Within the CITT project we are looking for successful examples of applied research and ICT technologies that can be brought to the market. And we like reporting when a Central European university or a company succeed in pan-European competition. Here are two recent stories from Brno that may be inspiring for other FP projects and small start-ups.
A unique MUFIN system for searching multimedia data has been developed at the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University in Brno (partially under Sapir and Delos FP6 projects). Unlike the common search engines searching only in textual tags and descriptors MUFIN can compare the content of images, audio or video files on the basis of their characters (like color spectrum, texture or shapes for images) and search for similar, for example, DNA sequences, faces or fingerprints. The development team has been awarded by IBM Shared University Research and you can test it yourself on 50 million Flickr photos.
Westcom, Brno based start-up and our neighbour from the Technology incubator, was awarded the second place in the start-up contest of the LeWeb conference in Paris in December as the only Centrope finalist. Its Webnode free service for fully interactive creating and editing websites was launched in January 2008 and over 200,000 users registered, mostly from US, Spain and China, have registered since that time. Webnode aims to monetise through paid-for extra storage space, extra bandwidth options and e-mail accounts.
