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.

The first time you use the app, you’ll notice you’ll have to identify your Facebook friends. After that, however, the app will be able to detect and tag persons automatically, which is of course far more appealing an offer.

Also worth noting: you’ll need a device running Android 2.x with a 1GHz – or faster – processor to run the app. I tested it on an HTC Desire HD phone and it worked like a charm.

Viewdle was founded back in 2007 and last October raised $10 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Best Buy, BlackBerry Partners Fund, Anthem Venture Partners, and Qualcomm.

On a sidenote: I organized my first Plugg conference back in March 2008, and the fledgling company took home the top prize at the startup competition that year (it later went on to win the one at Le Web, too).

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.

In conjunction with this investment, Best Buy Capital’s Kuk Yi and John Albright from Blackberry Partners Fund will join Viewdle’s board. It’s also worth noting that Viewdle’s Series A investor, Anthem Venture Partners, also participated in this new funding round.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the names of the new backers, Viewdle plans to use the additional financing for the launch of new consumer products over the coming months.

Viewdle has developed impressive technology, the result of over fifteen years of research and three years of commercial productization, that is capable of real-time, cross-platform visual analysis at the point of capture.

The startup says its patented facial recognition system automatically identifies faces in videos and photos across mobile phones, computers and in the cloud.

Quick sidenote: I organized my first Plugg conference back in March 2008, and the fledgling company took home the top prize at the startup competition that year (it later went on to win the one at Le Web, too).

Keep a close eye on this one.

SenderOK- a Ukrainian startup – has been offering this feature for over 6 months as its standard function. Moreover, it works not only in Gmail, but also in other popular web mail services such as Yahoo Mail, MS Hotmail and Live. The plugin extends the functionality of all widely used browsers, and also works in MS Outlook where it has the most advanced set of features.

Google has also announced another “innovation” – email sorting. Turns out SenderOK came up with this feature prior to that announcement as well. The product solves a lot of problems related to email management and social networking for business people.

This is the third Ukrainian startup that has appeared to catch Google on the hop: Viewdle (TechCrunch 50 2008, LeWeb 2008) was first – Marissa Mayer discussed it in her video interview here; UpriseApp was second (it competes with OffiSync that is actively supported by Google; and SenderOK is third. SenderOK launched about a year and a half ago, and its first public presentation happened at last year’s Demopit at TechCrunch 50 (September 2008).

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.

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 weed out non-relevant stuff), host (such as itunes, CBS Innertube, etc to focus on a favorite service provider), by date, relevance, prices, etc.

Presentation begins: CastTV doesn’t host videos, they index them.

Britney Spears video search compared, Google, Yahoo and CastTV: CastTV results are pitched as being better, more accessible etc

Colts Titans next example. CastTV is using smart clustering for results, pulling video from MSM and user generated content. Nice results, even if I have no interest in American Football

FAROO

FAROO is a peer-to-peer web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users, which leads to a more democratic, user centric ranking. FAROO also shares advertising revenues up to fifty percent with its users. The search engine uses privacy-protected behavioral targeting to increase conversion rates.

Interesting concept, P2P in a strict sense. Results are only pages that have been visited by users…I cant’ help but think the SEO crowd is going to love this

The presenter claims that the algorithms actually prevent manipulation: he doesn’t know the people I know. Nice results though.

Indexing via a desktop P2P client, demonstrated version on Windows. Faroo beta opens today.

Viewdle

Viewdle is a white-label platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video. The technology they are developing lets video producers algorithmically extract metadata from news, shows, movies, and Internet video. This is much more effective than the old method of text-based metadata indexing. Viewdle’s most notable feature is their facial-recognition technology that can create a create a “real-time index of true on-screen appearances”. They plan on building one of the largest databases of people-in-video references. Reuters is currently testing out Viewdle’s technology with their videos news inventory by letting people search their catalog for specific people.

Demo starts with 2 minute demo video. Slick, we’ll see if we can get a copy.

The facial recognition is always an interesting concept, but I’m remind of Riya. More Britney Spears examples, although they are pulling data from others in the video as well, it looks a step from previous tech, particularly give it’s video they are scanning, not just pics.

Product: Top Chance, scans on criteria, including date. Popularity search includes total video time and when. Platform (presuming API) will also be released shortly to plugin widgets etc.

Expert Panel: Ryan Block Chris Anderson, Marc Andreessen, Om Malik, and Marissa Mayer

First question Marc Andreessen to Powerset, great question, how do you break out, API’s etc. Good response.

Chris Anderson: what are the advantages of the various products to the user

Faroo responds first: we are by the user, for the user, it’s good because “they are doing the search together”

Om Malik to Faroo: most P2P systems people turn off, how do you overcome that, also how do you seed the network?

Faroo: it’s not a problem…not a particularly good response.

Marissa Meyer wants to know about the video search startups, scaling etc…classic

CastTV: we’re scaling, focus. Viewdle “we reference a point” hence can scale to billions, using “fusion engine”

Discussion continues around AI and natural language tools.

Jason asks Om: which one is the most viable. Om: CastTV. One to last: Cognitive Code. Middle of the road pick: Powerset. Faroo is “interesting,” Viewdle will be “acquired soon”

Jason Calacanis to Marissa Mayer: will people switch away from Google. Reply: most people use more than one search engine according to stats. Google’s advantage is being a one stop shop. JC: what did you think of CastTV, MM: nice interface, clustering for duplicate issues is good tech.

Marc Andreessen: I don’t want to be obsessed with distribution…but I am, how do companies deal with it
Powerset: we’re very aware of this…uploading to users (???), embeding on external sites (Google custom search style I’d think).

Conclusion: speaking to Nick and we agree that CastTV was the winner in a very competitive group, good tech which just works with a practical use. Cognitive Code had the coolest product, but the demo wasn’t great which lost it for them.