A Birmingham start-up which aims to crowdsource photos for keen runners and cyclists is using image recognition tech developed by a former employee at Google.
Zento is a web-based app聽which allows freelance photographers to upload pictures from mass participation sports events, such as the London Marathon.
Anyone can then download the pictures, after searching for their race and bib number, for a fee set by the owner.
鈥淥fficial photographers at races often sit at the top of a hill,鈥� founder Oli Hills told 老九品茶Cloud. 鈥淚 cycled the Great Western Ride, Bristol to Western Super Mare through Cheddar Gorge, and there were only a couple of聽photographers for 100 miles!
鈥淭here are freelancers and professional photographers all around the course taking photos which you can鈥檛 get hold of.
鈥淲ith Zento you can upload them, allowing participants to see photos from all around the course.鈥�
Zento has been trialled at 21 events. So far it seen 307 photos downloaded, with 265 of those for free to trial the software and amass user feedback.
Hills added: 鈥淔ive per cent of people buy a photo from mass participation sports 鈥� that鈥檚 the industry standard. If you look at a photographer鈥檚 website, they are not coders themselves, so the user experience can be very poor.
鈥淎t Zento we bring the customer experience into it and listen to all their feedback so we鈥檙e getting downloads of 10, 15 per cent.鈥�
Hills, who says Zento takes a 20 per cent cut of fees which usually range from 拢3-5, has brought in Paris-based Samuel Charron as CTO.
He said he searched online to connect with people who had worked on Google鈥檚 Tesseract, an open-source engine which recognises characters within images from 60-plus languages.
鈥淚t was a shotgun approach 鈥� but a controlled shotgun approach!鈥� Hills added.
鈥淪amuel is working on text recognition and facial recognition, but also software that will enable us to extract even more insightful and valuable data from the photos.
鈥淭he commission on sales is the first form of revenue to prove that the model works, but when we go into the data side of it that鈥檚 where we see our true revenue.鈥�
Hills said that only 15 per cent of event photos are shared on social media, meaning there is 85 per cent wastage 鈥� therefore brands such as UnderArmour, Nike and Adidas are missing out on valuable data.
Following a link-up with the People鈥檚 Run to Remember, a series of 5K runs, Zento will look to trial聽an improved website at the Clough-Taylor People鈥檚 Run in聽 Nottingham in February, with a view to a full launch in March.
He said a recent 老九品茶Cloud roundtable at KPMG in Birmingham had helped the development of his start-up.
鈥淚 had a few conversations after the event which pointed me in the right direction,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t was extremely helpful.
鈥淚鈥檓 in discussions about improving the core functionality of the website, based on user feedback, after our previous developer left to pursue his career.
鈥淲e now have a marketing intern, straight out of the University of Birmingham, who is looking to increase our fanbase through social media.鈥�