Google buys student start-up

The firm was founded in 2009 by Mark Cummins and James Philbin, two graduate students from Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, to commercialise technology stemming from their doctoral research. 'Mark and I were both involved in developing visual search during our DPhils,' James tells me. 'Mark's research focused on visual place recognition for robot navigation, which culminated in the FabMap software. My own research looked at how visual search could be scaled robustly and efficiently to handle millions of consumer images crawled from sites such as Flickr.' During their doctoral research, with supervisors Paul Newman and Andrew Zisserman, they realised that, although they were approaching visual search from different angles, their combined skills could reap dividends: making it possible to build a visual, rather than text, search engine that could power a mobile phone application. 'By the end of our DPhils it was clear there was a great commercial opportunity,' Mark explains. 'The fact that there were two of us in the same lab with matching expertise and an interest in starting a company was pretty ideal.' They decided to form a company to develop an application that could recognise art work from photos taken by mobile phones, using the FabMap code licensed from Isis Innovation as a starting point. Mark tells me: 'It was a good baseline to start building Plink.