Riya Conversations

I got an email from Tara Hunt, the superbly great “mischief marketer” from Riya.  Tara said she’s crossing her fingers for the alpha invites to go out on Monday, so if you’re on the list you should get your invite.  Personally, I can’t wait!  Danny Yang (also of Riya) also wrote me to tell me they’ll be launching shortly, so stay tuned.

Enric from Tech Alley sent me the link to a video he shot at the TechCrunch meetup/Riya Launch Party in which Tara gives a demonstration of the software.  I gotta admit, it looks pretty freaking cool in action; all I’d seen up to this point was screenshots, but now that I’ve seen it in action I’m even more impressed.

Attention Methods

Robert Scoble has a post from November 19 detailing the TechCrunch/Riya launch party. In it, he details a conversation he had with Ojos CEO Munjal Shah. Munjal talked about the facial recognition technology that has us all salivating, but he also revealed something I did not know: that Riya also uses other characteristics to identify certain people in photographs. Scoble’s son was wearing a tie-die shirt that night, and Riya would have stored information about that shirt so that it could better recognize him in case a photo doesn’t have a clear shot of his face.

Now, I’m wondering how well this is going to work in practice. Thousands of people have tie-die shirts, so will it return all those people? I guess it would be cool to say “show me all pictures of people wearing Houston Rocket jerseys” and have Riya return that, but I’m talking more specifically about finding a single person. Do you have to drill down through a bunch of data to find who you are looking for, or does the software match up shirts and other attention details with facial characteristics to give you a closer match?

This is a question I’m hoping to answer whenever the alpha goes out.

Take the Riya tour

Riya has a service available on their website that acts as a tour guide to some of the major features of the software. It takes you through the steps of uploading, tagging, and searching photos, but the real revelation here is the revealing of the auto-tagging feature.  If you add your address book to Riya, you’ll be able to automatically find pictures of people that are in your contacts list — so long as they’ve been tagged by someone else.  This essentially means that I could upload a picture of myself, train Riya to recognize that it’s me, and then tag it with my email address.  Then if my mom or someone like that goes to Riya and uploads a picture of me, it’ll automatically tag it with my name since Riya knows that it’s already me.  Pretty crazy, huh?

I truly believe that this is a software package that will reach an even bigger audience than Flickr.  Why?  Because people who don’t use Flickr will be attracted to this because of the ease of use. I’m not saying Flickr is hard, but being able to find people via facial recognition will revolutionize the picture hosting and photo search industry simply because it’s intuitive and easy. I know people who don’t know anything about Flickr, but when I mention Riya to them and tell them what it can do, they get excited.  It’s truly the future of photo search, and Google better truly be thinking about snatching this company up before Yahoo does.

Riya Alpha nearing ready state

In checking up on the various Riya employee blogs, it looks as though the next wave of alpha testing is about to begin.  Ojos (the company developing Riya) had planned on sending out invites to 1,000 testers (myself included) on November 23, but are still working out a few kinks and bugs in the system before passing it on to the public.  The team even worked through the Thanksgiving holiday, which shows enormous dedication and belief in the product they’re creating.

I’m eagerly anticipating the release of Riya, and I haven’t even tried it out yet.  I’ve always wanted to see what facial recognition software could do, and the fact that they are releasing it to the masses for free is both astonishing and highly effective.  If the software works as planned, then Riya will have no problem owning the photo search market — especially if they can get to it play well with Flickr.