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Tuesday, 26 July 2016 00:02 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Hiyal Biyagamage
BitMasters, a team comprised of four University of Moratuwa students, will represent Sri Lanka at the coveted Microsoft Imagine Cup 2016 world finals in Seattle, USA. Amplus, their intelligent digital signage platform, will be put to competition under the innovation category with 12 other countries.
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is an annual competition which brings together young technologists from all over the world and encourages them to use technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. Teams will compete under three categories which are innovation, world citizenship and games. The other 12 countries in the innovation category are Australia, New Zealand, Romania, France, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Guatemala, Italy, Turkey, Tunisia and USA.
Chatusha, Lakmal, Charith and Chanaka
Lakmal Meegahapola, Chathusha Wijenayake, Charith Eranga and Chanaka Lakmal from the Faculty of Engineering competed in the Sri Lankan finals last April with 22 other teams from leading state and private universities. Their innovation managed to steal the limelight of the event and got the approval nod from the judging panel to become the ultimate winner of the innovation category. Before leaving for the world finals, Daily FT had the chance to speak to them about the product and what the future holds for BitMasters and Amplus.
“It has been a long journey for us so far,” started BitMasters’ team leader Lakmal Meegahapola. “Back in 2015, we worked around the initial plan and showcased Amplus at the Google I/O Hackathon. We managed to clinch the 1st place and that win paved us the path to participate at many competitions. We won a merit award at the National Best Quality Software Awards (NBQSA) in the same year, 1st place at the Yarl Geek Challenge, 1st place at the Ideamart Mora Hackathon which helped us to integrate our product into Ideamart and finally, Microsoft Imagine Cup.”
Amplus is a low cost, easily operated and intelligent digital signage platform for smart and intelligent advertising. It is a complete package of software and hardware mastery that will help to revolutionise the digital signage industry both locally and globally. The device which resembles the structure of a Chromecast or an Intel Compute Stick can be plugged into the HDMI port of a display and it has another slot to plug in an HD camera. When a person goes and stands in front of the display; his gender and facial recognitions will be detected by the Amplus software which has a special emotion recognition algorithm.
Based on this info, the display will show advertisements which suit the gender and the mood of the person who is standing right in front of the display. Advertisers have a back-end to upload advertisements to the system and it provides a gazillion amount of information to users, such as total views, gender-based statistics, number of reactions to an advertisement, average view time and location-based views.
Global statistics show that the digital signage industry is on its way to hit $ 20 billion by 2020 and the industry already have big display manufacturers such as Philips, Intui Lab, Bright Sign and Cemsua. However, BitMasters has identified that they lack different elements to bring a real vibe to the industry. Those are no feedback to users, no targeted advertising and their high cost. They are determined to address these issues through Amplus and they are confident that have already covered the basics of them.
“Amplus is about learning, adapting and intelligent advertising. It helps you to manage your advertisements easily through an online portal, gives real-time feedback for advertisers and promotes intelligent advertising using emotions, gender, time and location. Big players who are technically display manufacturers in the world haven’t even touched these features. Amplus has the capability to revolutionise a billion-dollar industry with feedbacks and proper targeting which we believe would be a definite game changer,” said Chathusha Wijenayake.
Product Amplus
As part of their research, Bit Masters had analysed how the local market would react to a product like Amplus. They have set up Amplus in Majestic City, K Zone Moratuwa, Dialog Head Office and several Softolgic showrooms to see the feedback of the local market. Their efforts were commended by the big companies however they were amazed to see the response of several small shop owners. According to them, they were quite keen on setting this up at their shops. Their business model will support both display owners and advertisers: an extra income for both parties at the end of the day!
“We have been doing many researches to implement Amplus. Companies like Atom and Emerging in Sri Lanka gave as valued feedback about how the local market reacts to digital signage-based content. The industry has lot of potential to build a rapport locally but still, they are sitting on the bench with technologies used decades back. What we are trying do here is to enter this market with an up-to-date solution. The response we got from ordinary shops was brilliant. That is why we believe it is a good product for local advertisers with our business model providing them an extra resource of income,” said Chathusha.
Bit Masters believes that they haven’t built a product for the status-quo and Sri Lanka needs to adapt these new trends as a country quickly or they will be left behind.
“I guess Sri Lanka is still getting used to these new trends of advertising so we believe we have a good opportunity internationally. The simple reason is Amplus contains novel features which are synonymous with their digital advertising standards,” added Chanaka Lakmal hopefully.
Charith Eranga revealed that the initial idea was to develop a digital notice board but they have changed their master plan to come with up Amplus instead, after consulting several industry experts and mentors.
“Competitions we faced since 2015 helped us to refine Amplus from the scratch. At each stage, we received valuable suggestions and opinions from judges and industry experts. We used them to bring Amplus to this level. Our first version had a Raspberry PI module where the image processing power was not enough. We had to send the images to an external server, send the signal back to the system and change the advertisement accordingly. The newest version has been revamped with powerful Microsoft technologies and an Intel chip. Now, the device itself does the image processing. The idea was broad from the inception: from hardware level to software level. We improved the features day gradually by adding new technological elements to Amplus,” said Charith.
After fine-tuning and several testing sessions, Amplus was pitched for the Microsoft Big Pitch 2016 and they came among the top 10 in the world. They also participated in the International Technology Summit (ICAMES) 2016 in Turkey, and Amplus was named as one of the top 20 engineering products in the world.
“Technologies are changing every day as well as industries. To face that, we need to innovate rapidly and include cutting-edge technologies into the solution. Amplus will be developed to be future-proof and compatible with future tech. This is the third version of the solution, which goes to show you that we are fortifying its base to go with any kind of a new technology. When new technologies settle in the industry; Amplus will have the foundation to implement them all,” Charith said with a note of confidence.
When asked how serious are they launch this commercially, Chathusha said, “After winning so many competitions, people tend to ask. As we are still in the third year, it is bit difficult for us to give a timeline. However, we are hoping to kick-start the project as soon as we can in Sri Lanka. We don’t want to start something for the sake of starting something.”
According to their road map, Bit Masters are hopeful of releasing Amplus as a commercial product by the end of September this year and further expand. Several investors have reached them with a whopping $ 14.8 million investment on the cards from the Lanka Angel Network. With their next release, Bit Masters wish to include Microsoft Cognitive Services that would help them to make Amplus more unique in every sense.
It has been a long journey for BitMasters to come to this stage. They missed their chance last year at the same competition but they never gave up. These students made sure that it was their start and roll back their journey to be champions with advices coming from many experts. Even with minimum exposure to the industry; they have succeeded with their efforts. Microsoft’s biggest stage for young innovators – The Imagine Cup, awaits them with more than $ 200,000 worth of cash and prizes. Daily FT wishes them all the very best.
