Developer of the Month: VTX is Making Mobile Purchasing a Good Deal

We’ve selected VTX as our Developer of the Month for December. VTX has offices in Brazil and the United States and develops software for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, to help consumers easily purchase shoes, electronics, books and other goods.

Eduardo Monteiro, CEO at VTX, answered some questions for us, so you can learn more about his company and the work they do.

Can you tell us about VTX and the software you develop?
After two years of research and development VTX created the Product Recognition Platform (PRP). Mobile search can be an awful experience, so we wanted to create a service where only three clicks are needed for a user to take a photo of a product and purchase it. PRP is capable of identifying any kind of product within a few seconds, using an image. Once the product is recognized, the customer is directed to purchase it, all within the mobile app environment. It makes it easy for customers to just point, shoot and buy instantly! VTX is already running the PRP solution with several clients of different segments, including healthcare, shoes, electronics and books.

How was your company started?
The company was founded by 3 programmers: Eduardo Monteiro, Erico Perrella and Paulo Saito, to be the best tech shop in Brazil and the USA. The goal at VTX is to create a lot of new mobile technologies and innovations. For example, the idea of developing the Product Recognition Platform came up while the team was trying to create a universal and unified product catalog from crawled data, using information retrieval techniques in partnership with top universities in the US and Brazil.

What advice would you give to other developers working with retailers?
Consumers now have power and information, literally “in their hands.” The retailer’s challenge is to integrate their brick and mortar, e-commerce and mobile operations. With the right combination of strategy, technology, investment, not to mention will to change and innovate, developers can help merchants make a difference in shopping experience.

How would you describe the team at VTX?
Our team is currently formed by 9 PhDs and 11 employees with master's degrees, selected from top universities. Some of the guys we work with are not capable of speaking about “normal” things and can only have conversations lasting more than 5 minutes if they are talking about chipsets, bus handlers or fast Fourier transforms.

What are some development tools and resources you can’t live without?
Eclipse, Xcode, Stack Overflow, Github, Bash, Sublime Text

What do you love about developing mobile apps?
We love to build products that will change people's behavior or create new habits and ideas.