Cortexica sees its way to a new CEO, while ARM veteran joins as Chairman

Visual search and image recognition startup Cortexica Vision Systems has appointed Iain McCready as new CEO today, while ARM-veteran Malcolm Bird has joined as its non-exec Chairman.

Bird was previously Technical Director with Acorn Computers Ltd. where he is said to have played a key role in business development and negotiation in the joint venture between Apple, Acorn and VLSI Technology that became known as chip company ARM. He went on to become a founding non-executive director of ARM until 1997. Since then Bird has held the post of MD of Phone.com Europe and was a Venture Partner with Deutsche Bank Capital Venture Partners.

Meanwhile, new CEO McCready joins Cortexica from NeoMedia Inc., a “world leader” in barcode creation, capture, delivery and reading technology for use in the ticketing, couponing, publishing and marketing sectors. He’s also held stints with mobile barcode company Mobiqa Limited, technology management company ScoLocate, and KSCL, a supplier of billing applications to mobile operators.

On paper at least, McCready and Bird would appear to be great recruits for a startup that is born out of academia. Cortexica was spun out of Imperial College London in February 2009 after six and a half years of research to understand how humans see and two years building algorithms to accurately mimic human visual recognition.

Just last week the company released its VisualSearch API, which has been in private Beta for a while. It’s aimed at brands who want to “directly engage with consumers” via their mobile device while bypassing the need to use QR codes or other barcodes or more traditional text search.