There will be a strong showing from Blacksburg at next week’s South By Southwest Festival in Austin Texas. Two local start-ups are heading out there to participate. The annual conference is known for original music and independent film, but, it also has a tech side.
South By Southwest began as an indie arts festival, but last year, it sold more tickets for sessions by what it calls ‘the brightest minds in emerging technology.’ Jules White is a professor of electrical & computer engineering at Virginia Tech. He started two new companies last year. One of them is a finalist for an award in 2 categories “best new technology” a competition called, “accelerator.”
"So what we do is we have computer vision algorithms that literally allow your phone to see. So you take a photograph, it gets sent to the cloud and we identify what you’re looking at and where you’re standing in relation to that object," says Jules White with PAR Works.