Knorex CEO Justin Choo shows off the app, which will allow newspaper
readers to obtain content such as 3-D images, video clips, photo galleries,
product catalogues and contest forms on their smartphones.
Start-up's app lets readers scan photos and ads in the papers to get
extra content
Made-in-Singapore technology is
making its way into newsrooms across Asia, helping newspapers like The Star of
Malaysia, Thailand's The Nation and Hong Kong's China Daily come alive with
cutting-edge smarts.
Local start-up Knorex has inked
deals with six dailies in the region which will enable readers to download an
app on their smartphones and then scan photos and advertisements in the paper
to instantly get extra content on the device. These include 3-D images, video
clips, photo galleries, product catalogues and contest forms.
"It's a new way of
interacting with print content," said Knorex CEO Justin Choo, 34.
"How cool is it to be able
to view a movie trailer on your smartphone just when you are reading a review
of the same movie on print," he added.
The two-year-old spin-off from
the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) clinched its first
major deal last April with The Star of Malaysia.
Thailand's Nation Multimedia
Group will also be launching a similar app for its three national dailies - The
Nation, Kom Chad Luek and Krungthep Turakij - next Monday.
By June, the Philippine Daily
Inquirer and Hong Kong's China Daily will come on board too.
Business publication The Edge
Singapore and Indonesia's national daily, The Jakarta Post, are also currently
in talks with Knorex, said Choo.
The company which he co-founded
two years ago is already profitable through revenue-sharing deals with news
publishers, he added.
The firm was spun off from the
Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R) - an A*Star unit - in January 2010.
Knorex's ARise technology is based on augmented reality, where virtual content
is "embedded" in real-world spaces.
This is typically done with the
smartphone, although advanced spectacles or TV screens are also capable of
overlaying the virtual content.
One of the key components in Knorex's
ARise augmented reality app is Snap2Tell - I2R's award-winning image
recognition software which is able to make sense of the images in print or on
physical objects.
The I2R invention won an
international image-recognition competition - Document Image Binarisation
Contest - in 2009 in Athens, Greece. The contest was organised by the National
Centre for Scientific Research, Demokritos, in Athens.
Dr Lim Joo Hwee, head of visual
computing at I2R, said that Snap2Tell is also used in a National Heritage Board
app for conducting tours to 32 historical sites - like Labrador Park, Fort
Siloso and Bukit Chandu - for some 130 schools.
Separately, Knorex's ARise has
also been recognised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. It won
the merit award in the Most Innovative Infocomm Product/Service category at the
biennial Singapore National Infocomm Awards last year.
Last year, Knorex also won the
silver award in the Digital Media category of the Singapore Infocomm Technology
Federation (SiTF) Awards, organised by infocomm industry promotion body SiTF.
Irene Tham
The Straits Times
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