Marco Vanossi

Brazil is getting a lot of attention now with very solid investors jumping into the local scene. I’ve been mentioned in a great blog post by Dominic Philips. Read about it here

Early this month I had a great discussion with Angelica Mari of IT Decisions (www.itdecs.com) whose focus is to highlight brazilian innovators, featuring articles about their endeavors and bridging local business opportunities with the outside market, mainly English. She is passionate about meeting local entrepreneurs and she is also working on her own startup and other interesting initiatives with the British government.

On Monday of this week, I had the fortune to have my history featured on the well-known The Next Web’s blog: http://www.thenextweb.com/la/2011/12/19/this-24-year-old-brazilian-entrepreneur-wants-to-disrupt-image-search/

If you have been following ClickPic’s developments, you might remember that it started only with image recognition .

With time, we were able to adapt our core technology to identify sounds/audio . The difference though is that to reliably recognize a sound, we need from 5 to 10 seconds of it.

To overcome this, we are announcing our real time video recognition technology, that can precisely identify a video without turning to audio analysis. Check the demo video here and let your imagination think about all the possibilities of this “sci-fy” cutting edge technology!

Last month I have attented Sao Paulo’s edition of Startup Weekend, wich is

a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities.

In other words:

No Talk. All Action. Launch a Startup in 54 hours.

Wich is a great event for “wanna be entrepreneurs” to share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.

But, even though I already run my own startup ClickPic, I decided to participate in order to show that it is possible to build a very innovative project quickly using ClickPic’s API’s.

ClickPic’s API’s allow anyone to build websites/applications that leverage image, audio or video recognition.

For example, with image recognition you can build an application that is able to identify a movie when you point your phone’s camera to a DVD cover .

On the other hand, with audio recognition you can build apps like Shazam or SoundHound , but instead of recognizing general songs, you can specify the app to identify a particular audio from a TV Show or Commercial. Be it on the television or on the radio.

Now if you prefer not to rely on audio only, you can leverage ClickPic’s video recognition API to identify a program/movie/etc by pointing your phone to the TV.

In that sense, I decided to pick one of these API’s from ClickPic and build an innovative project on the weekend.

The idea was to build an application that could recognize someone from it’s face and show related information about him/her such as Facebook/LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

The project was elected the best according to the juri, and I’ll refer you to TechCrunch’s detailed description of it: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/bring-on-the-creepy-faced-me-is-building-a-new-facial-recognition-mobile-app/ .

In October, I’ve been interviewed at the popular Programa do Jo in Brazil.
Check out the video below ( if you need english subtitles, click here, then click the CC – closed captions – logo )

No comeco do mes bati um papo muito gostoso com a Bia Kunze (a “garota sem fio”) e o pessoal do PapoTech.
Conversamos bastante sobre o ambiente de startups e a cultura do Vale do Silicio. Vejam em http://www.garotasemfio.com.br/blog/2011/11/02/papotech-133/

Approaching the middle of the year, I have unveiled my startup to the world: ClickPic (www.clickpic.com) .

ClickPic builds image and audio recognition technologies.

Our focus is on building mobile apps to bridge the offline world (magazines, tv shows, radio programs) with the online world (internet contents).

Check the demo videos for more information:

IPhone app that turns content on magazines/newspapers interactive

iPhone app that let’s you add comments to “things”

iPhone app that does TV Commercial recognition

In the first months of this year, I’ve been interviewed by Hermione Way, a reknowned Tech journalist, while in San Francisco.

In the beginning  of this year,  the 2nd edition of Brazil’s BRNewTech monthly startup meet-up took place. And I couldn’t be happier to have participated in this great event!

Not only because it’s leveraging the Brazilian entrepreneurial ecosystem, bringing Silicon Valley successful entrepreneurs to chat (as Paul Bragiel, Dave McClure, Chris McCan), helping spread its key cultural elements, like: sharing, avoiding the fear to fail, networking and helping each other.

I was flattered actually by the words of this month’s guest, Mr. Vivek Wadhwa, kindly talking from Stanford via Skype. When I introduced myself and said I had a question, he interrupted me and said:

– “You are my favorite brazilian entrepreneur.”

I got very excited! It was very nice to hear that. But it didn’t last long:

– “But, Marco, you are the only one I know, so…”, he adds. Nice one!

But then it gets serious, though.

I asked him to give some hints for brazilian investors.

– “I would invest in you, frankly”, he says.

Check the video to understand his conclusion!

Watch the full talk here

Mr Vivek is assisiting Scholar, UC-Berkeley, Dir. of Research, CERC, Duke University, Sr. Research Assoc Harvard Law School, BusinessWeek columnist, TechCrunch contributor.

In the end of last year, I took a trip to Silicon Valley organized by Brazil Innovators (www.brazilinnovators.com).