When the Picture Changes

I've written about Riya a few times. It's visual search technology is interesting; alas, it hasn't turned out to be very profitable, because the people behind it are changing direction somewhat. They've just launched Like.com, which seems to be a specialised accessories search engine for people with more money than taste.

What I do admire, though, is the way the company's founder, Munjal Shah, has put the ecstasy and agony of the transmogrification of Riya into Like in his blog for all to see and learn from. It's both brave and generous, and I salute that.

Pity about the new company, though.

Picture This

I wrote about Riya.com a month ago; now it's out in beta, so you can try out its face recognition technology. I did, and was intrigued to find that this photo was tagged as "Bill Gates". Maybe Riya uses more artificial intelligence than they're letting on.

It's certainly a clever idea - after all, the one thing people (misanthropes apart) are interested in, is people. But you do have to wonder about the underlying technology when it uses addresses like this:

http://www.riya.com/highRes?search=1fSPySWh
FrHn7AnWgnSyHaqJl6bzuGByoFKJuG1H%2Fv
otjYbqlIMI22Qj88Vlcvz2uSnkixrhzHJP%0Aej%
2B9VuGvjiodlKDrBNS8pgy%2FaVqvckjfyo%2
BjhlL1sjK5CgHriGhifn3s2C1q%2B%2FnL1Emr
0OUPvn%2FM%0AJ0Ire5Zl2QUQQLUMi2Naq
Ny1zboiX7JtL77OG96NmV5VT8Buz4bzlyPFmi
ppcvmBJagMcftZjHUG%0AFlnXYIfp1VOGWx
gYijpgpDcsU9M4&pageNumber=9&e=bIaIR30d
SGNoZcG8jWL8z2LhcH%2FEg1LzsBF%2F6pr
Fd2Jm7tpMKFCXTu%2FBsOKk%2FVdS

I know a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but not in the URL, surely....

Rich Media Search

Two rather large straws in the wind: Riya - which offers face recognition in pictures with automatic tagging - and Nexidia, which claims to be "the only technology to fully leverage the actual phonemes that define human speech", creating a "highly scalable tool for audio mining and speech analytics."

Assuming these deliver on their promises, they could be very big. Imagine being able to let your PC search through thousands of photos for people - or, more interestingly, groups of people; imagine being able to upload thousands of hours of recorded conversation, and find just the spoken phrase you were looking for.

Combine this with the continuing drop in the price of hard drives - and hence the ability to store as many photos and recordings as you like - and you are getting close to a situation where you could archive all the significant visual and aural moments in your life - and find them again.