The Bird, the Rain and the Pocket PC

The inspiration for WhatBird came from a tiny electronic device that I carried in my pocket called a PDA, also known as a "Palm Pilot" or, if you are a Microsoft fan, a "Pocket PC". If you have not heard of these contraptions I suggest you take a look at one, its like having a laptop computer with you at all times. Anyway it was a dark rainy night. Well actually it was not that dark and not that rainy but it might as well have been--I was cold, muddy and frustrated, hiking in the hills of California, and trying the best I could to identify an elusive bird fleeting about in the branches of a redwood tree. Like most "birders" I carried a copy of Tory Petersen's "Field Guide to the Birds of North America", a classic book full of beautiful paintings of birds with paragraphs describing each in great detail.

There was only one problem. The bird would not stand still long enough to look it up.

The Trouble with Books

"That's the trouble with books", I thought. They're great when you have loads of time to sit and turn pages. But when you can only catch a momentary glance at the bird, they are the pits. Flipping through hundreds of pages while trying to remember the color of the bird you saw, its shape, bill, the kind of call it made--all fade from your memory. Not to mention how confusing it is to see a Duck, a Hawk and so on when all you want is a perching bird.

I sat down on a wet log. The PDA bulged in my back pocket. It gave me an idea--would it be possible to use my Pocket PC as a "digital field guide" to help identify the bird? Could I take advantage of a mobile device's searching features to narrow in on the bird I am trying to identify faster than I could with a book? Could I put the sounds the bird makes into the device so I could play it back in the field and see if the bird recognizes it? Is there a way I could indicate to the device just a few of the field markings and characteristics of the bird so I could match it quickly? It seemed like a good idea but I was not sure the PDA technology had enough power to perform these functions, and had my doubts about how to type information into such a tiny device. While some of these PDA's have keyboards, they are incredibly tiny, too tiny for my fat fingers.

The Dearth of Good Search Engines

My first thought was could it be set up as to require no typing, so you could just touch the screen, or tap it with the stylus. To do this I would need a way to indicate the bird's attributes visually, and I was not sure that could be done easily either. I started by looking at all the web-based bird search engines as well as CD ROM software. I discovered they all had a major flaw--you would enter all the field marks ahead of time, everyone you noticed, usually by clicking check boxes, then hit the search button. If you did not select enough characteristics you would get back way too many birds. If you selected too many characteristics you would frequently end up with "No Bird Meets Your Criteria" as an answer.

Frustrated, I knew there had to be a better way. Then it hit me--make the search more of a step by step process, allowing you to pick one attribute at a time: color, location, pattern, eye color, size, wing shape, etc. That way the search would narrow a list down and there would always be a valid result. One great side effect of this approach would be that I could eliminate field mark attributes after each search step that no longer applied to the bird I was looking for. That would mean each step would only present marks that where valid so if I got to the third step and it was "color" I would only see the colors of the birds I had narrowed the match down to, rather then all of them. In fact if the birds where all the same color that field mark would not even appear. Would that not be cool?

Rentacoder and Flash

I started building a mock up of my idea using a multimedia tool called Macromedia Flash. Then I posted it on the on the net in a few web sites I use for renting programmer talent, one great one called Rentacoder. My idea inspired a lot of programmers and eventually a very good one who specialized in mobile devices, Robert Levy. We started working on a real working prototype. Then we realized something--this idea did not need to be limited to birds, it could be used to identify objects in any kind of collection--be it cars, computers, coins, stamps, trees, movies, etc. Any collection that had a set of common characteristics was a candidate. At that point I decided to build more general purpose search engine, and use the bird database as a primary example. We decided to call this technology Percevia.

Outsourcing Illustrations

Since all good field guides start with excellent drawings or photographs, and I personally prefer illustrations because they make it easier to emphasize the field marks, I started searching for talented artists and immediately hit a wall. I discovered that drawing birds is a very difficult job--feathers are hard to draw--a typical illustration takes well over a day to finish (I now know why Mr. Audubon spent his entire life drawing). Given the number of birds I needed was well over 900 for North America, I had to find a solution that I could afford. Then I heard about outsourcing. I don’t want to start a political war here, but in this particular case if I was restricted to artists in the USA I would not be able to create this engine, so I did not feel I was taking anyone's job away. I used a cool web site called Elance to post my idea and quickly artists from all over the world to help me: India, Argentina, Russia, and China. The best artist, and the one responsible for 50% of my drawings, came from the Ukraine.

Poor PDAs

At the time we started this work in 2001, the processing power of the PDA technology was not fast enough to handle the graphics, so we decided to first build the software on a laptop PC platform, then we would scale it down to the PDA later. This would give the PDA technology time to mature and at the same time we would learn more about the user interface. The desktop version was completed in January of 2003.

All along I had been adding new illustrations, bird calls and ornithological information to the bird database; by the time we where done it was up to 400 birds. That was another ah ha moment--we realized that the bird database was in every way superior to all similar products on the market, and would make a great resource for others to use. Our business plan is not to sell databases but the technology for building them, and so we decided to make the Birds of North American (Western Edition) database available for free educational use. But then we had another problem.

Too Big for a CD ROM

The size of the database had grown to over 100 megabytes and thus distribution would be a problem. Sure we could use CD ROMs, but we where updating it all the time so a CD ROM would quickly be out of date. The solution was to make a web-based version of the search engine that could be accessed by any browser. This solved the PDA problem as well since, with a little modification, we could use the browser in the Palm or Pocket PC to access the same web site.

In January of 2004 we launched Percevia.com. We added a collection of databases for helping people choose everything from Laptops to Movies, a World Fact Book, and so on. We made our Field Guide to Birds of North America our best example of the Percevia technology.  We decided to make the bird database freely accessible to anyone interested in learning about birds or just identifying them.

SQL Enterprise Edition and the Birth of WhatBird

Towards the end of 2004 Robert landed a great job with Microsoft in there Mobile division. About that time I met Rick Stephens, an accomplished .NET programmer who had great experience in working with web servers and large applications. In March of 2005 we converted our Percevia database format from its proprietary XML underpinnings to the industry SQL standard, which gave us a great deal of flexibility.

Around the beginning of 2005 I met  David Lukas and Simone Whitecloud. They are naturalists specializing in birding and found the Percevia site an exciting example of what can be done to bring more awareness to the birding world. David convinced me there was a disconnect between the name Percevia, the focus of the site on technology and what birders want. While Percevia was getting a huge number of visitors, they where not interested in the search technology or the other databases we had created for demonstration purposes, but rather most  used the Bird database for finding birds. David also pointed out that the name Percevia was not a good one for birders. So we created a new site called WhatBird and devoted it to help people at every level identify birds, learn about birding, and become part of a community.  (We refocused the Percevia site on the underlying technology which powers WhatBird).

 And this is where we are now, we have just launched the WhatBird.com site.

P.S. The Percevia bird identification software is being used by the students at Piedmont High School for their 39th Annual Bird Calling Contest, which is featured each year on David Letterman's TV show.