Prague team wins New York innovation prize

Two local IT researchers have beaten competition from around the world to land a prestigious New York enterprise award with a software product that can verify whether a digital image has been modified.

Radim Nedbal and Babak Mahdian of Prague's Czech Technical University (ČVUT) won the Graduate category of NYC Next Idea, an entrepreneurship prize that aims to boost New York's status as an economic hub for innovative startup companies. The award comes with $20,000 (331,200 Kč) prize money plus six months' free office space in New York, which the winners can use to launch their new business.

"We are really proud that we have beaten very strong teams from Oxford, Cambridge and many other renowned technological and also MBA universities," Nedbal told The Prague Post after receiving the award from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "This win supports our belief in our technology and our business strategies, and gives us confidence that we are on the right road."

The duo's product, VerifEyed, which Nedbal said came about thanks to "more than seven years of intensive research and development," is designed to determine the authenticity of photos, videos and scanned documents by identifying whether the files have been modified, either with software like Photoshop or from changes in the file information.

"In brief, our application divides the world of digital photos and videos into two groups: those we can trust - i.e., with a genuine verification - and the others," he said. "It also can determine whether a photo has been downloaded or stolen from the Internet."

Nedbal said he believed the technology could be of great value to insurers and other financial firms that are concerned with fraud prevention.

"VerifEyed can either verify the integrity of communication like photos and scanned documents with clients of companies to prevent fraud, or it can detect fraud by analyzing scanned documents and photos that firms have in their archives," he said.

Aside from policing the corporate paper trail, VerifEyed has a wide range of other potential uses for all kinds of websites. In fact, the technology has already been taken up by banks, online auction sites and even online dating sites to detect fraud through digital photographs.

Asked why the Czech Republic has been such a boom location for IT security companies - with world-famous anti-virus firms AVG and Avast! both based here, for example - Nedbal joked that he saw the industry as being like a "sort of high-tech game, and this is exactly what researchers and developers in the Czech Republic love to indulge in."

The NYC Next Idea judging panel, which was made up of a team of successful local venture capitalists, said they chose VerifEyed along with the other winners because they were the projects they themselves would be most likely to invest in.

Nedbal said he and Mahdian were especially pleased to have their hard work recognized with a prize awarded by "a judging panel comprising successful entrepreneurs and professionals from top venture firms and also academic fields."

As they prepare to launch their Web-based product April 28, Nedball said he believed the chance to start his and Mahdian's business in New York was a great boost for VerifEyed, particularly since so many large insurance companies and other big financial institutions are based there.

"Setting up our headquarters in New York City will surely streamline establishing cooperation with our potential clients," he said.

Before picking up their prize, Nedbal and Mahdian had the chance to spend a week in New York along with the other finalists, touring some of the top facilities the city has to offer for IT startups.

They paid a visit to General Assembly, a bespoke business space for startup companies that just opened this year. They also got the chance to see the headquarters of Etsy, Next Jump and Bloomberg LP, and attended a monthly gathering of the city's tech community known as New York Tech Meetup.

"When it comes to big ideas, there is no better launching pad than New York City," Bloomberg said at the award ceremony April 8 for the competition, which is now in its second year.

"Talented entrepreneurs from across the globe entered this competition with the goal of getting help to establish their ventures in the city. We want them and other budding business leaders from around the world to start their ventures here," the mayor said.

Bloomberg's chief adviser, John Feinblatt, added that many of the most high-profile American multinational IT firms - including Google, eBay, Intel and Yahoo! - all had founders who were born outside the United States.

Next Idea's organizers, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), say they started the competition to raise the visibility of New York City as an international center for innovation and entrepreneurship while showcasing the world's entrepreneurial and technological talent at the same time.

Funded by the NYCEDC together with Columbia University's engineering and science faculty in the city, the competition is open to new, independent ventures in the conceptual, seed, startup or early growth stages, as well as business concepts that include the expansion of an existing venture into New York City.

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com