Briefs

Thursday 16 September 2004. Portsmouth data mining algorithm start-up Trice UK is looking for commercial customers to unlock venture capital (VC) funding.

"We have one customer in the space sector. It is a significant player, but in the current climate VCs with money to put into the military/aerospace sector are putting it directly into bullets and bombs," company strategy head Terry Joint told Electronics Weekly. "Two to three million dollars would allow us to prove it across markets and industries."

Trice has data mining intellectual property called Radiance, which was originally developed to pick-out individual stars for satellite orientation.

It can search huge databases very quickly, claimed company director Richard Bolt: "A Pentium class PC would take 18 hours to match one fingerprint from a database of all the world's fingerprints. We can bring that down to four or five minutes."

The firm's products are data mining co-processor boards to which host computers can pass search tasks. The firm is looking for commercial customers among database vendors and data warehousing firms. "The discussions we are having currently are with world-class players," claimed Holt.

For more information, see www.triceuk.com.

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