Visual analysis company Viewdle this morning launched an Android app called SocialCamera that allows users to instantly tag photos, add captions and share them on Flickr or Facebook, by email or MMS. The demo video below explains how the app works in more detail.
The Android application, which is still in beta and not to be confused with Justin.TV’s Socialcam app, is free of charge and should be available through Android Market today. → Read More
Facial recognition technology companies have been in the limelight lately, with Apple buying Polar Rose for a rumored $29 million and rival Face.com raising $4.3 million from Russian search juggernaut Yandex and others.
A lesser-known but equally impressive startup in said field, Viewdle, announces today that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding from a group of noteworthy investors that includes Best Buy, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Qualcomm. → Read More
Viewdle, a startup developing facial recognition technology for video, has received an unspecified amount of funding from KIT Capital. As part of the deal, Viewdle will partner up with ROO, another KIT portfolio company focused on IPTV broadcasting. The partnership will provide ROO with full and exclusive access to Viewdle’s white label technology. Both companies will also work together to promote each other’s services. Reuters currently uses Viewdle’s technology to index the people in its video archives (see the Viewdle homepage for an example of what this looks like). Viewdle presented this past fall at the TechCrunch40 conference. Our coverage of their presentation can be found here. The last (and only) time ROO came on our radar was over a year ago when News Corporation invested in the company without Fox Interactive’s knowledge. CrunchBase Information Viewdle Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Session one as follows, including our live notes. Powerset Powerset is a natural language search engine that can use everyday phrases and grammer to conduct more accruate web searches by understanding the search query and the pages it indexes. Parsing phrases and grammer theoretically produces better results because the egine has a better understanding of the searches intended goal than with just keywords alone. For instance, a Powerset search for “politicians who died in office” returns information on the subset of politicians who died in office, rather than a group of pages that ranked highly with the phrase. Powerset presentation begins: talk about semantics and search, “we parse the web”. Natural language search. Announcement: Powerset labs, where users can explore tech demos, share ideas, feed the learning engine and “improve your search karma”. Demonstration of natural language queries with a social voting style feature. Touches of other sites Demonstration of Powermouse (see screen shot), information is pulled from Wikipedia into a semantic index. TC40 attendees will be amongst first in private beta. Overall: tough sell in the search vertical, but interesting take. Great start to TC40. Cognitive Code Cognitive Code makes artificially intelligent user interfaces. Their main product is the SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) platform, which can add a human-like artificially intelligent interface to nearly any digital device. The SILVIA platform can learn and converse in natural language to carry out tasks for the user. Potential applications include children’s digital toys and personal assistants. Flagship product: “silvia platform” Symoblically isolated linguistically variable intelligence algorithm. Laymens terms: AI. Demonstration with AI on the screen, the AI system is having a conversation with one of the Cognitive Code. A couple of bugs in the live demo, but pretty cool. Uses include embedding in toys, phones, websites “unlimited uses.” First major target market is “smart toys.” Clever idea, if they can pull it off we’re seeing the future of toys. CastTV CastTV is trying to build one of the web’s best video search engines by creating a rich index of contextual data about videos and an easy to use interface for searching them. The engine pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. Notably, CastTV also searches paid video searches such as Apple iTunes. Their user interface allows users to sort results by shows (to → Read More
