Breakthrough Visual Search Engine for Mobile Phones Takes off Big in JapanKDDI

Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in
partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan’s
leading mobile content provider, announced today that KDDI Corporation
is including the “ER Search”
visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 “au™”
line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any
KDDI customer with a prior “au”
camera phone. This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the market for
mobile visual search, which will enable millions of consumers in Japan
alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with
their camera phone.

The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an
entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which
is already projected to grow to $24 Billion worldwide by 2013. (Source:
ABI Research)

ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and
powered by Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual
pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a
traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go
through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of
something they’re interested in and
immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.

As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music
CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the
album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are
shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label
and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are
browsing through a catalog and see an item they’d
like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the
item on the page.

“ER Search is an entirely new way for
connecting consumers with content and companies,”
said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. “Because
ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the
customer is, as soon as they see something that they’re
interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to
click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process
far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before.”

“We are very pleased to be working with
Bandai Networks and are excited to see the momentum building in the
Japanese market,” said Paolo Pirjanian,
President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. “Our
mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable
for mass market applications, and ER Search is a great example. We see
this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and
other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to
expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies
alike.”

Bandai Networks had already deployed ER Search on over one million
phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of
users with access to ER Search will expand by millions more in a very
short time, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers
to participate in the service.

About ViPR

The ViPR technology easily supports user-generated content so that users
can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and
tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content
will then show up in the results returned to other users who take
similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for
communities to develop and access.

(A video demonstration of Evolution Robotics’
visual search technology running on Apple’s
iPhone can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/user/EvolutionRobotics [1])

ER Search’s versatility rests in Evolution
Robotics’ breakthrough ViPR visual
recognition technology. ViPR is able to learn new objects and images on
the fly (such as the cover art on a music CD), without the need for any
special encoding such as barcodes or watermarks. Just as significant,
ViPR performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on
most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions
are poor.

For the music search application alone, Bandai Networks has over 150,000
music CD covers already indexed in their database. Other mobile
marketing and mobile commerce applications include providing content and
links for print ads, book covers, DVDs, product packaging, movie
posters, retail displays, business signs, etc. Even animation, streaming
video or images from live TV can be supported.

About Evolution Robotics

Evolution Robotics, Inc. is based in Pasadena, CA, and partners with
brand leaders to make their products smarter by providing solutions for
vision, autonomous navigation and intelligence. From toys to cell phones
and vacuum cleaners to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s)
the company has over 2 million products on the market through partners
such as Sony, Bandai and Sharper Image. Evolution Robotics is an
operating company of Idealab, a creator and operator of technology
businesses.

About Bandai Networks

Established as a subsidiary of Bandai Co., Ltd. in September of 2000,
Bandai Networks is a member of the company, Bandai Namco group. Bandai
Networks builds on Bandai Namco group's strength in character
merchandising and adds an expertise in server management and
applications, innovative concepts, and strategic business partnering to
operate a wide variety of mobile phone and Internet content services.
Bandai Networks currently boasts 3.6 million subscribers to its domestic
pay mobile phone services. For more information about Bandai Networks,
please visit http://www.bandai-net.com/ [2].

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