The original name of the company was NBA Quality Systems Ltd and was started by a very talented entrepreneurial guy (and good friend) named Nigel Biggs.

Nigel was with the company right up to 2006. When I joined in 1992 the NBAQSL was providing asset-management software and services to the telecoms division of British Rail (BRT). This involved lots of analysis, design, site visits and training and was generally a most enjoyable period. NBA was, at the time, the smallest company to achieve ISO9001/TickIT certification.

The NBA team c1995

NBA Quality Brochure

Life really started to change at NBA with the privatisation of British Rail when our main customer turned in 77 small customers with almost no development budget. Nigel took a very brave decision to switch the direction of the company and concentrate on the newly evolving digital imaging technology (it wasn’t even a “market” yet). At this time, I was made aware of the imminent release of the very first affordable true digital still camera - the Kodak DC40. We got hold of one of the very first examples, reverse-engineered its serial interface and added it to our imaging application.

Now we had a unique application that could talk directly to all two of the consumer digital cameras available. Then Canon discontinued the Ion.

Pretty soon more cameras came along. The Casio QV-10 was popular as it was the first to have a colour LCD screen instead of a viewfinder but, at 307,000 pixels it was even lower resolution than the Kodak. However, that resolution (640x480 pixels or QVGA) became the standard for many of the cameras that came along over the following year or so. The first zoom digital camera was the Chinon ES-3000 which also had removable memory.

As each camera became available we carried out the same interface re-engineering process and over a short time NBA PhotoWallet (It now had a name) became a unique and market leading product that allowed corporate users of digital imaging to use any of the available camera devices without the need to install a different application for every different camera. It also provided an easy mechanism to organise pictures and to use them in documents and other applications.

It is important to remember that USB did not exist at this time and the communications protocols for every camera on the market was completely different. Most used RS-232 serial comms, some used SCSI and a few had their own dedicated interface that needed a custom card installed in the PC.

It was about this time (Mid 1995) that we were approached by Kodak with regard to creating a revolutionary internet-based service that allowed consumers to store their digital pictures online.

Brilliant!

We created a special Kodak Ektranet version of PhotoWallet that allowed users to choose pictures and upload them to an account on a Kodak server. 

The service had limited success but how little did we know then...

Late one evening, when the rest of the staff had all left for the day, Nigel and I were chatting - you know how it is - and the subject of the company name came up. It was clear that the current name ‘NBA Quality Systems’ didn’t really fit with our position in the new industry of digital imaging. “What we need”, said Nigel, “is an ‘ology’ to give what we’re doing a scientific feel.” My contribution was to suggest putting ‘pix’ in front.

And so, after sleeping on the idea, Pixology was born.

Named “Piccolo” the 2nd generation app took the concept to new heights by taking advantage of the trend to use removable media cards in digital cameras by interfacing directly with card readers.

Piccolo was launched in March 1998 at the CeBit show in Hanover, Germany. (CeBit is a huge annual technology exhibition which used to be called the Hanover Fair). Piccolo v1.2 - much improved and in 5 European languages was launched at the same show the following year.

By the late ‘90s the technical team at NBA/Pixology had gathered a huge amount of information about the ever expanding digital camera market. We had software that could not only connect to every digital camera but could identify that camera when it was connected. Plus we pretty much had every physical camera in our collection too. On top of that we were’nt bad software designers either!

The perfect set of tools to create the world’s first in-store interactive camera demo system -

Digital Camera Advisor

The software and update service was launched in February 1999 at the annual PMA show in Las Vegas. We had a tiny booth on the periphery of the main floor but attracted a huge amount of attention from the photographic retail industry.

So much so that sales to the huge CompUSA chain in the US and Dixons in the UK came quickly. These were followed by sales in Europe and Australia with database updates continuing for more than 2 years.

DCA’s life came to a natural end when the camera industry adopted USB as the standard physical connection method and standardised on EXIF JPEG as the image file format and DCIM as the default folder structure.

The days of camera-specific software was ending.

PMA 1999 - Las Vegas

So, we had the image management software, lots of expertise in the new digital cameras and imaging technology and we were getting into the online world. How could we bring this all together? 

The question that triggered the epiphany was... “Could we send the images to a conventional lab for printing?” Again, it is important to understand that there was no such service available in the UK at that time.

Off we went to Jessops’ HQ in Leicester and convinced them to let us do two things - firstly to investigate the possibility of printing digital files on their FujiFilm Frontier wet labs from a non-Fuji PC and, secondly, to create a Jessops branded plug-in for Piccolo that could format the files and transmit them to the internet server system we had yet to create. We also had to design and write software that would sit in the printing lab, regularly connect to the server and download any print orders.

Having done all that, the UK’s very first Internet printing service went live in a limited way in 1999 with a client application integrated into Piccolo that formatted image files and transmitted them via the internet to a server. The application in the lab connected to the same server, downloaded the order data and sent the image files to the lab. The service went live nationally in June 2000.

As the only consumer connectivity available then was 56kbps (max) via dial-up, a client application was the only viable option. Web-based image handling was still a few years away.

From this relatively humble start, the Pixology Internet printing system grew in to a global service fulfilling thousands of different products to millions of consumers across four continents. Among the users of the services were -

Of course I didn’t do absolutely everything perfectly.

As this cutting taken from the British Journal of Photography (BJP) on 9th Nov 2005 announced to the photographic world... (Click anywhere in this box to see the cutting)

Despite being early with the in-store Digital Camera Advisor service, we were a little late entering the retail kiosk market but, because we had an existing infrastructure that was technically pretty awesome, we were able to catch up very quickly. The kiosk software was able to integrate with labs, servers, and other software. Print orders could be printed instantly, to labs in the store or sent via the internet to external fulfillers. We also had a full-blown hub-and-spoke model working in central Manhattan.

A number of large companies implemented Pixology’s kiosk technology in significant numbers, such as Boots, Tesco, Costco, Duane Reade and Noritsu.

Another advantage of having a flexible infrastructure in place was that adding a print-to-store application to mobile phones was relatively straightforward. We created a Symbian Series 60 application that would work with the majority of mid-to-high-end camera phones. The application provided users with the ability to take pictures and send them via the GPRS or 3G network to be printed in their chosen store and picked up when convenient. An automatic SMS (text) message acted as an electronic receipt.

Boots, Jessops and Duane Reade all implemented the application and either distributed pre-loaded on phones sold in-store or we provided an on-line download.

IRISS - Fully Automatic Redeye Removal

It wouldn’t be possible to create and run leading-edge digital photo systems and services without the technical teams getting involved in some pretty in-depth imaging science at virtually every stage. However, following a suggestion from one of the development team, we decided to embark on some serious R&D into the single most common issue with any consumer photographs - Redeye.

Several patents were eventually granted to the IRISS team for the methods invented by us for the detection of various types of redeye and for new ways of automatically correcting them.

Pixology also won a number of awards for IRISS, including the 2003 Technology Award from the British Computer Society.