Progress Update 6/9

[Sai To Yeung]

Hey guys,

Time for a progress update.  The email's a little long, but I'm thinking for the upcoming weeks, we can instead have a conference call/google hangout.

Last week

• Jon has been working on 1) Designing and pressure testing our algorithm for registering dot patterns, and 2) Designing a simulation to get get the total number of IDs
• Jon has found a good, consistent way for the iphone to register a set of points as congruent with rotation and translation.  I'll leave it to him to explain it in more detail (I think he's even written a tutorial on it), but essentially it involves taking a set of 5 points, calculating the centroid, translating the set of 5 points such that the origin (0,0) becomes the centroid, summing up the unit vectors of each point to the centroid to get a pointer vector, aligning this pointer vector along the Y axis, and then translating the set of points such that they are all back in the first quadrant.  This is what we are calling a "standard form", and the total number of standard form will represent the number of unique IDs.
• Getting a simulation that will finish within a reasonable time has been difficult, and it may be time to wind down our efforts here
• James has been working on learning Objective C and implementing our algorithm into the iOS app
• Given the difficulty in running a full simulation, I ran a few Monte Carlo simulations in which instead of checking every single combination of 5 points, we choose 5 points randomly and check whether or not it is a standard form.  If we run this a lot of times (like a million times), we should be able to get a pretty tight range for our answer to the total number of IDs
• I'll go back and see if I made any mistakes, but right now I'm getting about 3.6 billion IDs
• We met with T-Ink on Thursday to get the prototyping process started, and overall, it was a good meeting.  My feeling was that they tried to intimidate us in the beginning by saying that we're stepping on Printechnologics' (PT) patents, but they backed down when we told them that we've done our research and saw that their patents are still pending.  The tone changed as the meeting went on and after being initially hesitant because they are in a 50/50 partnership with PT, they ultimately agreed to help us print some prototypes.  At the end of the day, it looks to be a win win situation for all of us since we have the technology and they have the printing capabilities and and a lot of connections in the industry that may want to utilize our technology.

This Week's Schedule

• Monday: Pitch to Samsung Ventures
• Tuesday: Partner Meeting
• Wednesday: I am meeting with Stephane from Cooley to start the conversation of incorating touchBase
• Thursday: We're up for the "Fishbowl"

This Week's Tasks

• Jon: Continue work on pressure testing our algorithm and thinking of a way to simulate.  I'm thinking you should dedicate 70% of your time on the former, and 30% on the latter
• James: Continue working on the app, 
• Melanie: Continue research to see whether we can try printing with MICR toner; work on web development
• Sai To: Produce dot designs to send to T-Ink by Wednesday, Work on web development

Thanks for reading.

Best,

Sai To