Back in 1983, Mario Guzzi of S2F Solutions was talking with a couple of his techie friends and a pilot. The common thread was their Commodore Amiga computers – state-of-the-art technology at the time – and hanging out in the same college user group tech forums. Their conversations were around a shared love for flight and developing software.
Little did Guzzi know this casual collaboration would launch his journey into entrepreneurship.
In 1986 Guzzi began working full time on Airware Solutions to create aviation software based on discussions from those forums. Airware Solutions created a product for optimizing air crew scheduling with a view to improving the quality of life for pilots and flight crew.
In 2001, a Waterloo-based aviation company acquired Airware Solutions to integrate it into their product offering. In 2002, Guzzi moved to Waterloo from Montreal, transferring his technology and training staff. He stayed with the company for a decade.
In 2010, Guzzi’s entrepreneurial curiosity and passion for innovative technology and aviation led him to start thinking about mobile technology and augmented reality, about the role of video, the cloud and what the possible intersection of these technologies might be to serve aviation and other industries.
The following year, Guzzi created S2F Solutions (Seek 2 Fly) to provide consulting and mentorship to entrepreneurs, but more importantly, to start brainstorming projects he was passionate about.
That same year, Guzzi contacted Communitech. “I got very excited about the potential of Communitech because here was a group of people that could help me develop ideas,” he says.
One of the ideas he chose to focus on is the area of geospatial directional time mobile media search. The technology leverages camera telemetry data to provide mobile media footage search based on where a camera is looking, as opposed to just where the camera is located.
He hopes the technology will answer questions such as: Did anyone knowingly or unknowingly record something while the camera is aimed at a particular location and time, and would they allow me to access it?
He attended collision days for exactEarth and DATA.BASE at Communitech, provided immense value. “It really helped me crystallize my idea of where this technology could be used,” Guzzi says.
As more and more mobile video is produced, “the quality of video is increasing and mobile device cameras are getting to be very good,” Guzzi says. “In addition, there is an increase in the use of unmanned airborne vehicles (personal drones) that collect media. There are countless of hours of video. How does the person who wants to find video footage from a particular geospatial location sift through all of this in a distributed mobile space?” he asks.
“There is no single database for this video, as not all of it is in the cloud and there is so much residing on personal mobile devices as well, with no efficient way to capture and search that amount of data or incent people to share it.”
“We don’t even need to have the actual footage,” Guzzi says. “Initially, just being able to capture and send telemetry footprint data to the cloud indicating there was a camera aimed at a specific location at a specific date and time would be enough.”
It is exciting to know that most smartphones can easily provide this information with their built-in compass, GPS and clock, as well as telemetry and gyro capabilities.
With help from the DATA.BASE team, Guzzi found a starting point for building a prototype. He decided to focus on creating an app to search user-generated mobile videos to find footage of events at specific dates and times. He also wanted to learn more about the market, competition and challenges that might arise in creating such a database and search technology, particularly in the areas of security and privacy.
With funding from DATA.BASE, S2F has completed the draft phase of development. Communitech has also connected Guzzi with initial market research, valuable information that will allow him to determine market size and competition.
“The efforts of Communitech and DATA.BASE have been wonderful,” he says. “Going forward, prototype development will continue with DATA.BASE and Communitech.”
“After that, we can solve how we get parties to agree how to share this information,” Guzzi says.
Today, S2F is searching for interested partners and partnerships as well as funding to develop the application. “It will be exciting to have it built,” Guzzi says. “The applications of this technology are potentially endless, from national security to accident investigation and even the entertainment media market.”
Having taxied the idea to the runway, Guzzi is no doubt ready to see S2F’s cloud-based video search technology take off.
