Tag: facial_recognition

Blogging, Business blogging, Search Engines

Riya being bought by Microsoft?

Riya is a company I have mentioned previously – they have an incredible application which combines text and facial recognition with photo uploading, so that once you tell Riya who is who in your photo albums, it will recognise those people from then on out in any photos it sees! Riya also has tagging built in to the application – like any half-decent web 2.0 application. Riya is due to launch tomorrow.

Now comes the rumour/news that Riya is being bought by Google – before it has even launched! I have to stress the news that this is still just a rumour – and the way rumours grow legs on the blogosphere (remember the Technorati buyout rumours?), it may well be completely untrue.

However, given Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr, Google needs a cool photo app like this to maintain a presence in this space – then again, so does Microsoft! Anyone want to start a Microsoft is buying Riya rumour? Funny, Robert Scoble didn’t mention it in the interview of him which I podcast yesterday… then again, he wouldn’t, would he? 😉

UPDATE:
I see Michael Arrington and Dave Winer and others have picked up on this story as well.

Search Engines, Technology

Intelligent photo searching coming soon!

Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch, has the first review of Riya on his site.

What is Riya? Riya, formerly known as Ojos, is facial recognition software – basically, if you upload you photos to Riya, it will ask you the names of people in the photos, and quickly start to recognise them in more of your pictures so you get a searchable index of all your photos of people.

Riya also allows for tagging of pictures and parts of pictures, so you could tag your dog’s picture with his/her name, it recognises text in pictures and it allows you to open your pictures for friends to tag and search also.

This sounds like it will revolutionise online photos – intelligent search has always been missing from photos.

Riya is, as yet, unavailable to use – it is in Alpha testing still. There is a learn more series of pages on Riya’s capabilities on their website and the option to register your interest. I did. Watch this space!