Ojos – Auto Name & Tag Your Photos

Company: Ojos
Launched: Pre-Alpha
Status: Angels include Peter Rip and John Malley
Location: Palo Alto

Overview

Ojos hasn’t launched yet, and may even change it’s name. But a bit of buzz has started about them already, stoked by a post by Rob Hof at Businessweek and followed by Ho John Lee.

The company’s founders include Burak Gokturk, a Stanford Ph.D. who holds 15 patents in facial recognition (according to Rob Hof) (other team members below), which gives us some idea of what they are up to. The idea behind Ojos is that they will take the photos stored on your hard drive and apply face and text recognition technologies to guess who and what is included in a photo. Tag one photo including a person, and Ojos can automatically tag all other pictures that include that person with the same tags. It sounds simple, but the the technology needed to do this is not.

The way I am thinking of this is that Ojos solves the long tail problem with my thousands of unnamed, untagged photos. Sure, I put the occasional picture up on flickr and buzznet and go to the trouble of tagging them, but the vast majority are simply filed away on my hard drive under a general topic and month the picture was taken. This could fix that.

One of the co-founders, Munjal Shah, has started a blog and has posted occasionally on Ojos with additional information.

Ojos has also hired Tara Hunt, who I’ve been bugging daily for an invite to the alpha (no luck yet).

She did send me a very small screen shot of some pictures that have been processed with Ojos – see image to left. I’m pretty sure she gave me permission to post this. The image includes pictures of Tara over the years, identified and organized by Ojos. It recognized her even through hair color changes.

Tara has also posted a few hints about Ojos.

If you’d like to get in line for the beta, send an email to “beta at ojos-inc.com”. I’m looking forward to trying this out.

Team

Munjal Shah
Burak Gokturk
Azhar Khan
Tara Hunt
Ben Lee
Kuang-chih Lee
Vincent Vanhoucke
Dan Chiao
Danny Yang
Neelesh Vaikhary
Sandeep Gain
Sowmya Karnad
Ginto Mathew
Piyush Partani
Nikhil Pal Singh
Nitin Agarwal
Vineet Bhardwaj
Drago Anguelov