Reading the vision tea leaves

Across the pond in Britain, or so I’m told, fortune tellers predict the future from the patterns left at the bottom of the tea cup. Fortunately, in the machine vision world we don’t have to go to such extremes to make forecasts, although good hard information is hard to come by.

I try to help by sharing financial info from companies like Cognex and Basler, but there is another to sense the direction things are moving. When a company decides to move to larger premises that’s a pretty good vote of confidence in the future.

Back in March we heard that Canadian camera company Point Grey was expanding their Headquarters, and now I see that Pleora Technologies is also expanding. The November 2013 issue of Quality Magazine had a short story about how the driving force behind the GigE interface was growing into a new space.

Admittedly, these aren’t Google-like explosive growth spurts, but they do show faith in the future of machine vision. I also find it interesting that both companies are Canadian.