I’ve never really been a fan of tapping a “Like” button on Facebook. Mostly because it doesn’t always mean that I like something. I use that button as a way to say “hey I looked at this and it meant something”, but maybe I use Facebook incorrectly. Today, The Next Web surfaced what seems to be a test on Twitter, with the labels of “like” and “star” instead of the word “favorite” when it comes to… → Read More
According to The Next Web, sending someone a link to something on a third-party site using Facebook’s social system in a private message increases the “Like” numbers on public counters by two. → Read More
Last week’s announcement from Facebook about the new ability for app developers to integrate a hidden, built-in “Like” button in their mobile applications seemed to fly under the radar. Not that it wasn’t duly covered by tech press: it was. But the deeper implications seemed to have been summed up under the banner of “this is great news for app developers”-type sentiment. It is, of course. App… → Read More
As what exactly the Google +1 Button does continues to mystify some users, security researcher Ashkan Soltani and Brian Kennish, former Googler and the mind behind Facebook Disconnect, have decided to kill two buttons with one browser extension, creating Like +1.
Unlike the +Like extension, which allowed you to Facebook Like Google search results, Like +1 turns all offsite Like Buttons into… → Read More
Japan’s newest electric car isn’t made by one of the nation’s many major automakers, but sometimes it needs a venture to accelerate potentially positive developments in rather conservative industries. Boutique automaker Mitsuoka Motor has now begun accepting orders [JP, PDF] for “Like” [JP], a 5-seat electric car that’s based on Mitsubishi Motors’s i-MiEV (the Like was unveiled earlier this year). → Read More
Facial recognition service Riya will shut down on August 21, 2009, says founder Munjal Shah in an email to users this morning. We are adding it to the TechCrunch DeadPool.
This was one of the original services that defined the early Web 2.0 movement. We first covered it, then known as Ojos, four years ago. The service changed its name to Riya before launching at a party, yes, in my back yard. → Read More
Silicon Valley based Like.com managed to raise a monster round of financing at just the right time: $32 million in Series C round of funding that closed in August, led by Menlo Ventures. Crosslink Capital also joined the round, as well as all previous investors. Prazan Vazirani from Menlo also joined the company’s board of directors.
The valuation was north of $100 million, says a source close to… → Read More
Is a picture worth a thousand clicks? You’ve heard of contextual ads triggered by keywords on a Web page. Now, get ready for contextual ads triggered by images on the page. Visual-shopping search engine Like.com is running ads on Facebook that appear to match objects in profile photos. Notice the ad by Like.com in the lower left for aviator sunglasses in the screen shot shown here, sent to… → Read More
I can’t really say much about Tuyuan yet since it’s in Chinese and there isn’t much information (translated page here), but it certainly looks like they’re trying to tackle the facial recognition problem that has destroyed many a startup. We’ve seen Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a… → Read More
Most people have thousands of digital photos sitting on their hard drive. And the vast majority of those photos aren’t tagged or searchable. Want to find the 300 pictures of your youngest son amongst 10,000 others? It’s not going to happen. Unless you’ve been diligently tagging and categorizing those photos over the years, and who does that? The problem is obvious. The solution… → Read More
Fred Wilson lit a fire today suggesting that certain bloggers need to step it up a notch to improve quality and be more like mainstream journalists. A fair point if spoken generally, although I’d argue that the quality of reporting done by many bloggers today, at least in the tech space, is equal to or better than most mainstream journalism. I think this is particularly true when we’re… → Read More
Yahoo Hack days are a lot of fun, and some pretty interesting stuff comes out of them. But a persistent question is whether or not they are much more than fun – and if any of these hacks ever make their way into actual products. The answer, apparently, is yes. Tonight Yahoo is announcing two product feature launches that were originally created at Yahoo Hack Days. – Shop By Color and… → Read More
Last November, Munjal Shah made a fairly tough decision and did an about face on his startup, Riya. Instead of continuing to focus on Riya’s existing product – facial recognition and tagging of photos – the company took its core technology and launched an image search engine called Like.com. Unlike other image search engines, Like.com uses photos as the query, returning similar… → Read More
Silicon Valley startup Riya, currently a photo search company focusing on facial recognition, is making a significant strategic and product shift this morning. Riya will continue as is, but the company is leveraging the core technology to launch a new image search engine called Like.com (see our previous coverage of Riya here). Like.com is image search. There are lots of other image search engines… → Read More
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