Tough decisions, big plans and a bright future

Browsed through my blog today. Realized I hadn't written much about what I've been up to. There's been a reason for that. One year ago I left my position at Duke University. It wasn't an easy decision. The Radiology eye tracking project I was involved with (and still is) was making good progress. I had been working long days since it started at Stanford in 2009 and we were doing pretty neat stuff with volumetric medical image datasets. 

The Stanford/Duke Radiology eye tracking project and our novel approach to volumetric gaze data.

At the same time I spent nights and weekends working on the open source ITU Gaze Tracker together with Javier San Agustin. Somewhere I always had the feeling that we should get back together, great things just seemed to happen when we did. So after my grand tour of the US and countless Skype meetings over six months we had a plan. The four former PhD students from the ITU Gazegroup was to start an eye tracking company. At first we called it Senseye but later changed it to The Eye Tribe due to trademark issues. 

The Eye Tribe as of Spring 2012 at the US embassy reception. 

We decided early not to go for the established market. It's a red sea with a couple of fairly big players that have been working on their high tech creations for years, it's a low volume/high margin game with intricate and expensive solutions primarily for the research and disabled markets. 

The Eye Tribe intends to innovate and disrupt by bringing eye tracking to post-pc devices in the consumer market. It just doesn't happen with devices that costs several thousand dollars.  

After twelve months of executing our plan we recently raised funds from a group of European investors to accelerate (as covered by The Next Web). The team has grown and we are looking to make additional hires in a near future. Perhaps you would like join the tribe and be part of something great? There's some very interesting things happening in a near future, for the skilled it's always best to get on early.

One year ago I traded a warm North Carolina for a cold Copenhagen, a relationship for loneliness, a big house for a small apartment and a sport car for a bicycle. Time will tell if that was the right thing to do, with big plans, full commitment and funding in place, it is so far, so good.