Entrepreneurs in Consumer Electronics

Abstract

T his installment of the “Professional Development” column features an interview with Lukas Kinigadner, chief executive officer of Anyline.com, founded in 2013 in the beautiful city of Vienna, Austria. Tom Wilson: What is Anyline? Kinigadner: Anyline is the leading specialist in mobile optical character recognition (OCR). Using a smartphone camera, Anyline is able to scan and im port all kinds of text, codes, and numbers with high accuracy and in real time. Our software development kit (SDK) allows any developer with an idea to transform his or her mobile camera into a real-time OCR tool. Wilson: How did you get started? Kinigadner: We had an unconventional start: after university I set up a mobile app development company with some friends, and we loved developing but knew nothing about marketing or sales. We would develop an app, launch it in the App Store, and then cross our fingers. After each failed attempt, we would simply start working on the next app and go through the process again. We must have done that literally about 35 times! But it taught us valuable lessons about how the App Store works and how important it is to develop for a concrete need that is relevant to customers. We pivoted to developing apps for other companies that already knew their customers and how to generate sales, and we became one of the top three app agencies in Vienna, Austria. Wilson: How did this turn into Anyline? Kinigadner: A friend of mine was a cofounder at a start up called mySugr, which had developed an app to help diabetics monitor and manage their sugar levels. He explained that users found it very tedious to manually type in the blood sugar reading from a standalone measurement device into their mySugr app, and we discussed using OCR on the smartphone to enable a user to scan in the sugar-level reading directly to the mySugr app. We were excited about the potential to improve people’s lives, but it turned out to be a much more difficult technical problem than it sounded. We initially estimated a month’s work, and eventually it took nine months! However, having realized that we had solved a difficult problem, namely, OCR on mobile, we realized that there would be many more companies whose apps could benefit from OCR as a part of their product, for whom it would be more economical to licensein our technology than to develop this themselves. Thus, we had the foundations for a business and, in 2013, after gaining high-profile clients, such as Red Bull, and winning Innovation awards, we had the confidence to focus on this alone. Wilson: What was the problem, and why was this so difficult? Kinigadner: It turns out that performing OCR on a smartphone is difficult, for several reasons. OCR may have been solved in the 1980s for scanning machines, where high-quality cameras and lenses are a fixed distance from the text within a controlled lighting environment, but enabling your grandmother to scan her electricity meter with a smartphone requires handling many more degrees of freedom. A mobile environment has so many variables, starting with the ambient lighting conditions, the distance of the camera from the target text, its size and font, the experience level of the user, the low quality of the camera and lens, and, not least, the heterogeneity of the cameras. On the Android platform, there are over 28,000 different camera configurations, each with their own colors and distortions that affect the image as seen by the OCR. Wilson: What is so special about Anyline’s solution? Kinigadner: Our solution makes it easy for developers to integrate fast, accurate, and reliable OCR into their products, because it is designed to deal with these camera variables and guide the user through the process of capturing an image. It can warn the user, e.g., that the image is too dark or that he or she needs to move the phone to avoid a reflection obscuring the text. These features are only possible because our Entrepreneurs in Consumer Electronics