Calgary’s Slyce acquires YorkU tech to improve its retail e-commerce app

Calgary’s Slyce has acquired a computer vision technology that was developed by YorkU. There’s no indication on the specific name, but the tech will assist Slyce’s mobile retail e-commerce app to quickly analyze and aggregate similar images.

Slyce has a cool platform that enables smartphone users to search and buy products by simply by taking a picture. “Showrooming” has become an easy way to find similar products online before buying them in-store, potentially at a lower cost. Slyce’s retailer’s catalogue is already responsive and incredibly useful, so with this addition of the tech by YorkU it’ll certainly improve the overall experience.

This deal was led by MaRS Innovation and Innovation York, but no word on the monetary value. Slyce has also brought on board former York PhD student, Dr. Ehsan Fazl-Ersi, as their new head of R&D to lead the integration of the intellectual property into Slyce’s current Visual Search Platform.

“Identifying and classifying an object captured within a scene is difficult due to the effects of background clutter, lighting variations and viewpoint changes on the object’s appearance,” says Fazl-Ersi. This is a much bigger problem for mobile applications where the algorithm’s speed and efficiency are the difference between losing a consumer or making a sale. Our technology will provide higher accuracy when quickly identifying retail items so that consumers can choose among similar items according to style, colour or pattern using a mobile device.”

Slyce previously announced in November that they received $2.2 million in financing and also acquired desktop visual search startup Hovr.it.

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Ian Hardy

Ian is publisher at MobileSyrup. He's been quietly creating and building things for years and is completely addicted to Tim Hortons.

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