Southland firms race to go global with cell phone 'eyes'.

PLENTY of companies want to be "your eyes and ears in the marketplace, but 1. two L.A. companies are in fierce competition to be just the eyes--for your cell phone.

Santa Monica-based Neven Vision and Pasadena-based Evolution Robotics have both developed technology that allows a cell phone to recognize objects and images captured by its camera.

Both companies signed agreements with major Japanese telecom carriers in recent months, and both are being used in name-brand ad campaigns overseas. A customer could use his phone to snap a photo of a poster, for example, send it to a database and receive a coupon, special offer, or product information back on his phone.

Evolution Robotics was started in 2001 by CalTech and USC grads. It's an Idealab company still housed in the Pasadena incubator. Neven Vision was founded in 2003 by German engineers from the University of Southern California.

Though the technology is new and its potential can only be imagined, the race is on to see which company can imbed itself in the most mobile handsets.

"We have every reason to believe that our technology is superior," said Paolo Pirjanian, president and chief technical officer of Evolution Robotics. The company just announced a deal with Japan-based Bandai Networks Co., a mobile content provider, to deploy its search tool on Bandai's network. Customers of NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest mobile carrier, will have immediate access to the technology.

The pact comes just weeks after Neven Vision signed a deal with NTT DoCoMo in March for its facial recognition software. Neven's agreement is for a security feature that allows users to lock areas of their phone--contacts for example--with their picture. When someone tries to access contacts, the phone will automatically match the user's face with the photo image on file. Unauthorized faces will be denied access. The software is imbedded on two models of Sharp handsets for DoCoMo customers, and the company is in talks with two other phone manufacturers to do the same, according to Chief Executive Alex Cory. Neven has 21 other patented technologies, and its iScout software, similar to Evolution Robotics', has been deployed in ad campaigns for Coca-Cola Co. and German broadcaster ProSieben in Europe and Asia.

"We've built something that is a little faster, a little less clunky," Cory said. Neven is going straight after advertising clients, while Evolution Robotics is focusing on the technical aspects of its product.

The two companies are taking different approaches in their bids to go global.

Evolution Robotics are strictly engineers. They developed the technology and license it to content providers or marketing companies, who then customize it for campaigns and go out and seek clients. "We support them as engineers--improving it, doing integrations," Pirjanian said. "But our core experience is in technology, so we find partnerships for the other things."

Neven Vision, on the other hand, strives to be a full-service mobile marketing firm. The company provides the technology, manages the campaign and tracks response-rate. All the client has to do is design the ad campaign. "We want to provide any marketing you want to do related to the cell phone," Cory said.

The company is amassing a library of logos and other images, so that customers will be able to snap a picture of a CD, for example, send the image to a record label or even to a retailer's Web site, and have access to ring tones or purchase the album. The technology can be downloaded onto 50 cell phone models in the U.S., and another 50 in Europe, Cory said.

Neither company discloses revenues. Pirjanian expects Evolution to break even this year by selling software development kits to companies for $30,000 a pop, and also collects licensing fees from customers like Bandai. In the U.S., Evolution licensed its technology to Mobot Inc., a Massachusetts-based mobile search-marketing firm.

But the company's main business is in optical technology for robots--it creates "the eyes and the brain," Pirjanian explained--with clients ranging from Sony Corp.'s Aibo robot to South Korean Yujin Robotics for its household robots. "We originally developed this algorithm for robots, to enable them to recognize their environment," he said. Then he had several companies contact him about using the technology for mobile phones. "Since the cell phone space is so huge, we thought we'd take advantage of it."

Cory did not disclose Neven's revenues, but the company brings in direct fees for its marketing campaigns, licensing fees for its technology imbedded in phones, and a per-recognition fee during a campaign.

Cell phone marketing is in its infancy in the U.S., but marketing studies conducted by British mobile marketing firm Airwide Solutions show that 89 percent of major brands surveyed expected to use mobile text messaging and mobile media messaging by 2008, and a third of them planned to spend more than 10 percent of their marketing budgets on mobile phone campaigns.