Mac Uploader News

Tara just released the bad news: the Uploader for Macs won’t be ready for the next Alpha release.

Trust me — it’s worth waiting.  Better to get an Uploader that’s already stable than to have them rush something out to you that doesn’t work.

Upgrades and the Beta Issue

I’m not sure if the Riya team has made any drastic upgrades to the servers that host them, but Riya is significantly faster now than it was even two weeks ago.  Tara has promised that there’s some cool stuff coming down the pipe for the next alpha release, and I’m guessing that some of that venture capital money went to upgrading the servers and putting a big, fat pipe behind this thing.  Good call, team.

I’m not sure if they’re going to keep the Alpha tag when they release the unrestricted demo at DEMO next month, or if they’re going to move it into beta status.  Personally, I’m growing tired of seeing new services have “COOL NEW SERVICE” and then “beta” in small caps in the logo.  It was cool at first, but now it seems more like the trendy thing to do instead of an actual project status.  For example, how in the WORLD is Flickr STILL in beta?  You’d think that a service that’s been around for two years AND been purchased by Yahoo would be able to move past the beta stage at some point.  I’d caution the Riya team to not fall into that trap; they should keep an unrestricted alpha series open to the public while also undergoing true beta testing with a core team, and when it’s ready, release version 1.0 to the public.  At that point in time, I think people are going to be as sick of seeing “beta” attached to everything as I am and would much rather see “version 1” than another Web 2.0 service desperately trying to look like everything else that’s popular.  I know I’d be much more forgiving of a product if you didn’t have “beta” attached to your app, because beta doesn’t really mean beta anymore — it’s just the trendy thing to do.

News

– In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard the news, I wanted to point out that Riya raised 15 million dollars in venture capital financing yesterday from Bay Partners.  They’re really doing some excellent things at Riya HQ, and I’m glad they were able to secure financing.  In my own dealings with venture capitalists, I find that it’s extremely important for a VC firm you choose to work with to closely mesh with the capabilities and vision of your company, or else it’ll be disaster in the making.  Munjal seems very excited about Bay Partners and the team he’s working with, and I applaud them for finding the right partner who won’t jump and sell out before the product is even ready for delivery.  Riya has the ability to become, five years down the line, one of the most-used web apps out there, and this investment will help them move the company forward as they legitimize photo search.

– The team is still preparing to release the unrestricted alpha of Riya at the Demo conference next month.  As most of you know, you have to score an invitation to use the service now, but once it’s released at Demo anyone will be able to sign up and test the service.  I think that’ll be a watershed moment for the team, because they’re going to have to handle huge numbers of users all at once, and it’ll be interesting to see how the app holds up.  Not saying that it won’t, not even speculating, because if there’s one thing I know about Riya, it’s that they are committed to delivering a top-notch product, even to the minimal amount of alpha testers using it right now.

Unrecognized

Finally got the uploader to work today, and uploaded about twenty more photos.  I wanted to test the system a bit, so I uploaded ten pictures of people that I’d already tagged and identified and ten pictures of people who were unknown.  I ended up with eleven pictures of people that Riya identified somehow, so I went in to check and see who had been mis-tagged.  Sure enough, a picture of my girlfriend’s sister had been tagged with my girlfriend’s name.  Does this mean that Riya will have a tough time telling the difference between family members?  I doubt it — I put up bunches of pictures of myself and my sisters and it was able to tell the difference between them every time.  This might have been a strange occurence, and a singular one at that.

Tara  has a post up asking for more ideas for the photosearch, so here’s your chance to get your voice heard!  Is there anything that YOU would personally like to see in a photosearch?  I like the idea of a location-based search, like finding all photos that were taken at a particular place I’m planning on taking a vacation to, or things like that, but it seems like Tara already has that idea nailed down.

Alpha is out

The initial Riya alpha release is now out.  I’m installing the uploader on my machine and will then start uploading all my photos; I hope to have some more thoughts about the system later tonight.

Riya’s Worth

I’ve been doing some thinking about what a service like Riya could potentially be worth to companies like Google, Yahoo or even Microsoft.  Most of us have heard the rumors that Google is offering to buy out Riya for $40 million, and that seems like an astronomical number.  It’s just a rumor, of course, so please don’t take my words as anything but that.  If you stop and think about it, though, you start to realize that to someone like Microsoft, Riya could be worth a whole lot more.  The possibilities of including Riya’s technology in Windows Vista boggles the mind; can you imagine having facial recognition software right out of the box?  I’d wager that the real price of Riya, if they do sell the property eventually, will be somewhere above $200 million, and that’s a bare minimum.  We could see a bidding war escalate, especially if Google decides that THEY would like to include something like Riya in this oft-rumored web-based OS they’re supposedly buildilng.

Thank you to all the folks from Riya who’ve linked me from the official Riya blog and your personal blogs.  I hope it comes through that I’m a geniune fan and can’t wait to try this software out!

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.