More Riya rumors about whether it was going to be snatched up before it even launched a product. I have no idea what Riya’s product really is–most people focus on face recognition–but outside of Google (which has quite a few experimental online projects)–I can’t imagine someone picking up Riya at this point. Image reco is a hard problem. Wrapping a hard problem with a Web 2.0 interface, doesn’t make the problem any more solvable.
But this doesn’t mean Riya couldn’t define a way around the problem. They may be able to. I don’t know. Maybe they’re classifying images as landscape, photos with people, and the like–presenting something that maybe could be culled from tomorrow’s camera EXIF data. And if their algorithms miss something, who cares?
I’ve read of some web-based image classification systems in the past–and there have been some notable desktop-oriented face recognition systems too–but no one has been able to commercialize image recognition outside of some very special uses. It’s a fascinating problem, but let’s get real. $30 million for an image recognition company without a market tested product? Uh, right.
I can’t wait to see what the product is like though.