TreeMetrics features at CloudArena event


20 Oct 2011

(Left to right) Dave Feenan, founder of CloudArena, Dr Phillip Matthews, president, National College of Ireland (NCI) and Richard Bowden, chief operations officer, Cloud Consulting

Emerging Irish data company TreeMetrics was introduced at a CloudArena event this week, highlighting how it is helping to increase the value of Australian forests.

“Up to 20pc of the value of forests is being lost through mismanagement of data. When we started working with the State of South Australia, they were using a 100-year-old technique whereby each tree is measured manually with a giant callipers,” said Garret Mullooly, co-founder of TreeMetrics.

“Within a year we had introduced the forest growers and timber buyers to a software platform which uses 3D scanning techniques to sustainably manage ‘forest products’ – that’s trees to you and me!”

A participant in The Genesis Enterprise Programme, based in the Rubicon Centre in Cork, TreeMetrics was founded by Mullooly and Enda Keane in 2005. It is now supported by Enterprise Ireland, IBM and Coillte.

At the CloudArena event, cloud leader Doug Clark from IBM Ireland and UK spoke about its ground-breaking Wimbledon data-tracking technology.

“Taking the data we had on a player’s performance, we analysed over five years of Grand Slam Tennis data (>39 million data points) for patterns and styles. It was applying this knowledge against an opponent’s patterns that gives the ‘Keys to the Match’ for each player.”