Defending your position

July 1, 2011
In finance, the concept of a protective “moat” around your castle (investment) has been a central tenet of famed investor Warren Buffett and others. In an interview in Fortune magazine more than a decade ago, he noted, “The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage."

In finance, the concept of a protective “moat” around your castle (investment) has been a central tenet of famed investor Warren Buffett and others. In an interview in Fortune magazine more than a decade ago, he noted, “The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”

So how do moats relate to machine-vision products and services? Larger machine-vision companies have invested capital in new technologies to maintain their market share despite competition from numerous startups. Those in consumer markets are also leveraging imaging technology to lure buyers into purchasing their latest technology and thus maintain their leadership position.

As reported in this issue, for example, Microsoft’s SDK for its Kinect for Xbox 360 gaming system should speed the adoption of Kinect’s time-of-flight sensor technology in robotics and other automated applications. The system is already very popular with roboticists who have hacked the Kinect.

Lightfield cameras, pioneered at universities such as Stanford and MIT, may also be widening the protective moat for developers of other consumer products. Lytro, a Mountain View, CA startup, for example, plans to release a lightfield camera into the point-and-shoot consumer market later this year, allowing professional and amateur photographers to “take shots first and focus later.”

Durable innovation

While the technologies behind these two examples have been the subjects of frequent articles in Vision Systems Design, innovations in machine-vision technologies, systems, and products are allowing OEMs to maintain a competitive edge. In this issue, we continue the tradition of reporting on such innovations with an article by editor Andy Wilson, who shows how novel lens designs can be used to solve application-specific problems.

In another article, Wilson describes a creative multispectral vision system that combines cameras, filters, and custom algorithms to inspect color prints in real time—a very challenging feat. Then, contributing editor Winn Hardin shows how an automated x-ray-based imaging system can be used to guide meat cutting to ensure consistency and improve yield.

Our cover story about smart surveillance systems that dynamically process and analyze data to alert security officials is another clear example of how vision technologies are allowing vendors to maintain their competitive advantage.

In developing products for consumer, traditional machine-vision, and security and surveillance markets, all of these companies have realized that, by leveraging similar technologies, the protective moat around their markets will be broadened. In doing so, the products they develop will deliver more significant rewards for customers and investors alike.

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