• 05/31/2009 - 18 More Social Sites Added to SocialNetwork.in
• 05/25/2009 - Run Your Own Remix or Music Project at ArtistServer.com
• 05/22/2009 - AudioBoo.fm and YouNoodle.com Added to SocialNetwork.in
• 05/06/2009 - mp3tunes.com - no option to close your account
• 03/17/2009 - How to run a Remix Project
• 09/28/2008 - My Lovely Wife Lou is Pregnant
• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
• 09/18/2007 - AritstServer and ToneThis Serve Up Indie Ringtones
• 09/11/2007 - Running LightTPD and PHP on Windows
• 09/06/2007 - Compete.com -vs- Alexa.com - Comparing Website Rank

With Google possibly picking up Riya recently, the blogosphere has bubbled the topic to the top of Technorati, and it's quite understandable. The addition of facial, object, and text recognition in an online service is huge. This is indeed a core technology of the future, possibly even one that will find itself leaking into many products and services. Same goes for voice recognition, or any form of advancement in AI. These are technologies that will truly transform the plugged in world.

Don't think so?

Consider facial/object/text recognition tech in your phone. Now that's both scary and exciting :) Consider high pedestrian locations signing contracts with a corporation to obtain the rights to scan the pedestrains for brands and other defined elements in order to generate a saturation analysis of those brands and elements. Consider someone setting up a service that archived peoples Cams, and all the Cams on the Web, which would could then offer a person search searvice... even into the past since the video would be archived. Yeah, I'm focusing on the darker side, sorry about that... ok, now for some good... Consider yourself on vacation, you could use your phone as a tour guide - point it at a spot, take a photo - the service would identify the location, etc - then tell you about it. Similar to that idea - point your phone at a restaurant, snap a photo, and get a review about the place. How about an object finder - you run into a friend, you like the watch she just bought, so you snap a photo of it - then the service lets you know the nearest place to buy it.

All very interesting opportunities for a new platform of services, all based on visual recognition technologies.



Riya isn't the only one working on this, there's a few other players out there trying to get to market. Here's one I found interesting - mainly because of the viral marketing idea that they've used to start the service. Check this out... http://www.myheritage.com and the demo.

What the demo does: you upload a clear and straight on photo of yourself or mate, and wait a little bit - then the site displays a small photo browser where you can click through the "Celebs" that you apparently look like.

The screenshots below were made from assembling each celeb photo into one image - the site only displays one at a time.

If you upload a photo with a few people in it - the site will attempt to identify each person.

And... here's what it came up with for my wife and I :)

This is definately something people will forward to their friends, and if MyHeritage gets on the bus with an open API, I think there could be an even greater viral marketing tool in their hands.

While I don't think "Celebrity" sites bring any value to anything, there are a multitude of them. What MyHeritage could do, is make it easy for people to generate a chunk of code an/or links that gives these Celebrity sites something fun to add to their sites - that's relevant. One angle, is to present it as, "How close do you look like *CelebNameHere* - where the tool could not only show the visitor (who just uploaded a photo) who they 'do' look like, but also, how close they look to the given celeb. This is taking their current strategy, and truning it around. They could easily take on the population of people who already 'think' they look like some star.

And yes, the beer in the photo was very good! That's at Gordon Biersh, here in San Diego, CA. And the photo of my beautiful wife was taken earlier this year down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Oh, and if you see Kevin, and he's looking for a double for his next film, tell him I'm available, just as long as he's not directing or producing :)