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- Irish entrepreneur Mark Cummins is the founder of Pointy, bricks-and-mortar shows what they have in stock online.
- Cummins is a serial entrepreneur and sold his first startup, Plink's visual search app, to Google in 2010.
- Ironically, he was a graduate of Oxford University.
- Pointy has announced a major partnership with Google and has won investment from the founder of Google Maps.
- The startup says it has signed up of US retailers.
LISBON – Mark Cummins, a graduate of the University of Oxford, graduated from the University of Oxford with a job at Google.
Oxford is one of the most prestigious universities in the world and ranks highly on global league tables for computer science. Cummins had graduated top of his year from Balliol College and, as he put it, "thought I had a pretty good resume."
Cummins filed his application and, like any Oxbridge graduate with a top-tier degree, expected the offers to roll in.
"I did not get a phone call," he told Business Insider during an interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. "I had a back and forth with a recruiter, but I never really understood it."
Cummins had the last laugh. Five years later, Google would go on to buy his first startup. And a few years after that, Google would also be integral to the success of his second.
Mark Cummins' first startup was Plink, an app that recognised artwork
After several more job rejections, Cummins opted to stay at university and do a PhD in the then-unfashionable area of robotics and machine learning. This was before breakthroughs like DeepMind's AlphaGo made AI bady again, and the entire field of learning was still emerging from a second "AI winter."
The interest in robotics provided the germ of a startup idea. Cummins has been working on finding their robots for their thesis.
"My PhD work was on a robot [that] would collect images as soon as possible: 'Have I come back to a place I've been before?' "Cummins explained. "The first iPhone had just come out, the first Androids were just coming out, and mobile was just starting to take off. I think, this is interesting, we can do something with photo matching, so we're starting a company around that. "
The company, Plink, was a kind of Shazam for art. Users would photograph a piece of artwork, and the app would identify it. The app garnered 50,000 users in its first six weeks and Cummins and his cofounder, James Philbin, won $ US100,000 during an Android Developer Challenge. That brought the app to the attention of Google, Cummins' one-time dream employer.
Google initiated the development of the world of technology, and the product was developed by Hugo Barra and Google+ architect Vic Gundotra. They impressed the top brbad
The pair accepted what Cummins described as a life-changing amount of money, and took jobs within Google. Plink's consumer app shut down, its technology is used in several Google image recognition services, such as Google Lens and Google Photos.
Cummins hit on his second business idea while working at Google
Three years later, Cummins had moved to Australia and was still working for Google. He had an inkling for his second time when he was not able to answer questions.
Specifically, he was drinking craft beer at a party one night, and then was not able to find a shop that sold the same brand. Where's the nearest store that has this product available? It seemed like a basic question, "Cummins told Business Insider.
The problem is that most small local retailers do not bother to log all the inventory they have. Their cash register, as Cummins put it, can "look like it's a Western." of valuable footfall.
Cummins started selling small retailers in Australia, asking what it would take to get their inventory and make it searchable online. He concluded that some hardware would be required and set for another cofounder.
Philbin, his Plink cofounder, had a young family and was not available. Cummins ranks up another old friend from his Oxford days, Charles Bibby, a sailing expert who was in the middle of a yearlong sailing trip around the Mediterranean.
Bibby found the vision so compelling that he cut the trip to Pointy.
Pointy helps people find their local shops have stock
The end result is the Pointy box, a small device that looks like a 9-volt battery.
It plugs into a retailer's scanner and barcode scanners as they're being scanned for purchase. Eventually, Pointy 's software logs what a retailer is selling and can take a good guess at when it' s out of stock.
That information is then listed on a dedicated page hosted by Pointy, so you can check it out.
While it's easy to see when your local hardware store is open, it's very difficult to check what it might have in stock. "It's not ecommerce, it's more about driving footfall," said Cummins.
The box costs $ US499 for US retailers. Pointy also offers to place local ads for retailers on Google, and takes a slice of the ad revenue.
It does not seem like a decision to focus on bricks-and-mortar stores in the age of Amazon, but Cummins argues that it does not matter. The majority of the population is still there when they need something.
Cummins says that Pointy "ranks very well" on Google. And over the summer, the search engine marketing platform for the search engine, which appears on the Google search engine.
To date, the firm has raised $ US19 million from Vulcan Capital, Polaris, Boston Ventures, LocalGlobe, Seedcamp and well-known angels such as Google Maps founder Lars Rasmussen, TransferWise cofounder Taavet Hinrikus, and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. It is headquartered in Dublin – Cummins is Irish – and manufactures the Pointy Box in Ireland.
For now, Pointy is focused on persuading retailers to adopt its technology. Cummins says that 1% of all US retailers are on board, citing US Census Bureau statistics. That amounts to around 10,000 US retailers. It also has some pickup in its home market and across the UK.
On the consumer side, it looks like the startup is pretty much connected to Google – which is fine, as long as the firm plays ball and integrates Pointy's data into its search results. The current partnership is a blessing, but the startup might need to branch out to defend its turf. Cummins says Pointy plans to build it up so that retailers can do more than just have a store online, but it would not be any more detail at this point.
And could another Google acquisition be in the offing? Cummins said, "I do not know how to do it, but I do not know what to do with it." "There's nothing on the cards," he says.
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