Since the sale of RedLaser to eBay, people have been asking what’s next for Occipital. While RedLaser has been in the limelight, the team has been hard at work on our next-generation computer vision application.

Today we’ve launched 360 Panorama (app store: $2.99): realtime panorama creation for your iPhone 4 or 3GS. Gone is the need to stitch together a series of still photographs. With 360, simply pan your phone in any direction and watch as our computer vision system builds a panorama in realtime. Capturing a panorama on your phone has never been easier.

360 Panorama is our first major release since RedLaser, and we’ve surmounted many challenges to make it happen. We’re proud to say there’s simply no other app like it.

Here’s a short video preview of 360 Panorama in action:

Tech Note: The first release of 360 Panorama is optimized to make panorama capture extremely fast and easy so that you can share panoramas very rapidly. As we improve the precision of generated panoramas, we’ll also add options for higher resolution outputs. Current resolution of a 360 degree panorama is 2048 pixels wide (which is still wider than most monitors).

Occipital has grown up a little bit since August 2009. We had survived 2009 by running on fumes and building a shiny stage-1 rocket booster called RedLaser. Back then, we were happy that RedLaser had been installed on 95,000 iPhones. RedLaser has now been installed on over 2 million iPhones. The growth was pure word-of-mouth (see the Newsweek article about it written by Vikas from November 27 2009.) And as we recently reflected with UX Magazine, we learned that user experience was tantamount to success.

2010. We spent the early months of 2010 supercharging RedLaser. We added data feeds, local results, new barcode formats, and we licensed RedLaser’s technology to 70 companies including Target.  Apple featured RedLaser in a TV ad which premiered at primetime during Lost, scanning a bright red Gaggia Espresso Machine.

It was around this time that we realized RedLaser had outgrown our basement office. Occipital is fundamentally a computer vision technology company, but we had transitioned to spend most of our time fueling a large-scale mobile commerce tool. We started laying the groundwork to scale RedLaser up and away from our core engineering focus, and it was around that same time that we started kicking around ideas with a little company called eBay that just happened to specialize in large-scale mobile commerce tools, which brings us to today’s announcement.

Today we’re announcing that RedLaser has been acquired by eBay, Inc. We are confident that eBay is a truly better home for RedLaser than Occipital.  Not  only will RedLaser continue to thrive (now free for the first time on the App Store), but we’re also excited to report that the RedLaser SDK and all of the companies it supports will continue and expand under eBay.  If you’re wondering, Occipital remains a freestanding company and we will not be moving over to eBay.  eBay has an entirely new team running RedLaser.

Tomorrow. We’re really just getting started. Remember, we were just on the crawler with our partially-completed rocket.  We no longer have our stage-1 rocket booster, but we have something even better in the works – a stellar engineering team:

Robert Grant, a Computer Science master’s alumnus from the University of Michigan, joined the team on February 18 as Occipital’s first Computer Vision Engineer.  Since then, Rob has been leading development for Occipital’s next major release, which begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital’s primary focus for the foreseeable future.

Rémi Chaignon, currently working in Paris, is starting remotely in July as our first Augmented Vision Engineer until he will join the company in Boulder this October. Rémi worked at the University of Teeside on the fundamentals of an Augmented Reality Game engine dubbed GEAR.

Shaun Werkhoven, the most recent to accept our invitation to join the team, has a PhD in Computer Vision from the University of Newcastle.  Shaun, who currently resides in Sydney until his trip to Boulder next month, deeply studied Interest Points as applied to object recognition and 3D reconstruction for his thesis.  Shaun will play a crucial role, applying his research knowledge to more optimally help us solve problems as a Computer Vision Engineer.

Without a doubt, this is the most exhilarating time in company history. We’re looking forward to the formal launch of Occipital now that we’re refocused on what we do best as a company – computer vision, and we can’t wait to watch as eBay accelerates and improves RedLaser with a new dedicated team.

If you haven’t already downloaded RedLaser – it’s free today.

I love photography.  And I like the fact that I can take digital photos on a device that fits in my pocket and is always with me.  However, I hate the fact that many of the pictures I take come out blurry just because there is a little motion in the scene or because I didn’t have the camera perfectly still for the shot.

I’m tired of guessing when everyone is standing still enough to get a good picture.  I’m tired of working so hard to keep the camera still when I take a picture.  Most importantly I’m tired of missing the truly special moments just because I can’t get the camera to stay still at the same time as everyone in the scene.  There has to be a better way!

When I found what appeared to be the solution I was estatic: ClearCam’s quickshot mode.  A camera that took several shots and then just kept the best one – the one where the camera was still AND motion in the scene was minimal.  Brilliant!

Then disappointment set in when I realized it wasn’t in a condition to be released through the App Store.  So a long story short, I called up Jeff and Vikas and said what’s up with that?  Don’t you realize what you’ve developed is the perfect solution to this problem?  Of course they knew that but were way too busy with the success of RedLaser to put energy into it.  Kudos for that, but seriously I was missing way too many moments with this mobile camera that had everything going for it but the ability to reliably capture moments.

With no where else to turn, I reluctantly dusted off my Xcode development environment, formed a partnership with Occipital and off we went.  In the process we have taken ClearCam’s quickshot mode to the next level by virtually eliminating time required between shots (just in case there’s more than one moment to capture, or you’re just not sure which moment you will need to capture).

And finally, for the first time ever, I find myself trusting my iPhone camera.  Seriously trusting it.  For me, it has become one of the only apps I use on a daily basis.  I hope it changes mobile photography for others as much as it has for me.  It’s been fun guys, thanks.

Now if only there were an app that would help me improve those once in a lifetime shots I keep coming across without my DSLR.  There has to be a better way…

If you were watching Lost, NCIS, Parenthood, or Melrose Place on Tuesday 4/6, you might have noticed this commercial featuring RedLaser:

ProductWiki, a collaborative product review and information site, was also featured in the commercial. Check out the extension they created to search Product Wiki using RedLaser here (using our Custom Apps feature).

We just recently set up a display that shows scans happening in realtime at Occipital HQ. Here is what happened after the commercial aired:

RedLaser 2.6 is now available on the App Store. This update has a number of enhancements, including:

• Multiple scan toggle switch:  This mode makes RedLaser act like a checkout scanner.  Scan an item and move onto the next without pressing any buttons.  This is good for cataloging your entire bookshelf or rapidly zapping several items without having to wait for RedLaser to search for prices.
• Local library search:  This feature actually launched before 2.6, but we never had a chance to announce it on the blog.  RedLaser now searches WorldCat, the world’s largest library catalog, to find books at local libraries.  Check out the TV spot on this feature by NBC 4 Columbus.
• Improved startup speed and less memory use: RedLaser’s more efficient with its memory use during scanning and during normal product browsing, and it also starts up a bit faster.

And keep your eye out for Repo Men movie posters like the one below.  If you look in the corner, you’ll see a barcode, and right below it the text “ACTIVATE WITH REDLASER.”  RedLaser exclusively displays actual product listings for the artificial organs, or Artiforgs, that are the subject of the upcoming Repo Men movie starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker.

You can scan them with RedLaser 2.5, but RedLaser 2.6 will automatically activate the Artiforg product details when you scan these posters which are scattered around the country.

Additional notes: For advanced Custom Apps users, we’ve made it possible to put a “Scan” button inside your RedLaser custom app.  This is nice if you want to create a web-based utility where users can scan multiple items without needing to exit RedLaser every time.

About 72 hours ago, the RedLaser 2.5 update was published to the App Store.  It was a soft-launch with our new partner, TheFind, which is the fastest growing search engine for shopping in the US with over 400 million products in its search index.  In the 2.5 release we also improved our scanning speed (6% faster), and made a handful of interface improvements.

Behind the scenes, we were racing to get the technology ready for Black Friday, and in our rush, we made a mistake.  In the US (and initially in the UK, too), we completely replaced Google Product Search with TheFind. We were overconfident in the volume of search results that would be immediately available from TheFind alone.  Over the last 72 hours, based on your feedback, we and TheFind realized that this wasn’t the right decision for RedLaser users.  In response, effective immediately, as of this posting, we have re-enabled Google Product Search results and are now providing them along with TheFind’s Product Search results. This means that in almost every case, we will have substantially better search results in version 2.5 than in the last version, 2.2.

The only case where RedLaser will now display fewer results is for some products on Amazon.com.  The reason is that Amazon has a policy that prohibits querying their API from mobile applications unless they give explicit written permission.  We asked for permission a few months ago, and were told “No.”  We then tried a number of work-arounds and unfortunately, Amazon asked us to remove them as well.  Despite the limitation, in some cases Google and TheFind may be able to provide Amazon results and will include them when possible.

Meanwhile, we knew it would be extremely frustrating to users if we removed Amazon with nothing in its place.  So we began working on a partnership with TheFind.  TheFind, we soon found out, has an incredible product search engine that is comparable to Google.  They include products from over 500,000 stores and online sellers, a number that continues to grow.  By featuring results from TheFind, we can now show local results for many products, a request of many RedLaser users.  They also have coupons, reviews, local addresses, and comprehensive store information, which we can’t wait to start tapping into.  Previously, with Google as our primary search provider, we were limited in how we could improve RedLaser.  Occipital is first and foremost a mobile computer vision company.  (That means we’re rocket scientists when it comes to image processing, but not when it comes to crawling the Internet for products.) Despite a lot of great ideas, we didn’t have the resources to focus on both computer vision and better results. With TheFind, we now have a partner committed to helping Occipital improve mobile product search relevance, the accuracy of barcode data, as well as providing information never before available in RedLaser, starting with local results (They’re rocket scientists when it comes to shopping.)

We’re confident that our partnership with TheFind is going to be a great one ― one that is focused on creating the best user experience possible and eventually paving the way for a new kind of shopping. Occipital will continue to build the best vision-based technology to power RedLaser’s barcode scanner (and barcode scanning is just the tip of the iceberg), while TheFind will innovate new ways to provide you great shopping search results.  We stumbled a little with our rushed launch, but we’re back on track, and we hope that RedLaser will always be your trusted companion for mobile product search.

Keep the feedback coming.  We’re listening and improving.

Thank you for using RedLaser.

Additional Release Notes:

• TheFind and Google Product search are now enabled for the US and UK.  Google Product Search also supports searching for results in Euros, so RedLaser can be used today with Google Product Search in Europe.  In other vicinities, we currently cannot surface listings.  Let us know if you have data sources we should look into, and if you have one that can already be searched via barcode, check out RedLaser custom apps.
• Custom Apps improved:  As in 2.2, you can create a RedLaser custom app that searches just about any website with barcode, and in 2.5, we’ve improved the launch screen to make it seamless, and added a built-in browser so you don’t have to redirect back to Mobile Safari after you’ve scanned in your custom app ( use “noexit=YES” ).  We’ll keep improving Custom Apps so that RedLaser is even more useful in areas where our coverage is poor.

Sumocat from GottaBeMobile posted about of how he used RedLaser to organize his office by cutting the clutter of loose books.   The before/after image he included with the post was so cool that we couldn’t help from posting it here as well.

I grabbed a book, scanned its barcode, put it in the box, then confirmed the search results matched. …  Once I filled a box, I numbered it, emailed the list to my work email, and cleared the list for the next box.

Check out the imagery.  The only thing that could be better than the super RedLaser arrow with drop shadow would be a timelapse video showing the the whole process.

Messy -> RedLaser + Boxes -> Organized

What I really like about this is that this is exactly the organization system I’d like to use for all sorts of physical items, like massive (print) photo collections, and souvenirs that you don’t want to throw away but also really don’t want to waste shelf space for. The challenge is speeding up the electronic cataloging process so that it’s easy to do this.  Thanks for showing us how RedLaser can help with that!

We’ve been getting a lot of requests that look like this:

I love RedLaser, but can you please add my favorite site X to your search results?

Can you send the barcode I scanned to site X for logging?

We thought this might happen, so we embedded a feature in RedLaser 2.2 that lets you search any website by barcode. But until now, we haven’t announced the feature.

RedLaser Custom Apps is now live! After you’ve installed RedLaser, check out this page: redlaser.com/apps (best viewed on an iPhone).

Pre-built popular custom apps

Build your own custom app

Your new custom app!

Try building an app by following the instructions and let us know what you think. We’d also love some suggestions for other sites to add to our “popular” custom apps list.

We’re excited to see what RedLaser Custom Apps get built and used!

By the way if you like RedLaser, we also launched two other iPhone application last week -FoodScanner (partnership with DailyBurn), and Snapture (partnership with SnaptureLabs). All three of these apps are doing well – they’re all in the top 100 paid apps on the App Store and RedLaser is at #2!

******* EDIT *************

We just added the option to convert scanned barcodes to UPC if the site you are searching only supports UPC format.  On the RedLaser Custom Apps page, when building an app, simply check the “Convert to UPC” box, and the app you create will convert to UPC before searching.

Occipital has come a long way in 2009.  In late December 2008, we were running on fumes.  Our TechStars funding was spent.  We had recently made the hard decision to postpone fundraising, while a number of our cohort were closing their seed stage or series A rounds.  We had ditched the concept we had spent all summer refining.  Not that it wasn’t a good idea, but it required significant funding to pull off, and factors outside of our control made fundraising a virtual non-starter.

We were down to that last month where we could pay the bills with our personal reserves.  I had come straight from earning a stipend in the Intelligent Systems CSE PhD program at Michigan, which means my personal reserves were more oil slick than Alaskan Oil Reserve.  Vikas probably had a little more, but cost of living in NYC where he had been working put us on pretty even ground.

So we did what we hadn’t needed to do up until that point: we asked for a little financial help from family, the only people who really know what you’re capable of, and those who are the most bullish on your odds of success.  We opened a bank account and deposited 20K, in on a convertible note from my mom.  For what it’s worth, almost everyone in my family was willing to help, but we didn’t want to put more at risk than we needed to.

We did another thing we hadn’t done yet: we decided to make Occipital cash flow positive.  Yep, we just decided we’d go ahead and do that.  We joked numerous times about registering and publicly displaying status on ‘isoccipitalcashflowpositive.com‘ as a sort of way to induce pressure on ourselves.

We also tried to make a “business plan” for the first time in company history.  Ok, in truth it wasn’t really a business plan.  Vikas got assigned that job and as much as I tried convincing him to include businessey stuff, there weren’t any fancy growth charts or 5-year projections.  But it was our biggest effort to date in terms of showing the business potential of Occipital.

We had decided to build next generation augmented reality technology, but we realized doing it like we wanted was still going to require some money.

So we did something that didn’t require a lot of money.  On February 3rd, we launched an iPhone application called ClearCam.  At its core, it’s actually the beginnings of our next-generation augmented reality engine.  But you’d never know that from using it:  To users, it magically doubles the resolution of their iPhone 2G/3G camera.  It also takes photos faster than any iPhone application to date, and can intelligently select sharp photos.  Since the camera was perhaps the most-criticized element of the first and second gen iPhones, ClearCam was a hit, and has been downloaded 780,000 times.

There’s a premium version of ClearCam which unlocks a couple of features, and costs $9.99.  We had bets on how long it would take for anyone to actually pay us.  For one thing, the free version gives you all the premium features for 15 days.  For another thing, due to the low-level way we interfaced with the camera, we weren’t able to use the App Store for distribution, and we had to roll our own payment system.  So we figured it’d be maybe 24-48 hours after launch that the first purchase would come in.  In reality, it was more like 10 minutes.

And with that, we were cash flow positive.  Near-death averted.  We upgraded to Ramen noodles after consulting OBE-1.

We really wanted to get back to augmented reality.  We started to spend every waking moment thinking about AR with Paul Berberian and his longtime business partners.  We were onto a mindblowing AR concept that everyone was excited about.  We knew we could build it.  But alas, this required money too.  An introductory meeting was held with prospective investors, and the result was only half positive.  The technology risk was too much.  We could’ve kept pushing, but the rejection took the wind out of everyone’s sails, and we eventually parted ways with Paul after discussing at least 12 less-risky alternatives.  Although we never became business partners, Paul is still in many ways the most significant mentor we’ve had.

Fundraising hopes nixed again.  Back to bootstrapping.

ClearCam was still selling and we decided we could afford an office.  Up until then, we were office nomads.  Our lowest office experience is shown in this recruiting video from our dingy NYC apartment/office.   We moved into a new office with Ben and Dan from Devver, another TechStars 2008 company that builds Ruby developer tools in the cloud.

March 1.  We realized not one of the 30,000 iPhone applications on the App Store was capable of reading product barcodes (Natively anyway.  There were a couple that worked with an add-on lens).  Everyone thought it wasn’t possible without autofocus.  The best open source barcode project out there couldn’t do it.  But we figured we could.  I often say that “If you can define a visual recognition task well enough, we can build a computer program that does it as well or better than humans.”  In this case, we had to beat humans, because not even people can read barcodes imaged without autofocus a couple of inches away from the iPhone.

On May 15, we launched RedLaser for $1.99 on the iPhone App Store.  An iPhone barcode scanner that worked with a carefully-taken photo.  By that time, there was actually another app, pic2shop, by a computer vision guy in Belgium which could read barcodes, so we couldn’t say we were first.  Damn.  But we were more accurate, and we had phase-shifting updates planned.

May 28.  We had a prototype that could scan barcodes without the still photo requirement.  On June 16, the application was approved by Apple for distribution on the App Store.  Aha!  This time we were first: First realtime mobile barcode scanner that doesn’t require autofocus.  We also learned a lesson: it’s way harder to get press when you update an application, even if the update is more significant than the first launch.  That’s a potential caveat with the release-early, release-often strategy that we generally believe in.  But we did get a great piece of coverage.

We’re getting closer to a scalable business.  RedLaser, in its paid App Store and free more advanced Beta forms, has been installed on 95,000 different iPhones and has generated about double ClearCam’s revenue.

Occipital is morphing from an application company to a technology platform company that happens to make a few applications on the platform, too.   As soon as Apple allows it, we’ll be powering barcode scanning in three already-popular iPhone applications.  A key turning point will be when we generate more revenue from technology licensing than from direct to consumer applications.  Both in our own applications and applications built via our network of partners, we intend to make Occipital synonymous with seamless computer vision.  Barcodes aren’t the only thing we’ll teach computers to see.

What are we launching next?  Will we end up raising money or bootstrap all the way?  Are we finally going to launch something viscerally recognizable as augmented reality?

We have more than one thing up our sleeve, and the future looks great for Occipital, but I think we’re still in the crawler on the way to the launch pad.

As iPhone developers, you have to test your software on every OS version.  This would be fine if there were a reasonably simple way to switch between iPhone OS versions.  As it turns out, there isn’t.  Upgrading is easy — but downgrading isn’t allowed by default within iTunes.

There is, however, a way to do it.  I figured it out the hard way, so I’m posting these instructions to help anyone else who might be in the same situation.  Partial credit is due to other tutorials that I borrowed information from.

If you’re getting iTunes Error 1600 and iTunes Error 20, this tutorial should help.

Disclaimers: Don’t do this with your personal phone, because you have to remove iTunes and completely reset the phone.  Restoring everything later is probably possible via backup, but make sure there’s nothing important on the phone before proceeding.  I don’t think this works on the 3GS phone.  But don’t even try it.

Downgrading from iPhone OS 3.0 to 2.2.1

1. Completely Uninstall iTunes 8.2 AND Apple Mobile Device Support
2. Install iTunes 7.7 (find it on an old version website).
3. Download the 2.2.1 (or 2.2) ipsw file for your phone.
4. Launch iTunes, connect to USB, and enter DFU mode (see below).
5. iTunes will mention restore mode.  Click OK and then Shift-click “Restore”
6. Choose the ipsw file you downloaded.  Wait for restore.
7. If this completes successfully, congratulations!  You’re done!  If you get Error 1013 (as I did), ignore and continue.
8. Hold the Power and Home button for 15 seconds, then press Power for 2 seconds to reset your phone.
9. You should now have the “Emergency Call” screen.  If your phone has service, it should activate itself.
10. If you’ve switched phones (to a 3GS for instance), you will need to either purchase phone service for it, or activate it via jailbreak.
11. Once activated, you’re ready to start testing!

Let us know if these instructions work for you!