness and beautiful bookish things – for readers, writers, dreamers, thinkers and bibliophiles everywhere

Jackie says:

Sales Precruitment is all about helping MDs of growing digital and technology companies prepare for recruiting their first (and additional) sales person.  Setting realistic targets, putting measurements in place, interviewing and induction, these are just a few of the things we can help with.  All this is done face to face at present but 2012 is the year I work out how to offer some of this support online… wish me luck!!

From January Emily, Kyran and myself are off to Chile for the StartupChile project, we’re taking TinyEars and StrongSteam as our 6 month projects. A part of our requirement for StartupChile is that we help build the entrepreneurial community – given our work building OpenCoffeeSussex, SheSays, FivePoundApp and GirlGeekDinners we figure we’re well placed to help bring interesting folk together. The opportunity to network with several hundred other folk who have jumped country to found new businesses is simply too good to pass up (along with living in a growing, upbeat country with a strong economy, a new language to learn and some Tango to practice).

For our StrongSteam we’re after alpha testers – we want non-AI developers (particularly web and mobile devs) who want access to image recognition, OCR, data mining and clustering tools. Emily is after collaborators and testers – particularly people with kids and iPad 2s.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m a little behind with the blogging so here’s the short version. StrongSteam has been under constant dev for 2 months, we’re close to putting up the first AI tools behind a few Python demos (hopefully it’ll be up next week). I’m talking on this at HackerNewsLondon tomorrow night.

We haven’t (quite) finished the demos so it’ll be a slideshow, I’m thinking of running a workshop in a month or so to show what’s possible, talk through the limitations and possibilities and help people got comfy with the API.

I’m also very pleased to say that we were accepted into the StartupChile programme alongside RadicalRobot (my better half). In StrongSteam Kyran and I will get 6 months in Santiago with a $40k budget (for no equity!) to build our API and this opens the door to further travel. We’re also very happy to welcome Balthazar Rouberol (linkedin) to our team, he’ll be joining us remotely as an intern for 6 months.

Our biggest priority now is to get the alpha out there. If you’re curious to see what we’re doing please follow us via @strongsteamapi and join the mailing list on the strongsteam homepage.

We also have two surveys – the first is so you can tell us about your general AI interest, the second focuses on some of the points raised in the first to tell us more about your needs. We’d really appreciate your input here if you have 10 minutes to spare.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.