Australian Securities Exchange-listed Internet of Things (IoT) company Xped has announced that it is purchasing fellow Adelaide-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Jemsoft for AU$200,000 in cash and 50 million Xped shares. The total value of the deal comes to AU$900,000, with Xped shares priced at 14 cents per share. In addition to acquiring all of Jemsoft's intellectual property -- including its computer vision machine-learning technology, Monocular API -- Xped will also gain ownership of 51 percent of Jemsoft's partially owned subsidiary Media Intelligence, which offers media measurement technologies and real-time research solutions. The acquisition will allow Xped -- which offers a platform that enables consumers of all technical capabilities to connect, monitor, and control everyday devices and appliances through their smartphones -- to provide an in-house AI solution to clients looking to enhance their IoT products using visual sensors. Monocular's account management and dashboard components, as well as its user-trainable functionality, will become "integral components" of Xped's smart home and other IoT offerings moving forward, the companies said.

One Monday afternoon in April 2013, 19-year-old Jordan Green was working in a liquor store in Adelaide, Australia, when two men in balaclavas holding a shotgun entered the store, jumped the counter, held the gun to his head, and demanded his co-worker open the store's safe. It isn't the typical foundation for a company, but this is how Jemsoft was born. As a pragmatist, Green told ZDNet that he approached the situation by questioning how they entered the store with automatic doors and security cameras. Fortunately, Green was also a programmer involved in robotics. "The question in my head was why is it that someone who so clearly was not here to grab a slab could come into the local bottle-o and threaten my life and the life of my co-worker -- who to my knowledge has not returned to work. You could say that I took a pretty radical career change because I then left uni, left that job, and tried to build a company, which is not something a sane person would do," he said.

Technology created by an Australian startup is going to bring the conservation of orang-utans in a Sumatran jungle into the digital age. Adelaide-based Jemsoft's Monocular API is a computer vision machine learning technology, which can be taught to search for items in the real world. Under a new agreement the company will licence the software to conservationists to be applied to footage taken via drone above the canopies to identify nests of the endangered mammal. Rather than conservationists sifting through photos and video manually, Jemsoft's intelligent software can be trained to identify the orang-utan nests. Jemsoft, founded in 2013, is already being used by a number of large enterprise clients, including Fortune 500 companies, for other purposes.

Monocular is a computer vision API with a whole range of computer vision and image analysis endpoints. These computer vision and image analysis functions are accessed via the API and the data is returned as an easy to parse structure in your chosen language. The user dashboard is your central place for all things Monocular. Here you will find your apps, your API key, SDKs, usage statistics, docs, support options and account management. Applications are used to grant access to the API. Applications are what hold your app ID and secret, therefore at least one application is required to connect to the API. Note: We highly recommend creating separate applications for each code base you have that uses Monocular to easily visualise your data on the dashboard.