Philippines’ Orchestrack automates ad monitoring on radio

Founded in 2010 by two De La Salle graduates, Unyx Sta Ana and Raymond del Rosario, Orchestrack developed algorithms to identify sounds given a few seconds of audio data. This capability is similar to offerings from established players like Soundhound (100m users) and Shazam (20m users), or Google’s recently launched Sound Search service.

Now, Orchestrack has shifted their focus from music and copyright identification to ad monitoring on the air. According to Ms. Sta Ana “What we’re doing now is 24/7 advertising monitoring on radio, TV and streaming media, and offer it as a B2B SaaS to automate spot detection as proof of airing.” In short, they automate the measurement of ad impressions.

Currently advertisers’ pain point is having to confirm ‘proof of airing’ –that paid ads are actually aired over hundreds of radio stations over a contracted period. This monitoring is a time-consuming and manual effort. Read more

IdeaSpace launches annual competition for startups; will offer seed funding and more to winners

IdeaSpace is inviting all startups to join their annual national competition where the top 10 winners would walk away with up to PHP 2M (USD 49K) worth of prizes including seed funding, mentorships and training, office space, backroom operations support, intellectual property and legal services among other goodies. The contest is open to both local and global entries.

IdeaSpace President Martin Earl Valencia shared that there were already more than a hundred entries as of Dec 15, 2012. The deadline for submissions is January 7, 2013.

The organization is a Philippine-based non-profit formed by First Pacific, Metro Pacific, PLDT, Meralco, Smart, Digitel, Sun Cellular, SPI Global, Indofood, Philex Mining, Maynilad, MediaQuest and TV5. It provides funding cum incubation for early stage startups. Read more

New price comparison app PricePinz one of the fastest and easiest to use

PricePinz is a free price comparison iPhone app that launched recently. Developed by a Singapore-based company, it joins a growing number of apps like Save22 (formerly LobangClub) eBay’s RedLaser, Amazon’s PriceCheck, and ShopSavvy, among others.

Since its debut a few days ago, PricePinz has been downloaded over 100 times. It currently offers over 4,000 items in its pricing database — the information is gathered mostly from merchants and in-house data entry.

PricePinz boasts support for both barcode and QR Code scanning, and provides a list of deals available in the vicinity of the user. It leverages social network to allow users to help promote their favorite deal and rate or rank a retailers’ offering based on criteria like customer support, freebies, and after sales service. Read more

Mobile price comparison apps compared

Singapore startups Save22 and PricePinz are facing formidable competition in the mobile price comparison space. How do they stack up? To help you decide, here’s a quick summary about the features and reception of the price comparison apps in the wild.
 

Quick elaboration on two of the variables:

Price Protection: If the prices fall within 30 days from date of shipment, the company will refund the difference as long as you give them notice.

Social: The app’s ability to leverage social networks to promote the product/service.

Edited by Terence Lee

Graymatics aims to give Google’s Artificial Brain a run for its money

Graymatics can sense which part of a video is attractive for ads.

Imagine yourself at lunch hour in a hawker center, sometime in the near future. You see a diner with an appetizing food item. Rather than ask the diner about it, you decide to use your Google Glasses to take a snapshot of the food item, and then send it over to Graymatics’ cloud based cognitive media processing servers.

In a few milliseconds, Graymatics comes back to you and shows the results on the heads-up display of your Google Glasses. The food item is a new variety of Pineapple Chicken rice mixed with coriander sauce. Combined with data from HungryGoWhere, you find that it can be bought at Lian’s Food Stall located a just few meters away. You also see the latest reviews from past diners about the chicken rice.

The hawker center scenario above is but one of the promising use cases that Graymatics cognitive media processing can bring to life. The technology consists of algorithms that can instantly recognize and categorize image and video content that is fed to it. It can then tell users what the contents are about and who or what is in them.  Read more

In Cambodia, Project Alba helps farmers increase income, protect against seed raiders

In parts of rural Cambodia, farmers’ primary source of income comes from harvesting rice — once a year. This is a poor outcome compared to other ASEAN countries which harvest twice or thrice annually.

To help increase farmers’ income, Victor Combal-Weiss and Guillaume Virag founded Project Alba. Project Alba’s socially-minded, sustainable business model works by lowering the risk for farmers to start a second cropping. Farmers get their farm inputs like seeds, fertilizers, and technical knowhow from Project Alba along with a guaranteed buying price for their produce.

In Cambodia, Project Alba has already developed a market for lettuce — an entirely new crop that wasn’t previously produced in Cambodia. It turned out there was a ready market for the vegetable in the increasing number of high end hotels that were sprouting in Cambodia. Read more

Mysteries surround Facebook’s Asia Pacific Gateway project

The Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) is an NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph)-led initiative to lay submarine cables across 12 Asian Telcos and not 11 as initially reported.

These countries include: China (China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom), Taiwan (Chunghwa Telecom), Korea (KT and LG Uplus), Japan (NTT Communications), Singapore (StarHub), Malaysia (Time dotcom), Vietnam (Viettel and Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications) and the Philippines (PLDT).

Credit: SubmarineNetworks.com

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Cloud management app Nubefy enters private beta

Nubefy announced last week the launch of its private beta where a select group of partners and customers will be invited to try Nubefy out and provide feedback. This enables the startup to refine and improve their product offering to the public. The public can also try to get in the beta by signing up for a Nubefy account at www.nubefy.com. Read more