Take the Comforts of Home With You: Atlanta-based startup Koridor personalizes your hotel accommodations

hotel

It is important to be comfortable when away from home, especially on a well-deserved vacation. Traditionally, there aren’t many personalized options available when booking a hotel room. That is all about to change, thanks to Koridor, an Atlanta-based startup that wants to empower guests through its MyRoom platform.

By combining consumer behavior principles, innovative merchandising techniques, and valuable analytics, MyRoom helps consumers to have more control over their room choices. “For many years, the hotel industry lagged other elements of the travel experience when it comes to offering a mechanism to select a specific unit of inventory. With the MyRoom platform, the hotel industry finally leads the travel industry by offering guests an immersive, engaging experience that enables a much higher degree of personalization,” said Koridor CEO, Larry Hall.

“So when a guest is browsing a hotel, they can see a virtual tour of that room, they can see three dimensional imagery, they can see 360-degree views of the room or well-done still shots,” Hall continued. The software also provides guests with floor plans, available upgrades and window views. MyRoom is so specific, it allows a user to pick proximity to elevators and ice machines. Depending on the hotel, the software also has the option to include specific amenities, such as fireplaces, oversized closets, or a double-size sink in the room.

MyRoom is a first-of-its-kind software platform that was formed by seasoned entrepreneurs with deep industry expertise in hospitality and technology. To create such personalized experiences, Koridor works with hotel clients and manages the process of capturing digital assets and will swiftly configure the platform to highlight the personal qualities of each hotel. Analytics are then hauled into the mix, which can track consumer behavior, patterns and preferences, thus generating information that is used to tailor a guest’s experience, which in return increases revenue.

Are you developing software to improve the hospitality industry? Did you know that you can receive up to 14% back on your research expenses with the R&D Tax Credit? To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today or check out our free online eligibility test.

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Swanson Reed is a Specialist R&D tax advisory firm, offering tax credibility assessments, claim preparation, and advisory services to the state of Georgia. We manage all facets of the R&D tax credit program in Georgia, from claim prep & audit compliance to claim disputes. 

Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE and CPE credits for CPAs.  For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.

Coco – The Pixar movie that blends art and technical advancement

Disney

From Toy Story to Inside Out, Pixar Studios has become a universally acclaimed, visually-stunning storyteller of animation. But less known is the sheer amount of innovation, problem-solving, and laborious commitment needed to achieve Pixar’s ground-breaking heights. The company’s upcoming film Coco was a testament to this, where Pixar encountered quite a few new technical challenges that had to be overcome with new solutions.

Coco follows the story of Miguel, a young Mexican boy with aspirations to become a musician. However, after his great-great-grandfather left the family to pursue a career as a musician, the family forbade music and discouraged Miguel’s dreams. All this changes when Miguel is thrust into the Land of the Dead on Dia de los Muertos (the Mexican holiday known as Day of the Dead). He embarks on a journey back to the land of the living, searching for his great-great-grandfather in the process.

Because the story takes place in the Land of the Dead, animators faced a number of setbacks. For one, skeletons comprised a major component of the story and Pixar had to come up with a way for the skeletons to move in a convincing yet distinct manner from humans made up of muscles and flesh. Gini Santos, one of the supervising animators on Coco, said, “Over the years we’ve spent so much time and research figuring out our human characters and how their skin squashes and stretches, so this totally broke the rules for us. We knew with skeletons that all of a sudden, those boundaries of something organic are gone — the skin, the muscles, the tendons. And if there’s nothing holding it together, what can you do with bones?” To render each skeleton unique, the animators had to design distinctive movements for each skeleton to reflect their individual personalities. Animators, moreover, diverged from conventional skeleton designs by giving each a set of eyes and clothing.

According to International Business Times, each skeleton was composed of about 127 bones, 80 of which were visible while the remaining bones were covered by clothing. Manual painting of the bones was out of the question due to the large number of bones involved and consequently, a special software was needed. Initially, the company tested using Presto, the same software used for its film Brave (2012), but this couldn’t handle the requirements of Coco. Clothes would get tangled in-between bones and did not achieve the animators’ desired look. Instead, the developers tested a new program where negative spaces could be filled in more efficiently and the bones on the characters’ arms and legs were better infused. This helped orient the clothes on the bones in a more natural way.

Pixar also had to tackle lighting challenges. The Land of the Dead was elaborately designed with a multitude of nooks, crevices, and cracks that needed to be filled with lights of varying gradients. At least seven million individual lights had to be incorporated on the film, ranging from pin lights, plaza lights, street lights, and so forth. A computer could not process all these individual lights without a boost from special coding. Pixar programmers, adopting a practice from The Good Dinosaur (2015),  developed a code whereby the different lights could be grouped into fifteen types, making it more manageable for the computer to process than seven million individual lights.

Are you a software company experimenting with different codes to improve animation like Pixar’s efforts? Did you know your trials could be eligible for the R&D Tax Credit and you can receive up to 14% back on your research expenses? To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today or check out our free online eligibility test.

Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE credits as well as CPE credits for CPA’s.  For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.

 

How Not to Get Away with Murder: The Serial Killer Detector

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Each year, five thousand people get away with committing murder in the United States. And it’s likely they’ll strike again. Recognizing that a third of homicide cases goes unsolved, Thomas Hargrove is determined to develop a serial killer detector to find these murderers.

Since 2010, Hargrove, a homicide archivist, has been gathering information from municipal records on murders committed as far back as 1976. His catalogue contains information on 751,785 cases, making it the largest archive in the United States. He conceived the idea of using information to find serial killers while he was working as a journalist. Looking at the data provided by the FBI’s Supplementary Homicidal Report one day, he speculated whether statistical trends could help narrow down the searches. Hargrove told The New Yorker, “The first thing I thought was, I wonder if it’s possible to teach a computer to spot serial victims.”

He began writing code to sift through his catalogue. He started by telling the computer to search for statistical anomalies to vet out “ordinary murders” that arise due to love triangles, gang fights, and robberies. The serial killer detector then aggregates data based on method, geographical location, time, and the victim’s sex to highlight patterns.  This code forms the backbone of the Murder Accountability Project (MAP).

Developing the serial killer detector was difficult. Isaac Wolf said, “[Hargrove] would write some code, and it would run through what seemed like an endless collection of records. And we did not have expensive computer equipment, so it would run for days.” From these countless tests, Hargrove was able to narrow down his search parameters to sex, weapon, age, and location. There were certain patterns that emerged, such as women accounted for 70% of serial killer victims. Weapon was typically strangulation or bludgeoning. Significantly, Hargrove found that geographical location offered key insight into tracking down a serial killer. According to a New York City homicide detective, “Serial killers tend to stick to a killing field. They’re hunting for prey in a concentrated area, which can be defined and examined.” Murderers are less likely to act the further they are from the “hunting ground”.

Although not yet perfected, Hargrove’s algorithm has been useful in linking instances of murder to the possibility of a serial killer. For instance, Lake County in Indiana had fifteen cases of women who were strangled to death between 1980 and 2008. Studying the data, Hargrove suggested to the police of the city of Gary, which is located in Lake County, the possibility that these women were killed by the same person. The police rejected his report but four years later, the police in Hammond, a town near Gary, arrested a man named Darren Vann who was found to have been the perpetrator behind the Lake County killings.

There are still limitations to the serial killer detector. For one, it relies on data supplied by municipalities. Some cities are less capable of solving murders and documenting cases than others. The algorithm’s reliance on geographical data also makes it more difficult to find serial killers who travel farther than the typical hunting ground radius. Nevertheless, it’s a huge breakthrough.

Hargrove said, “Our primary purpose is to gather as many records as possible. It’s seductive how powerful these records are, though. Just through looking, you can spot serial killers. In various places over various years, you can see that something god-awful has happened.”

Are you experimenting with algorithms to solve unsolved mysteries like Hargrove? Did you know that your experiments, even the unsuccessful ones, could qualify for the R&D Tax Credit and you could receive up to 14% of your research expenses. To find out more, please contact a Swanson Reed R&D Specialist today or check out our free online eligibility test.

Swanson Reed regularly hosts free webinars and provides free IRS CE credits as well as CPE credits for CPA’s.  For more information please visit us at www.swansonreed.com/webinars or contact your usual Swanson Reed representative.