Company: Occipital LLC.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: After meeting as students at the University of Michigan, Jeffrey Powers and Vikas Reddy decided to start a business together. They launched Occipital from an office on Beaver Island, Mich., before relocating to New York in early 2008. In May 2008, the duo relocated to Boulder to participate in TechStars, a seed-stage incubator program.

"We were working on a program that would help people organize digital photos," says Powers, describing "computer vision" software capable of recognizing people's faces and landmarks. Powers and Reddy refocused the company on applications for mobile cameras earlier this year. "We decided to move on to something that we considered as big an opportunity but wouldn't require as much upfront capital," Powers says. "The mobile phone has changed into an application device, and use of mobile cameras has exploded."

After TechStars, "We intended to move back to New York," Powers says. "We only decided to make it permanent in Boulder earlier this year. There's an awesome, helpful startup community here--it's not antagonistic."

IN A NUTSHELL: "Computer vision" sits at the intersection of signal processing and artificial Intelligence, Powers says. "Our primary focus is writing software to allow mobile phones to actually see things and recognize things."

Occipital's first iPhone application, ClearCam, came out in February and has since rung up more than 850,000 downloads. "It's an app that can see between the pixels," Powers says. The software automatically snaps six shots and intelligently merges them into one picture with double the resolution of the originals. "We take the six images and break them down into a whole bunch of 'features.' Then we figure out how to precisely line them up."

The second app, a bar-code scanner dubbed RedLaser, came out on Apple's iPhone app store in May and was installed on 125,000 phones in its first four months. "We used computer vision to teach a mobile camera to cut through the blur on a UPC code," says Powers, describing it as a "software lens."

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