The venture's charter is to commercialize technologies developed at Sharp Laboratories of America Inc. that have languished here in the labs — "technologies that, for one reason or another, Sharp Corp. in Japan is not going to develop," said Jon Clemens, the leader of Sharp Technology Ventures. Clemens retired last year as director of Sharp Labs after getting permission from the $20 billion parent company in Osaka to form the tech venture company.

"There will be many advantages to users as we license these technologies, but for me it's about the people who created them," Clemens said. "You don't join Sharp Labs to write papers; you want your technologies to get out there."

One technology that could find a wide audience is Sharp's HiMpact Sports, which applies a set of algorithms that understand the semantics of baseball, football and soccer (for starters) and can boil down a three-hour game to 45 minutes without skipping a single play. The technology provides automatic indexing, random-access play-by-play navigation and annotated summaries for live or recorded video streams. Sharp will license HiMpact for video-on-demand, video-over-Internet, personal video recorders and handheld devices.

The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network will likely be the first licensee for HiMpact Sports summaries; according to Clemens, ESPN is interested in merging video feeds with its Sports Ticker service (a real-time wire service that offers play-by-play text).

But the company claims to have many other customers on the hook for the IP, including security experts seeking a HiMpact Security version for pinpointing and extracting "suspicious activity" highlights from long hours' worth of surveillance footage.

For ESPN, Sharp Labs created a prototype that segments game videos into plays, then merges in the SportsTicker commentary for each play. The result, which Sharp calls a summary, lets fans watch a game play-by-play with a textual index that will tell them what to watch for, which players will be featured and the outcome of the play.

By: DocMemory
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