In Conversation With Ori Cohen, Founder of Fotegrafik

You might have read our feature on visual search solution provider, Fotegrafik Labs. This time, we managed to interview Ori Cohen, the founder of the company, to find out more about the origins of the company, and what prompted them to change direction to then set up Fotegrafik Labs.

What is your background and what were you doing before setting up Fotegrafik Pte Ltd?

My affair with Singapore began in 2002, when I was asked to move here and manage the Asian HQ of Dalet Digital Media System, a global leader in T.V & Radio Broadcast and Content Production systems. I come from a marketing and biz-dev background but I also have a long software engineering background having worked for years as lead software engineer and product manager in different small and large companies,and even a small exit at these happy 90’s selling one of my first startups at the age of 22.

During my MBA studies at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, I spent time in the US and in general traveled a lot, and I have lived in various continents since childhood.

The company started off doing stock image galleries. Why go into that field in the first place?

I was following my personal passion as a very enthusiastic photographer.

Ori Cohen

After starting the Stock Photo Agency we realized very soon that the process of acquiring, categorizing, keywording and later on searching and retrieving content by customers is labor intensive expensive and subjective since you are dealing with how human beings look at images in different ways.

My founding team and myself have a very deep technological background, we took this as a challenge to try and solve the various issues faced by large image and video libraries and buyers. The result was Fotegrafik-labs that was formed about 2 years ago, and ever since has become our main focus and area of interest.

There are many different companies and products doing something to do with image recognition. What do you think differentiates Fotegrafik?

Its a common misconception to think that image recognition is one specific area that solves all the problems in the universe. In reality, machine vision is a very large space for researchers and one technology or another doesn’t cover all aspects of this universe. A simple example is face recognition which is a very different area from barcode reading or OCR (e.g. automatically reading vehicle license plates) – these are completely two different problems that researchers and companies have built their products around for many years.

Our products are currently targeted to solve real life problems in two main areas: Media and Security. Our team comes from a strong digital media background, and traditionally we designed our products for this industry. However over time we were approached by various government security agencies and commercial security companies that were amazed by how unique and advanced our technology is and the numerous problems that it can solve in their space.