I heard about Videntifier in 2009, when I was asked to do a business model due diligence on the team that was coming out of Reykjavik University and I was told that the faculty and the professors of the University were mighty impressed with the technology and the team. It was very impressive, basically what the team had done was a finger printing algorithm of any digital image and/or video. The business model was to sell the software through subscription to police departments and investigation teams that need to analyze videos and images. I was not very impressed with that business model and I am still not very impressed with that business model. I think it is a bad market to go after for various reasons that I need to do another blog post explaining the challenges in that market. Here is the description of the offering:

Videntifier™ Forensic provides police authorities with an automatic and easy-to-use video identification system. A single mouse click is sufficient to automatically scan an entire hard drive for suspicious and illegal video material. With its speed, Videntifier™ Forensic saves investigators precious time, which they can spend on other more challenging tasks, rather than inspecting thousands of video files manually. At the end of each scan Videntifier™ Forensic returns a summary report, listing which videos have been identified.Videntifier – How does it work

I met with the team and urged them to pivot to show faster traction and they have done just that within a week of meeting, they have released a public API and they helped organize the Startup Iceland 2012 Hackathon. The winner of the hackathon actually used the Videntifier’s API and built an awesome web application that takes any image (file or URL) and matches it to the Videntifier database of movies to give you the movie name and all details of the movie in real time. Just think about the logic of having to implement that… in realtime… It is amazing. I really believe what Videntifier is doing is going to be huge. There are many applications and use cases and business cases that could make the company go into an exponential trajectory.

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