Web 2 Ireland

Congratulations to Irish startup Plink who were recently acquired by Google.

We’ve covered Plink in the past, and well done to the founder team of Mark Cummins and James Philbin, who are both Phd Candidates at Oxford University.

Despite some other media coverage, Plink is very much Irish (registered company in Ireland), and is a past finalist in IQPrize. Colin Farrell has suffered from same confusion as Plink

Hopefully its the first of many acquisitions by Google in Ireland/Europe.

Congratulations to Plink, who recently won the best reference app in the Android Developer Challenge for their PlinkArt application, and a prize of $100,000!

The Plink Art app is a visual search engine for art take a picture of a painting and the system recognises it and returns the history of the painting, info about the artist, etc. Right now it recognises tens of thousands of famous paintings.

We recently profiled PlinkArt on Web2Ireland.

Plink are a small Irish start-up developing image-driven search engines (you take a picture of something, and we recognise the object in the picture).

Their app PlinkArt just made the finals of Google’s Android Developer Challenge

The Plink Art app is a visual search engine for art – take a picture of a painting and our system recognises it and returns the history of the painting, info about the artist, etc. Right now it recognises tens of thousands of famous paintings. We’re working on building it into a next-generation museum tour guide.

The overall winner of the Google contest is determined by public vote. Anyone with an Android phone can download the “Android Developer Challenge 2″ app (just scan this barcode to get the app) to test out and rank the entries.

Maybe with last week’s launch of the first Irish Android handset (HTC Hero from Meteor), we could get some home-team support for Plink App.