I’m happy to announce I am joining Plainsight Technologies as CEO. I wanted to tell you why I’m fired up to lead this company and where we are going.
Plainsight Technologies is focused on building computer vision apps for businesses, and the approach is uniquely valuable. The big idea is that we offer “Vision Intelligence Filters” (or just Filters for short) that are as easy to understand and deploy as a consumer application (think Nest, Ring, Instagram, or Zoom) but are focused on a specific business task.
Use Case: How many pepperonis are too many?
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re making a pizza in a frozen pizza factory. You want to ensure the right toppings are on each pizza – not too much pepperoni or not enough cheese – and you need to keep track of this in a business intelligence (BI) report.
In our world, you would point a camera at the pizza production line, pick the “Pizza Toppings Filter,” and get output data that flows to your BI system. You could choose the best AI model for the job that recognizes pizzas. If a better pizza-detecting algorithm comes out in a year or two, you could swap for that. You could update the Pizza Filter simply by installing a new app on your phone or computer.
Instead of pizza, replace that with any business process that involves extracting intelligence, data, or alerts from video or image data. We’re helping marine biologists count fish near dams and bridges with underwater cameras. We are watching for wildfires on the horizon. We are assisting drone pilots in analyzing photos.
We enable produce growers by showing them the optimal time to pick their vegetables. We can watch people, places, and things to determine how many, what size, identity, shape, color, and even intention. This vision intelligence is powered by filters, which are conveniently stored and managed in a “filter repository” so you can download, install, and get the data flowing.
What makes Plainsight Vision Intelligence Filters unique?
Our filters are new, but we’re building them using core technology developed over the last decade in service of professional services projects. We’re investing heavily in “productizing” this library of computer vision solutions, wrapping them in modern software management tools like Docker and Kubernetes, and making the entire process easy to adopt and manage. You get the flexibility and power of a custom solution with the convenience and ease of a consumer product.
That’s me (third from left) and some of the team looking fashionable in Seattle.
You don’t need AI expertise or ML experts to make it work. We handle that for you. You get to keep your data private, even when using it to train AI models. The licensing model is simple and scalable – license filters for a year and deploy them to 10 video feeds, with a smaller add-on charge for each additional feed.
We aren’t interested in the trillion-dollar computer vision problems like self-driving cars and robot surgeons. We’re also avoiding consumer problems like home cameras (although we hope to support students, hobbyists, researchers, and non-profits with free access to our platform.) We will leave that for the big companies to solve. That still leaves millions of straightforward, everyday business challenges for us to solve with computer vision– anywhere your business crosses from the physical to the digital world is where we can help.
We work with various hardware (and offer a hardware starter kit for customers evaluating our platform to make things easy) and can fit easily into your environment. You can run the software in your cloud, on your edge devices, or we can host it.
To learn more about what filters are available, check out plainsight.ai/filters. We are also hiring as we scale to meet the market’s demands, so check out our job board.
