Leila Boujnane

Great entrepreneurs must be tenacious. Yes you can be friendly, have a warm disposition, but you must be fierce, because people will criticize you and you must not be daunted by your vision. 

I met Leila through the previously highlighted TorCamp / DemoCamp scene. Leila was the co-founder of Ideé with her partner Paul. Leila has a very open and friendly personality but I could immediately see she had strong opinions and not only was a success entrepreneur but would fight to make sure her ideas would succeed.

I had heard the concept of Ideé but had not fully grasped how the process worked. Print publications like magazines would use stock photography on a regular basis. They would use an image either wholly or heavily modified. Traditionally, the stock photography houses would employ people, often retired old ladies I was told, to scan publications that they had agreements with to manually identify images that were owned by the stock image company and charge the publications. To me this sounded like a bananas way to bill your customer and was wrought with missed and mis-identified images I’m sure. 

Ideé to the rescue. Leila and Paul built software to analyze a scan of a magazine page to rapidly and accurately find all images, modified or whole, against a library of stock photography images to correctly bill a publication. 

Leila gave me a tour of their office and I was fascinated to see the magazine cutters to separate pages from spines, laser drum scanners and the small server farm that they were able to accurately and quickly process publications. But what fascinated me more was Leila’s story about cooling the servers. 

The servers were not in a farm but rather in the basement of Ideé’s offices in downtown Toronto. From November through to the end of March the temperatures in Toronto are generally below 10 degrees Celsius and often freezing. Why then would you not cool the server room using outside air instead of running air conditioning in the winter? Apparently Leila had the same idea. Many HVAC engineers told her it wasn’t possible or too complicated until finally, undaunted, she found one she could work with to implement the idea. Tenacious. 

Leila and Paul would go on to evolve the technology into more generic image identification under the brand TinEye, a very popular way to find similar images across the Internet in general. 

In addition to her passion for running a successful software company Leila enjoys dogs, the outdoors, and especially the Canadian winter. Her passion and tenacity are an inspiration and why she’s on #My52.