We’re pleased to announce the availability of the “kooaba Paperboy” Android app. Starting today, you can download the “kooaba Paperboy” Android app for free onto any Android device.
Now no matter where you are, Paperboy delivers digital extras for print to you. To use our service, simply snap a picture of the page with your favorite magazine article and instantly get the e-paper of the page in return (please find the list with supported publications at the bottom of the page). Additional benefits: Sharing of the page via email, Facebook or Twitter and saving the page in your personal online archive on my.kooaba.com or in Evernote. In addition, Paperboy automatically recognizes websites and internet links and you get the URL in return (without cumbersome manual typing of long URLs). Where supported by media houses, you can explore related information like videos, images, 3D animations or links to selected topics.
We’re glad to be able to make an even greater commitment to bringing kooaba Paperboy onto mobile devices today and, as always, we’d love your feedback so please tell us what you think.
Finally, it’s definitely worth mentioning that as our mobile efforts expand, we’re hiring more people. If you are interested, please check out our jobs page.
We have been working hard on releasing more improvements to the kooaba Paperboy iPhone app and we are pleased to announce that the updated version of kooaba Paperboy is waiting for you.
So, what’s new?
You benefit from a streamlined picture capturing process where your pictures are automatically submitted (you don’t have to confirm submission to our server after taking a picture). Further, kooaba Paperboy guides you through the picture taking process leading to higher match results. In addition, the updated kooaba Paperboy version supports multitasking functionality (Apple iOS 4 and newer). Finally, we have added high-resolution graphics for iPhone 4.
The high-res Paperboy icon looks awesome on the iPhone 4 retina screen
A frame guides you while taking pictures.
Please visit the App Store and get kooaba Paperboy updated today.
Techcrunch broke the news already yesterday: we closed a CHF 3 million investment round. The round was completed with both new and existing investors. Thus, at this point we want to thank the new investors for the opportunity, and the existing investors for their continued support and trust.
With the new proceeds, we will mainly staff up our marketing and sales team here in Europe and we are planning the US market entry in the coming months. Moreover, we want to expand our partner network, which already includes companies such as Evernote, Wikitude, Layar, Metaio, etc. For this, we are actively looking for new sales and business development staff in Europe and the US.
Obviously we want to stay competitive on the product side, too. This means improving the user experience and scalability of our existing products. (Note: we are looking for new Rails developers), but also remaining a key enabler of the next generation of vision-based Augmented reality, or innovating new product prototypes such as Shooting Star with our academic partners ETH Zurich, KU Leuven and RWTH Aachen.
In particular this round confirms what we experienced the last few months: externally the visual recognition and augmented reality markets clearly are gaining traction now, and internally our products based on the Smart Visuals recognition platform have reached a level, where we can start expanding on the sales and marketing side. This would not have been possible without the support and dedication of our team members, so ultimately they were the key to raising this round. Thank you guys!
Obviously, this is not the end, but the beginning! We are looking forward to putting the money to work, stay tuned!
We have mentioned earlier that we like IKEA here at kooaba. Basically our complete office furniture is from IKEA (you can watch a video how we furnished our new office).
Today the new IKEA Switzerland catalogue (German version) hits the stores and mailboxes, and we thought it’s a good opportunity to make it available on Paperboy.
This is how it works:
You sit on the sofa, enjoying the new Ikea print catalogue. You see an item you want to remember, or share with your friend …
Start Paperboy on your iPhone, snap a picture of the entire page …
You get direct weblinks to the products on the page, you can recommend the page to a friend, ….
Finally, you can also remember the page in your personal online collection on my.kooaba.com or Evernote. This way you can easily remember all the products you liked in the new catalogue for later purchase.
This is what you can expect: at the left a picture taken with Paperboy, at the right the result with the product links on the page:
You see, Paperboy and Ikea help you furnishing your place.
Spotify, the online music streaming service, run a promotion for the band Monarchy, that allows users to hear an exclusive track via an their iPhone app which is powered by kooaba’s image recognition service.
Users will be able to take a picture of a special image on the homepage and use the app to unlock an exclusive Tim Goldsworthy remix of the single, “Love get out of my way,” in the Monarchy app’s “Vault” section.
Have a look at the video below to see how it works:
The Monarchy app can be downloaded for free on the App Store.
There is nothing nicer than a tasty meal. And it always tastes even better when you cook it yourself – at least with appropriate guidance while cooking. That’s why we want to highlight our latest addition to the supported publications on Paperboy: Betty Bossi.
Betty Bossi is THE most well known brand for cookbooks and magazines in Switzerland. Their monthly magazine “Betty Bossy Zeitung” is now interactive and available for kooaba Paperboy.
This means, if you see an interesting recipe in the magazine, you just snap a picture of the page and you can store the PDF of the recipe in your kooaba library, or in Evernote. (In fact, our friends at Evernote tell us that collecting recipes is one of the very popular use cases for Evernote.)
Yesterday, the popular online notetaking service Evernote unveiled that they now support add-ons by third-party partners. Their new Trunk features offerings by developers using Evernote’s APIs to integrate their products with Evernote’s memory-storing capabilities. Business card scanners, voice transcription services or collaboration platforms are some examples.
We’re proud that Paperboy is among these great add-ons. Our free iPhone application helps users to store the digital version of a printed newspaper or magazine page in their Evernote account simply by taking a picture of them. It works like this: When you discover a great article, interesting story or a product ad in one of the supported magazines and newspapers you want to remember you can snap a picture of it using Paperboy. After the page on the photo gets recognized you get a list of options. You can share that page with friends via Facebook, Twitter and email, sometimes explore additional content or simply store the PDF it in your Evernote account. The video in our earlier blog post shows in detail how it works.
Our visual search app “kooaba”, coming soon on OVI store, is overall winner of the NokiaCall4Mobile Applications and has been selected as best-cross platform application.
The five-member jury consisting of Alexander Oswald (Head of Marketing Nokia ASE), DI Dr. Christoph Schaffer (Head of the Mobile Computing department at FH Hagenberg), Jure Sustersic (Forum Nokia), Markus Hametner (Metalab) and Peter Höflehner (Mobile Monday) have thoroughly evaluated all submissions. The criteria were usability, creativity, degree of innovation and technical challenge.
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See here our proud CEO Herbert Bay together with Daniel Hammerl, Nokia Alps & South East Europe, during the award ceremony in Vienna/Austria on July 8.
We are happy to announce the beta release of a project we have been working on for a while now with our friends at ETH Zurich.
It is called Shooting Star and an attempt at complementing our mobile applications with a web tool for a novel use case. Shooting Star uses our image recognition expertise to simplify photo management. It recognizes landmarks and places in your holiday snaps and automatically labels and tags the photos accordingly. Watch the video to learn more:
As you can see, the kind of annotation we bring to photos in fact creates a kind of augmented reality for your personal photo collection. Interesting things in the pictures are highlighted, and related information such as Wikipedia articles is only a mouse click away.
The full power of Shooting Star unleashes if you are a Flickr user. Shooting Star integrates very nicely with Flickr, as shown in the following video:
The product is a closed beta release, and is an experiment for us to start collecting feedback early in the product development process. We believe that photo management is another space, where image recognition provides huge value for end-users. You will hear more about this from us in the near future.
Now hurry and get an invite for the beta under http://www.shootingstarapp.com. As all great things in life, invites for Shooting Star are limited.
metaio‘s exciting new augmented reality browser junaio has extended its capabilities beyond the usual location based internet services. Not only may the user obtain information on nearby POIs such as shops, restaurants or train stations, but the camera’s eye is now able to identify objects and “glue” object specific real-time, dynamic, social and 3D information onto the object itself. This unique feature is now being extended through collaboration with kooaba and its visual object search capability, providing access to kooaba’s extensive object databases. Initially available on Android, an iPhone release will follow soon.
Using the proven metaio technology of image recognition and object tracking, junaio is able to identify an object through the phone’s camera, access relevant information through visual search and then virtually “glue” information displays onto it, rendered in a way only metaio’s augmented reality engine can achieve. By moving the object or camera the user is able to interact with the “glued” augmented reality layer in order to navigate through information, rotate 3D displays, issue game commands, provide feedback, etc.
Peter Meier, metaio’s CTO, comments: “We are taking AR to a new level. The combination of Visual Search and Object Tracking is an amazing and highly intuitive way of interacting with objects and information.”
Make your message stick with junaio glue
The combination of server side and client based image processing is the next step towards an ever present and highly accurate information overlay on physical objects in our real world. The future prospects of this augmented vision are tremendous. Useful and entertaining information may be called up based on places or objects around you. Multimedia experiences can be triggered by images, signs, posters, magazines or newspaper pages, packaging or any other object nearby. Ratings, tips, affiliates and other e-commerce functions can be displayed on real products. Advertisers may “augment” their print ads with games or added displays. Museums may offer a guided tour of their art treasures through augmented reality. The possibilities are endless.
The talking CD
As a first example users will be able to take any CD cover and access the related online information simply by pointing their smartphone at the CD. This service is available on junaio within the kooaba channel. It allows the CD’s specific information to be found through kooaba’s advanced visual search capabilities and its extensive CD database. The user will then be able to see band related merchandise on ebay, affiliates or customer ratings, the nearby events of the artist and a 3D animation related to the content category. junaio then “glues”this information directly onto the camera image of the CD, allowing the user to interact and navigate through these displays simply by rotating the CD.
Dr. Till Quack, kooaba’s CTO, says: “CDs are only the beginning. Our database is constantly growing. The visual search and live-rendering will be accessible for more and more services and products.”
How to get your own information onto junaio?
The junaio environment is growing rapidly with exciting content around events, city features, objects, products, news media. If your company or organisation wishes to participate and also make information and messages available on junaio you need to set up and maintain your own public channel. Click here for more information.
