Today we add to the growing list of start-up success stories. For those of you unaware, I work at start-up company in Pittsburgh. It’s called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition. We are a spin-off of CMU doing face recognition.

Before we get to the good news, let me tell you a story. At some point just after I started working there, I distinctly remember us receiving annoying phone calls from the Yellow Pages. Sometime thereafter, we ended up getting listed. Where do the Yellow Pages put a face recognition company named Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition? Under Pattern Makers, naturally. We found this particular error humorous but never bothered to fix it. Why should we? It’s not like anyone is looking up “face recognition” in the yellow pages.

We pretty much forgot about it with the exception of the (very) occasional calls we’ve received on the topics of quilting and knitting. What was the point of this story? Read on.

Hardwork Pays Off

A few years on and we’ve bore so much fruit from our labor: face detection, face tracking, landmark localization, face recognition, speed-up factors in the 100s, highly threadable versions, and so on. Finally, with so much hard work, and dedication, it finally happened. On December 4th, a day sure to live on in our company’s memory forever, we received the following email:

I am pleased to announce that Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition has been selected for the 2008 Best of Pittsburgh Award in the Pattern Makers category by the U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA).

In recognition of your achievement, a 2008 Best of Pittsburgh Award plaque has been designed for display at your place of business:

Hot damn! We’re #1!

Given our new standing as the #1 pattern makers in the Pittsburgh area, I’ve decided to go ahead and drop some knowledge on you lesser mortals. Check it out.

Whoa damm.

In the spirit of teaching (because when we are gone, who will make the patterns?), I’ll divulge my secret recipe:

1. Open GIMP. Create new Image (any size).
2. Use the fill tool, with a warning pattern (yellow and black diagonal stripes)
3. Use Filters/Enhance/Antialias (a few times, remove the hard edges)
4. Use Filters/Distort/Emboss (default settings)
5. Use Filters/Artistic/Clothify (default settings)

Let us take a moment and pause to reflect on the genius.

Seriously

Ok, seriously. Can this be rightly called a scam? This question has been bothering me.

On the one hand, it’s deceptive, for sure. But on the other, if you were a local mom & pop shop, it would give you something to put on the wall. You can see this type of stuff on the walls of restaurants and shops all over the place. Does that type of wall art actually influence customers and win you business? Maybe. Does a “real” award carry more weight than one of these? Probably not.

I just can’t believe this is someone’s model. Go through the yellow pages, email everyone there and declare them the winner. Give them a sweet press release they can quote, and let them buy a plaque from you. My disbelief slowly became amazement. This is actually genius.

Sad to say this story has an unhappy ending. Despite my pleading, our company will not be purchasing our plaque. It appears we have our sights set higher.

trackback