Eyealike, the startup that lets you use photo recognition to help find your ideal mate, is expanding to apply its image processing technology to a new market: advertising. The company says that the new system will allow businesses to place highly targeted advertising alongside photographs that appear on their site (which have long been difficult to monetize).
For now the image recognition is restricted to identifying physical traits of the people in photographs, with categories including age, gender, hair color, and skin color. In the demo I saw, the results were impressive: photographs with babies in them were paired with products for infants and toddlers, and makeup ads were shown near photos with women in them. → Read More
Eyealike, a video and image recognition company, has released an update to its ‘Eyealike Faces’ product that makes it easier for users to find their ideal match on dating sites. Eyealike Faces uses image matching technology to compare faces across databases consisting of millions of photos – the idea being that you can upload a photo of your ideal mate and get a listing of the best matches. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to try out a demo on your own – Eyealike only licenses the technology to third parties (a deal with a major dating site is in the works, so you won’t have to wait long). The concept may be a little strange to some (the word superficial comes to mind), but physical attraction is obviously an important component for many people looking for a date. The new release of Eyealike includes “Face Levers”, which let users modify certain traits in the pictures they’ve uploaded. Looking for a woman with Angelina Jolie’s eyes but a slightly softer jaw? Just tweak the levers and bit and meet your future soulmate. At least that’s what supposed to happen. The demo I saw wasn’t too impressive, but this was likely a result of a limited photo database of only a few thousand instead of the millions of images the technology is designed for. We’ll have to wait until the technology is incorporated into a major dating site to see if it is as effective as it promises. Another technology company that offers similar image matching is Picitup, which didn’t work particularly well when we last reviewed it. CrunchBase Information Eyealike Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
With the DEMO 2008 conference kicking off today, a bunch of tech companies are making announcements. Here are some of the highlights: BitGravity Content delivery network BitGravity is launching its streaming video offering, BG LiveBroadcast. The company aims to make streaming video online as instantaneous and high-quality as streaming video on TV, while adding an extra layer of interactivity and customization. BitGravity already provides on-demand (i.e. recorded) video delivery for fifty clients, including Revision3 and Tom Green. Its streaming video service promises to bring the same robust scalability to live events, allowing thousands if not millions of viewers to watch the same shows simultaneously. If you want to stream live events using BitGravity, you can request a machine from them that will come preloaded with all the requisite software. Costs will then accrue depending on how much bandwidth you consume. Blist Blist, a web-based application that promises to make database management as easy as using Excel, is launching in private beta this Tuesday. A number of improvements have been made to the product’s design since we covered it this past November. Of particular note is a new “visual query builder” that makes the construction of complex queries easy with a drag-n-drop interface. Blist’s approach to relational data is also notable; relationships are established primarily in the “design” phase of database construction, obviating the need to explicitly extract relational data during query time. If you become Blist beta tester, head over to InviteShare to share your five invites with others. Eyealike Eyealike is announcing a service called Eyealike Copyright that will hunt down copyrighted material found in videos posted across the web. Eyealike purportedly has a knack for finding copyright material mixed in with user generated content on sites like YouTube. The company claims that its technology can “process hundreds of images and video clips per minute by still objects, object movement, and facial recognition” with 95% accuracy and a “near zero false positive rate.” Its web interface, pictured left, features a prominent “Send Notification” button that will allow companies like Viacom to speed up the process by which they send out take-down requests. GoldMail With GoldMail, you can send slideshows accompanied by audio messages to friends, family, and business contacts. The goal is to enrich communication over the net by providing a way to send not only your voice but visual materials, such as photos and diagrams, that reinforce your → Read More
San Francisco, CA
