Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

at the Oxford Said Business School

The web, today, is finally the platfrom for all kinds of things we thought it could be in 1997 - Allen Morgan, Managing Director, Mayfield

Some of Silicon Valley’s rising star start-ups have grown out of Oxford University.

Plink Art

Google’s first ever British acquisition (for an undisclosed sum) is a company founded by two Oxford University Engineering students, inspired to create their visual search engine – Plink Art, after spending time at the ‘Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford’ forum. The fledgling innovators, Mark Cummins and James Philbin, originally won a Google Android prize of $100,000 for their Plink Art app which has already been downloaded 50,000 times by Android mobile phone users.

The PhD students’ research in visual geometry and mobile robotics informed the development of software which enables you to take a photo on your mobile phone of e.g. an artwork, automatically leading to a search which provides its identity and any other relevant information from a myriad of sources including Wikipedia. This is a pivotal step in terms of visual searching on a grand dimension, and the entrepreneurial founders blogged that, ‘the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google scale was just too exciting to pass up.’

The Oxford student entrepreneurs envisage developing the ultimate mobile-based search engine for the visual domain. On an every day basis, they imagine a member of the public walking into a shop, taking a photo of a product on their mobiles and, finding the cheapest on the market.

Financial Times,
April 13th 2010

Google buys UK visual search engine

Refer to the press archive for further Plink Art coverage in the The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, BusinessWeek and The LA Times

Auctomatic

Talented Oxford team, cousins Kulveer Taggar and Harjeet Tagger are the joint founders of Auctomatic.com which was the first British company to be accepted on Silicon Valley’s Y-Combinator programme. After an intense period of hard work and perseverance, the online auction management company, Auctomatic has been sold for £2.5 million to a Canadian web company, Live Current Media. The completion of the sale is scheduled for May 2008.

Auctomatic is a software tool for managing eBay business. Sellers can use the software to track inventory, pictures, auction templates, and traffic on auction sites; stringent tracking helps to optimize listing strategies. Auctomatic does more than just list items and manage sales – it teaches how to maximize profits and increase the success of an eBay seller’s business.

In a series of reports for the BBC, Oxford PPE alumnus and Chief Executive of Auctomatic, Kulveer Tagger talks about the move to the West Coast and the development, growth and ultimate sale of the business he co-founded with Law graduate, Harjeet Taggar.

References:

YouNoodle.com

Bob Goodson, a former Oxford Mphil student of Medieval English Literature, took a sabbatical from his studies when recruited by PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, whom he met at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2003. Goodson was one of the first employees at Yelp, and co-founder of YouNoodle.com.

Oxford Mathematics graduate, Kirill Makharinsky is another co-founder of YouNoodle.com and former head of analytics and metrics at Slide.com, the world’s largest personal media network.

Located in San Francisco, YouNoodle.com develops start-up predictor software, employing a series of algorithms to automate aspects of the venture capital decision making process.

The New York Times
February 18 2008

A Start-Up Says It Can Predict Others’ Fate